"Digital sovereignty," if taken to mean we should switch from unaccountable American companies to unaccountable European companies, is largely missing the point of the problem. In a globalized economy the two are going to be functionally indistinguishable. What we need is non-profit digital infrastructure that's not beholden to the perversions of financialization.
@marijn So many people are cloud-brained by now, they have forgotten—or never learned—how to do things for themselves, and think throwing money at some cloud is always the solution. So of course they think more in terms of switching cloud than switching away from cloud services altogether.

@liebach

I'd be interested to understand whether and to what extent the advent of cloud computing has affected the overall resilience of the internet.

@marijn

@liebach @marijn sure, everybody *could* do everything by themselves. It would make society a whole lot less complex, because a lot of things today wouldn't exist at all without division of labour. Computers for instance.
@endolexi @liebach @marijn the point was probably that there was an entire, thriving, internet before the hyperscalers existed, not necessarily that everyone should (or was) building their entire computer from twigs and wire.
@marijn hell yeah marijn ❤️
@marijn
Better regulation of the commercial ones & zero funding/lobbying. Mechanisms to avoid regulatory capture.
USA is very poor on regulation. FCC is waste of space (deliberate pun).
Ofcom & Comreg are "captured".
Irish Data & Finance regulators are useless..

@marijn To be fair, China woke up to this issue long before #eu and has been trying to move away from US tech into #opensource

As a result, US decided to pump everything it has into AI and LLMs - which are themselves an attack on open source

The real target of that attack is every country who tries to move away from US tech and use open source software or develop their own #digitalsovereignty. - It's the digital version of America's Wolfawitz Doctrine, not allowing any competitors to emerge!

@marijn somebody has to get paid for writing the software..???

@marijn I don't think it has to be non-profit but it needs to be using free/open source software that is licensed in a way that ensures users keep having the rights afforded by that. Like Mastodon.

Drupal's founder & project lead @dries wrote an article that I thought was insightful about this: https://dri.es/the-software-sovereignty-scale

The Software Sovereignty Scale

Digital sovereignty depends less on where software comes from and more on who controls it. This post introduces a scale showing which technologies can never be taken away.

@marijn I am ok if it is a journey. I rather support an evil non-US company than evil Google & Co.

If there's competition, accountability can be a good product differentiator.

When I saw this diagram I thought, yes those are the companies I always complain about (excluding Nvidia, which I know too little about except for non-free Linux drivers, I think)

@marijn The EU company has at least decided to charter in your jurisdiction and is thus at least obligated to pay lip service to your laws.

So I certainly would not say they are functionally equivalent. That's actually a HUGE functional difference, at least so long as you manage to not just follow along with our bullshit within your own jurisdictions. If that's really all the same to you then yeah, whatever--makes no diff.

@marijn If forced to choose I'd take GDPR jurisdicted companies over non GDPR jurisdicted companies.

I say this as someone outside Europe. I prefer European tech companies than my local ones.
@KitsuneVixi I'm thinking publicly traded companies are easily bought. Startups acquired. Big companies brought to heel by limiting access to the US or Chinese market if they don't play ball. It's true that being in the EU is a plus, but I feel its significance is often overstated