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…
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