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.
The tariffs in your second link are not sanctions, and in fact the President levying tariffs as a normal course of business is illegal and unconstitutional in the United States. But it's a good example of the lawlessness of the current President, and his grabs at more power in an attempt to become a tyrant.
> But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump."
Yes, it absolutely was closed at the request of Trump, via sanctions. That's the entire point. The President of the United States can and will target anybody he does not like for whatever minor reason crosses his mind on a random afternoon. That makes it risky to engage in any sort of long-term transaction with a US company.
However, I was able to read it, which would not be the case if he had just phoned Nadella. Who knows, perhaps he did and Nadella refused to play? I see that he did not attend the inauguration..
I doubt Trump even knew how the sanctions would play out, in terms of all the effects on the ICC. But the IT services are a clear one for the HN crowd to pay attention to.
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.
We were installing on site Windows Small Business server for them. Issues were rare and one offs with self hosted email. The only issue of delayed messages was during changing IP addresses and DNS records, waiting for the updates to replicate to root servers.
Companies would often have a server just for email hosting running Linux on low power hardware. [0]
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.
Is that very different than the US? That seems more like a timeless endeavor, not a European tech one.
Governments are organizations like many others, with similar needs. Almost all need to be purchased in the marketplace. Is every purchase from a business, even a large business, corruption? What about cars? A phone system? Electricity?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Just wait 25 years, buy the media, and slowly brainwash the population.
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, and likely has roots that go much further back.
Difficult for a democracy to defend against this type of long term attack.
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
Creating a global enforcement arm is an obvious non-starter: Which laws shall be enacted and enforced against whom, and how are fundamentally political questions. The answers to those questions necessarily change once you cross into another polity. States can coordinate and agree mutually to enforce a law... but if Poland says that despite their commitments to the contrary they simply aren't gonna extradite that suspected Nord Stream saboteur: Tough nuggets. Such situations expose international "laws" as mere window dressing on powers that emanate from and remain held by individual states.
There is no global enforcement arm and plenty of evidence that if someone starts genociding you, nobody else is gonna do anything about it. You're on your own. Such "laws" bind but do not protect.
Especially in the context of the US as world hegemon: The US fully expects to shoulder the entire burden of deterring or defeating threats to the homeland. Joining the ICC would bring precisely zero extra protection from genocide. Indeed, such a commitment may limit the US's freedom of action, discredit US deterrence, and actually make a devastating war more likely.
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.
Would GWB have acted differently, had he been forced to consider the legality of his actions under a broader framework? Would we have preferred for presidents to have even broader immunity from prosecution?
Since the leader (elected or not) generally controls the executive apparatus (that’s what makes them the “leader”), its unlikely that this would actually occur, irrespective of the nominal obligation. It is more likely that they would be turned over after being removed as leader (a process which an ICC warrant may or may not accelerate, depending on the response of other institutions, the populace, etc.)
At least, that is what has generally happened with the top leaders that have ended up at the ICC (or its predecessor ad hoc tribunals, back to Slobodan Milosevic, the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal—the ICTY—who wasn't turned over by Yugoslav authorities until after he resigned.)
> because Europeans disagreed with a military decision
The majority of State Parties to the Rome Statute are non-European, as are a majority of the current judges of the court, as is the current acting chief prosecutor, so it is really weird to describe ICC involvement this way.
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.)
To answer the GP more directly: Treaties the US enters into are part of US law.
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•3mo ago
embedding-shape•3mo ago
pessimizer•3mo 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•3mo ago
throwaway894345•3mo ago
wat10000•3mo ago
throwaway894345•3mo ago
wat10000•3mo ago
mothballed•3mo 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•3mo ago
hyghjiyhu•3mo ago
embedding-shape•3mo ago
danaris•3mo 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•3mo ago
EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
epistasis•3mo ago
throwaway894345•3mo ago
epistasis•3mo 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•3mo 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•3mo 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•3mo 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•3mo ago
There exist other techniques to bring open source projects and their maintainers into line.
wat10000•3mo ago