A quiet but deeply unsettling moment just shook the foundations of international justice, proving why Europe needs digital sovereignty - and most Europeans not too interested in tech likely missed it: The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a court based in The Hague and central to Europe’s upholding of human rights, suddenly found that his email account was shut down. The service provider? Microsoft. The reason? Mr. Trump…
Seems the ICC could use a bit of technical competence, too. Why the fuck didn’t they set up their own MX instead of relying on MS’ shitty mail service? It’s not the first time something like that is happening and besides all politics Microsoft’s MX’ have proven to be unreliable countless times before, Extendend downtimes, lost accounts, blocks by antispam lists, etc.
Not only MS. The EU should finally treat the Internet as basic infrastructure. They wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) let a foreign company control electricity or water supply. Internet services should be viewed much in the same way, at least at the government level.
Well, technically the internet backbone is already controlled locally, it’s the web services - software - that are dominated by US big-tech. And for such services to be safe we need a diversity of providers, not only local ones maybe easily coerced by our own national governments, some of which might also try to turn authoritarian in future. So the problem is not that US big-tech participates, rather that we let them become almost a monopoly.
Yes, turns out the Internet is more than the telecom hardware that make connections possible. The services and even software that runs plays a huge role on it
I think the ICC by and large was built on the idea that governments would protect it. Instead we see multiple EU governments also attacking the court, be it verbally, be it by disobeying the court and violating the respective treaties or by not defending it against such attacks.
Countries like Germany and Hungary seem motivated to destroy any form of rules based order in favor of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu.
Convincing marketing/lobbying maybe
And the ease of hiring people who have experience with Microsoft clients compared with the ease of hiring people that can set up an open source version