Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens.
It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act. Their lunch is sitting out in the open, completely unwatched, waiting to be eaten by somebody else and it's far too late to do anything about it.
There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
HarmonyOS
And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies
That's a nice re-write of history.
What actually happened is that the US said: cut the crap and leave the opaque banking to us, else...
Nice attempt at whitewashing and gaslighting, but the only entity here that decided that is the fucking US of A.
The US big tech has been in bed with the US establishment since eternity.
neither are Microsoft 365 subscriptions at governmental scales
No offence, but I do believe a few Dutch ppl could run email servers for cheaper
that might change is privacy is an option. The real problem is the cost of building in the middle of nowhere, even if you use spare Starlink capacity, where do you get power & personnel from?
I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the countries pushing digital IDs?
> Official second-level domains do not exist.
Yes, this results in enshittification.
America was supposed to be the next step of humanity, a new land stripped from the ills of the old world where you invest or you go to build things, where your past or identity wasn't the primary concern but your dreams your abilities were. It wasn't nationalistic place, it was open to all and pretty much it was the group work of humanity. When aliens arrive, they arrived to US and even if not, they certainly wanted to speak to the US president as the leader of humanity.
Unlike Europe it wasn't stuck into petty identity conflicts, unlike Russia or China it was governed by the law and the law would protect you from the sneaky politicians. Unlike Europe, US companies were fair businesses that could protect you the customer from bad things even if America developed European or Asian habits.
Why wouldn't you use anything from America? Americans don't understand how transactional they are becoming and that from now on they will need to perform. Like the Tesla boycott, suddenly Tesla had to price their vehicles to match the functionality they provide in order to be able to sell cars again.
Currently the US tech tools are better as they were refined for decades with huge resources and user bases, so it is hard to switch away and at this time it's the perception of risk and US no longer being cool are what pushes for the transition but if EU is lucky Trump will invade Greenland and will make people take the inconvenient path and US tech industry will compact into 350M US market. Europeans will have a few years of sub-par tech and then will have good sovereign tech.
We dreamed of America
where the soft wind lives.
We dreamed of America
where honey flowers grow,
where the sky is vast and blue
with stars and stripes upon it too.
We dreamed of America,
but not anymore,
no, not anymore.
I don't know when people first began dreaming of America.
Long before Columbus, people dreamed of America, I think.
A place of everlasting flowers where everyone was free and happy, and
no one had to take off their hat for anyone unless they wanted to themselves.
A smiling paradise where love lasts forever,
and old age is beautiful, a place without any smell.
In 1945—before that too, but certainly in 1945—I knew what I was going to be
when I grew up.
I was going to be an *American*.
That spring, the first films from the Pacific War arrived,
where the Americans stood with bent knees on jungle paths and shot Japanese soldiers with U.S. carbines.
The Japanese were ugly, with protruding teeth and protruding ribs,
while the Americans were brave, handsome, clean-cut, and immortal.
And even if they did die, they died with a courageous smile and said:
"Give this letter to my mother; she will understand."
While the Japanese died like grubs and worms,
and we felt no pity for them.
Besides being ugly, they were portrayed as horribly stupid—so stupid that they spoke broken English even when talking to each other.
I know that we dreamed of America well into the 1960s.
A scentless land beyond the sea,
where everyone had cars and white teeth.
I don't know exactly when it stopped.
But one day in the 1960s, we not only stopped loving America as a god;
we began hating America as a fallen god.
And nothing falls so heavily, so hard, and so deep
as a fallen god
who turns out not to be a god at all,
but merely America.
Then America was blamed not only for the Vietnam War and environmental disasters,
but also, for example, for car culture.
And the greatest share of the blame fell on the man who discovered America.
Now, 487 years after his death, Christopher Columbus is blamed not only for the slave trade from West Africa,
but also for the murder of Kennedy,
and for all the worlds traffic accidents.
Now they say Columbus was a bastard.
Because it was he who discovered America in 1492.wat
At least they cannot read this ridiculous load of propaganda.
All throughout my adult life the US (for all its apparent faults) was to me a shining example of progress and humanity. It was the best large scale implementation of human rights, laws, and democracy. Sure it was far from perfect but “as good as it gets, for now”
Became very disillusioned with that image of the US in the last couple of years. Maybe it’s always been like that - but the recent cronyism, the blatant openly displayed corruption and complete disregard for all the values it used to champion really destroyed the good image I had of the US.
In years to come they will realise what this loss of image (or “aura” as the kids would say) really means in a very practical and blunt sense.
This is ignoring that AI also, of course, lets spying agencies move from having every email ever sent in most countries to actually reacting to every email ever sent in most countries. They can move from helping Boeing make foreign airline companies ignore door closing issues to influencing every last restaurant's drinks buying decision individually.
I mean, I doubt they're there yet, but that's what they'll want to do.
Disaster, meet Catastrophe.
It is open source and supported by Nextcloud, IONOS, Proton, Tuta and more.[1]
I haven't tried it out, bu you can find the documentation on how to host it yourself here: https://euro-office.github.io/documentation/
A more mature alternative would is Nextcloud as it offers a lot more, but setup is reportedly more involved. It does appear to be available for enterprise customers as hosted version as well though: https://nextcloud.com/office/
The person making project X days are over. The energy and drive is extinguished from humanity. Ambition is all that’s left.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-dai... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/meta-quietly-launches-a-ne...
