Digital sovereignty
As someone who has lived in the USA, has close friends from or living there, who deeply admires much of the USA’s culture, its intellectual live, its science, its technology1, its literature, music, movies, its optimism, its can-do energy, its blue skies, and who as a German and European is forever thankful how the USA saved and rebuilt the broken continent during and after WW2, I would have never thought I’d write the following. It’s surreal. It is tempting to close the eyes and deny. But here we are.
It is time for self-interested individuals and organizations in Europe and other democratic countries to move their mission- or life-critical IT services and infrastructure outside the reach of the US government; noting that US tech companies have already largely subordinated themselves.
Any use of technologies involves a benefit-risk trade-off. The changes in the USA—no matter whether they’ll persist long-term or whether there will be some swing back at some point—have drastically tipped that scale.
What are the risks?
- Denial of services: being extorted/blackmailed because they know your existence depends on it
- Misuse of data: to spy on you, to steal your intellectual property
We already have seen the performative cruelty, mafia-style extortion, spiteful betrayal of allies. They started on the most vulnerable, domestic and abroad — including the pure evil of betraying Ukraine. It’s in the playbook of tyrants that they won’t stop there. That they will go up the ladder, also hit those who still feel safe now. Disregard of the rule of law, of previous relationships, of long-held convictions. No-one is safe2.
Like many, I hope that we have already seen the worst, that the degradation stops here, that the mobsters turn on themselves and self-destruct, that responsible people step in and somehow restore a level of civility and decency. But building something on which your existence depends solely on hopes is not wise. The disaster insurance for the foreseeable future is to decouple. And if you do it in advance, calmly, and before everyone panics, the cost of doing so will not be so bad. And it will make sure you keep your agency, your “sovereignty”.
Footnotes
As a kid, one of my favorite books, from which I learned English, was the “TTL Data Book” by Texas Instruments, while in Germany people were still fussing around with vacuum tubes.↩︎
Trumpians have called the EU an enemy that they want to destroy and replace with a quarreling array of fascist nationalist vassal states; the plans to annex Canada; to invade Greenland; etc.↩︎