Data sovereignty is such a massively huge issue. But when some nameless market-droid can go "pay us more in 10 days or we purge everything", or "account disabled" - those can absolutely wreck an org.
Now, non-critical stuff happens. And use 3rd party services for those. The key there is cancellation isn't a big deal. But the moment they do turn critical, replicate in-house.
Also, keep in mind that the AP reported killing Hague's ICC contracts. Lots of misinformation, but this is the starting point.
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector. Migrating away all of the legacy systems is nigh impossible. Then you'd have to retrain all staff.
While this is not justified from an economic perspective one can only hope that these institutions have higher values to adhere to.
EDIT: This is great news, I should be more optimistic about this effort.
Thanks! Marathons aren't won by speed or doing everything at once, but progressing towards a far away goal step by step, and surely we'll need all the "good lucks" we can receive.
I'll disagree it's nigh impossible, and find such defeatist perspectives well, defeatists. One shall have hope we can continuously improve things by taking care of what decisions we make, this hopefully is one of those steps.
You are right. We need to make an effort, start small and tackle this issue step by step. I do support this effort and I think these are great news.
I stand by the comment of this being dependent on a commitment to higher values than "cheapest ok solution" which is all too common in the private sector.
> According to Handelsblatt, the decision is to be seen against the backdrop of sanctions by the current US administration under President Donald Trump against employees such as Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Microsoft simply blocked his email access. He therefore had to switch to the Swiss email service Proton. Since the ICC is highly dependent on service providers like Microsoft, its work is being paralyzed, it was stated in May.
While there are clear financial wins too, basic sovereignty is at stake.
If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan."
So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.
These are legally-binding sanctions, issued under the same authority as those levied against Putin and Russia for the invasion of Ukraine:
* ICC: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
* Russia: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/addr...
The ICC sanctions are politically unpopular in Europe, whereas the Russia sanctions are popular in Europe. But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump." Companies face serious consequences if they do business with sanctioned persons or entities - that's what makes sanctions work.
Many years later - "Oh no! Not running our own data centres means our data is no longer fully in our control!"
Who would have thought it!
I'd like to see how well it goes for you if you run your own e-mail server. Even when I did that in the near dot-com days, it was already getting locked down to the point you would get filtered out going into any of the big boys to the point it was largely a futile effort. It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.
I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"?
Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).
I never tried again because it was such an abysmal failure.
Note that a large part of the problem is if you are blocked there is nothing you can do about it. You can't contact anyone at google to get help.
I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.
I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.
The US isn't part of the ICC, but there are plenty of other governments who are and take this seriously. At least one will make a big deal about the ICC being blocked and governments have more power than even large companies.
Sure, but this will turn off any large organization large enough to piss off the US, which seems inevitable.
The trick is to send an email, have it whitelisted a bunch of times. Then it just works.
Once I massmailed by mistake. Google rightly spammed the emails. Had to unspam them and was back within a few days.
Outlook was worst but even that worked.
Its 100% doable
But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.
But then I guess the argument could be made for that you should go for the best option possible, as long as it's within EU, and I can certainly see the point of that too.
Maintaining it is.
The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Same reason individuals tend to want to live in a society and the rules that come with it.
On a national level I agree not to steal, and in return nobody else is allowed to steal from me. On the ICC level my country agrees not to genocide anyone, and in return others aren't allowed to genocide either
In this case, there’s a straightforward benefit to it in that it could be used to prosecute crimes against the US and US citizens, and soft benefits e.g. of the US being seen a a paragon of lawfulness and trust. There’s likely more, these are just what I could think of immediately.
Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Also, because they are tired of the diplomatic cost and expense of working with other countries to set up ad hoc tribunals for particular conflicts and want to get the job done once and properly. (That's actually why the US was one of the leaders of the effort that produced the ICC, even though it did a U-turn against it at the last minute.)
God willing, someone in this country or in another one will work up the nerve to erase such a malignant cancer out of existence eventually.
E.g. Switzerland (a country I'd argue as having a far more genuine independent spirit) was labeled as a currency manipulator by the US [0], despite the designation being fairly arbitrary, and you know, her being her own country (and so surely subject to her own laws).
