Cjen1Feb 27
Stephen Kell

Trying to put together a few slides about "data sovereignty" -- or, more generally, legal and social and ethical concerns of distributed systems (especially when they get ever larger).

Does anyone have readings or data to suggest?

E.g. I'd be especially interested in illustrating the historical decline of e.g. in-house or ISP-provided services, and the rise of the hyperscaler-backed equivalents e.g. Gmail / Office 365 / ...

Feb 27 at 12:36pmWeb
Show threadPeter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Feb 27
@stephenrkell interesting... this is a very different version of "data sovereignty" that I'm used to (I'm more familiar with it in the context of e.g. control of data by countries)... how does it relate to distributed systems?
Show threadStephen KellFeb 28
@pvanheus Well, the premise is that we have the regulatory / jurisdictional problem you mention largely from the increasing tendency to outsource data management (of whatever kind, i.e. across diverse applications) to hyperscale multinational service instances, rather than more traditional local approaches. That premise is certainly questionable, but it is the pattern I see....
Show threadjon rFeb 27

@stephenrkell
@rwg has a nice article on the mail decline: https://fossacademic.tech/2023/11/10/HowUniversitiesLostIT.html

Others argue similar things about DNS servers having originally been built as research, maybe @nlnetlabs or @ripencc have an idea. Also @irtf or @bert_hubert or @turris might know documented cases of products that grew out of public (state) sovereignty.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/our-self-inflicted-cloud-crisis/

Yet sometimes into community ownership as coop commons-public partnership #CCPP @IndieHosters

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/THRG3E-la_suite_coop_model_for_digital_commons/

via @khinsen

Blog

My first full-time academic job was at the University of Utah. Utah is, of course, very famous. No, not because of cold fusion or teaching Ted Bundy about the law.

FOSS Academic
Show threadStephen KellFeb 28
@yala Thanks! These are great... lots for me to munch through.