After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital sovereignty as we ban construction of new datacenter is just too cute. This is all just political theater as we peacefully sunset into a museum continent.
Europe's biggest problem (I do not mean just the EU, I mean everyone from the UK to Russia) is that it is in denial about its decline, weakness and irrelevance to the rest of the world.
The UK is a bit of an exception in being aware of it and actually talking about it. That is about it.
I disagree on this broad statement.
It has positioned itself at the center of the world's largest free trade zone.
It's managed to replace US contributions to Ukraine and looks like its in the process of bloodying Russia's nose.
Reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
Let's see how far China and US will go when access to the European consumer market will be resticted.
Let's see how well China and US can adapt to modern drone warfare when Ukrainians have the expertise and can share it with the rest of Europe.
We have to step up our game for sure, and everyone in Europe knows it. But the race is definitely not lost yet.
Btw, say what you will about Russia, but it's light years ahead of the EU in digital sovereignty. One of the reasons it did not crumble under sanctions.
Yes, I understand that it would be imperfect since inevitably not all servers would support it thus forcing additional understanding and decisions on the end user. No, I don't care that a user other than myself might leak my messages in plaintext. Perfectionism in this regard only serves to further shoot us in the foot. Yes, I understand that key distribution is a difficult problem but then that's the case no matter the protocol. Other protocols have solutions that work reasonably well at this point.
There's no justification for the current status quo.
Alternatively I'd be fine using matrix for all my PII related needs (healthcare, government, subscription services, etc, etc) but somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.
With "system" I refer to building a web (or multiple!) of trust, based on parameters that you decide upon.
And then you'd still need to worry about digital sovereignity for the keys.
Otherwise, a public servant could do sketchy stuff behind the public's back with no paper trace.
What you don't want is hostile foreign capitalists leaking your data to their local authoritarians. They are not your public and shouldn't have the data in the first place.
Trump 1.0 should've been enough, but instead European leaders were just too thankful for a Biden back-to-normal scenario that they basically took no action allowing the US to further extend its dominance.
Better late than never. Incidentally, trying to build EU tech independence should produce job making industries, so can become a populist move also
I love this. Do you think everything is in Europe's control? Do you know anything about the US has operated since WW2? Have you noticed the mismatch in economic and military might between the two regions?
And what about all the US military bases in Europe? Do you think it's simply a case of asking them to please leave within 1 year, thanks, goodbye.
They've had us in a headlock for a very very long time
"According to the investigation, which covered the period from 2012 to 2014, the NSA used Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former German opposition leader Peer Steinbrück."
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
But recently, after Trump, I have never seen anti American sentiment this bad. It is the first time.
Actually, it is natural. In my view, Trump's policies look very similar to the Indian caste system, and I think they are a serious regression for democracy. More than that, he is destroying all the international trust that the US has built up. In Korea, people used to think of the US as a 'just' country, but these days, people are cautiously mentioning US wrongdoing more often. Especially after the tariffs and the Iran war. I myself am now unemployed because my factory expansion was canceled due to the Iran war.
My country has a natural talent for impeaching presidents, but unfortunately, Americans do not seem to have that talent. What a pity.
Bad is subjective?
https://kbthink.com/news-list/view.html?newsId=2026011611543...
It seems Korea lacks the "cheat code" for fascism: an ethnic minority population on which all evil can be blamed.
consider Hanlon's razor before being mad and sending everyone to court for treason
Either ways, something needs to change
Then it was split in a camp dependent on the US and a camp dependent on the USSR.
Both the US and USSR spent decades keeping us together but definitely not united.
This runs deep in European political culture.
Until 2 years ago many Dutch people had more in common and more trust in Americans than <insert European country>. If only because half of them go broke once every generation.
But yes both US and Russia (perhaps China too) might stand to gain from Europe staying divided as it is.
And it's not "The EU", but really one EU commissioner. Many organs of the EU including the EU Legal Service have criticised CSAR (Chat Control) and the European Parliament has voted against it, effectively killing it.
I self-host e2ee services instead of server side encryption, even though I control the server. It's one less point of failure.
If the data centers can't see the data they're just hosting encrypted data like a Tor node that sends along gibberish–that's the endgame. Remove extra trusted parties to minimize data.
This also applies to metadata, that can be encrypted. SimpleX has 0 user identifiers, Signal's sealed sender encrypts the senders identity. Every Monero transaction is in the publicly distributed blockchain, hidden.
https://tuta.com/blog/fourteen-eyes-countries
And are proposing their own EU version as well....
>Incoming Dutch coalition floats European version of ‘Five Eyes’
https://www.politico.eu/article/new-dutch-government-floats-...
The way they break the informative tone and circle around the bush in AZ900 absolutely looks like a admission that they do and is peak hilarious:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/describe-...
>Describe the shared responsibility model
> How responsibilities shift in cloud
"the consumer is responsible for the data and information stored in the cloud. (You wouldn’t want the cloud provider to be able to read your information.) "
Hardly a decade ago, a well documented part of prism was on how Berlin was being scanned all the way up to the chancellor
Could the Dutch government think they were any different to the Germans ? Did they not use outlook ?
You put a lot of hope in managers from large companies and governments who get their rent and yearly bonuses no matter their performance, and will never ever be made redundant
(Am I doing this right?)
[0]: https://hackernoon.com/the-factors-prompting-a-judge-to-issu...
Please at least try to make your LLM write better. It can! You can start by giving it https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md.