What you're describing as "independence" looks a lot more like "rules for thee are not rules for me", which the US just happens to have the privelage of preaching due to its preeminent position in the world.
[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/switzerland-branded-as...
Currency manipulation is meant to benefit the country doing manipulation (in this case Switzerland) at the expense of another country (in this case U.S.)
It's very much the role of U.S. government to protect U.S. from other countries trying to do harm to U.S., be it by bombing U.S. territory, tariffs on U.S. goods or currency manipulation that economically hurts U.S.
You could present an argument that Switzerland wasn't trying to harm U.S. economically via currency manipulation but instead you're trying to delegitimize the very idea that U.S. can defend itself from other countries trying to harm it economically by pretending that it's purely internal affair that has no effect on U.S.
Currency manipulation does hurt U.S. and that's the reason U.S. has the right to push back on it.
At least that was the reason I was given in the US military. YMMV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
> The ICC is intended to complement, not replace, national judicial systems; it can exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals.
The US military told people whatever they needed to tell them to follow orders. That's why they follow unlawful orders like those to extrajudicially blow up non-combatant US citizens abroad, and imprison people in Guantanamo for decades without trial, assist the disarming of innocent US citizens in NOLA in the aftermath of Katrina, blackball soldiers in Vietnam that reported war crimes, and all manner of other things that hardly anyone seems to be held to account for.
For the same reason as any other treaty - the corresponding benefits.
> If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do.
That's not what the ICC is for. The ICC is for when a country won't do so when they should be.
> Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.
The US has a very long history of telling other foreign entities what they can and cannot do.
If US soldiers are (once again) committing war crimes, will the US do anything? What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes? Should there not be one?
The war crimes (and some others) that are subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC are already crimes recognized explicitly in the treaties establishing them as crimes matters of universal jurisdiction. Yeah, its difficult to get your hands on them to exercise that jurisdiction, but... that hasn’t really been a problem the ICC has solved with regard to significant powers when their personnel are subject to its jurisdiction, either.
Its not “service members” that are the usual defendants at the ICC.
But: "Zendis is part of an EU-level organisation that four EU countries founded on Tuesday with the aim of building sovereign digital infrastructure."
My intuition:
That is the usual European recipe for disaster. A public funded initiative to waste money in the usual way by giving it indirectly to consulting groups while producing nothing concrete and having to be scraped after a few years. At the same time, a big part of the money will be use to fund largely a big group of useless executives, representatives, communicators, and have countless workshops and conferences.
At the same time, almost zero money will go to the real existing Open Source project, their developers and maintainers.
nathanaldensr•2h ago
embedding-shape•2h ago
pessimizer•2h ago
I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of.
Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement?
edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)
wat10000•2h ago
throwaway894345•2h ago
mothballed•1h ago
One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history.
The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism.
I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.
Kostchei•1h ago
hyghjiyhu•2h ago
embedding-shape•1h ago
danaris•5m ago
Any for-profit company is highly incentivized to keep their products proprietary, locked behind copyright, obfuscation, etc, or even provided only as SaaS. They are also highly incentivized to avoid the negative attention of the governments of any of the countries they operate in, because their primary goal is to remain profitable.
Nonprofits do not have that requirement, and are much more likely to be able to attract people who are willing to defy oppressive, censorious, or outright fascist governments in order to continue to provide high-quality software & hardware to everyone without limitation or discrimination.
throwaway894345•2h ago
EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
epistasis•1h ago
epistasis•1h ago
Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.
embedding-shape•1h ago
Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"?
Money perverse the actions of the for-profit companies, as suddenly you have someone like Tim Cook giving gifts to the president, as the survival of his company depends on a specific person having a good view of them personally.
If neither of these companies were so hellbent on doing everything they can for profit, and instead focused on providing reliable, trustworthy and user-focused services, they wouldn't have that worry anymore. But of course, this is a pipe-dream and not at all realistic in the current climate.
degamad•1h ago
Now, we might have had good reason to pursue a plan that cost us money, but in general, threats to our funding are effectively threats to our existence.
epistasis•1h ago
Profit and money have nothing to do with what the ICC was reacting to. It's about power, law, and autocracy.
aleph_minus_one•58m ago
There exist other techniques to bring open source projects and their maintainers into line.
wat10000•2h ago