“Digitale autonomie moet het uitgangspunt zijn voor de overheid. We kiezen voor een Europese digitale infrastructuur, bouwen strategische afhankelijkheden in cloud, data en cruciale systemen doelgericht af”

The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.

“The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a step in the right direction. It signals that they acknowledge the problem.”

ll this decade, all over the world, countries have taken up arms against concentrated corporate power. We've had big, muscular antitrust attacks on big corporations in the US (under Trump I and Biden); in Canada; in the UK; in the EU and member states like Germany, France and Spain; in Australia; in Japan and South Korea and Singapore; in Brazil; and in China. This is a near-miraculous turn of affairs. All over the world, governments are declaring war on monopolies, the source of billionaires' wealth and powe

Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall.

Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS App Store, and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing and malicious compliance they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms equipment. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

Today's links The Post-American Internet: My speech from Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Error code 451; Public email address Mansplaining Lolita; NSA backdoor in Juniper Networks; Don't bug out; Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The Post-American Internet (permalink) On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech. Video Playerhttps://archive.org/download/doctorow-39c3/39c3-1421-eng-A_post-American_enshittification-resistant_internet.mp400:0000:0001:01:12Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume. Many of you know that I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation – EFF. I'm about to start my 25th year there. I know that I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no group anywhere on Earth that does the work of defending our digital rights better than EFF. I'm an activist there, and for the past quarter-century, I've been embroiled in something I call "The War on General Purpose Computing." If you were at 28C3, 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. Those are the trenches I've been in since my very first day on the job at EFF, when I flew to Los Angeles to crash the inaugural meeting of something called the "Broadcast Protection Discussion Group," an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters and cable operators. They'd gathered because this lavishly corrupt American congressman, Billy Tauzin, had promised them a new regulation – a rule banning the manufacture and sale of digital computers, unless they had been backdoored to specifications set by that group, specifications for technical measures to block computers from performing operations that were dispreferred by these companies' shareholders. That rule was called "the Broadcast Flag," and it actually passed through the American telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. So we sued the FCC in federal court, and overturned the rule. We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years. Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good internet, one that delivers both the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been unlocked. Today, it is open a crack. It's open a crack! And here's the weirdest part: Donald Trump is the guy who's unlocked that door. Oh, he didn't do it on purpose! But, thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are on the cusp of a "Post-American Internet," a new digital nervous system for the 21st century. An internet that we can build without worrying about America's demands and priorities. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not happy about Trump or his policies. But as my friend Joey DaVilla likes to say "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla." The only thing worse than experiencing all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America and the world would be going through all that and not salvaging anything out of the wreckage. That's what I want to talk to you about today: the post-American Internet we can wrest from Trump's chaos. A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side. In politics, coalitions are everything. Any time you see a group of people suddenly succeeding at a goal they have been failing to achieve, it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners, new allies who don't want all the same thing as the original forces, but want enough of the same things to fight on their side. That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel. And what's got me so excited is that we've got a new coalition in the War on General Purpose Computers: a coalition that includes the digital rights activists who've been on the lines for decades, but also people who want to turn America's Big Tech trillions into billions for their own economy, and national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about digital sovereignty. My thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition. Which is good news! For the first time in decades, victory is in our grasp.

For Cristina Caffarra, founder of the Eurostack Foundation and a competition economist, Europe's predicament is both alarming and self-inflicted. She estimates that 90 percent of Europe's digital infrastructure (cloud, compute, and software) is now controlled by non-European, predominantly American, companies.

When these nuts open, it looks like China is producing a big wave of new products. These are its breakthroughs in drones, electric vehicles, and robotics. Years from now we may see greater success in biotech as well. I am keen to follow along China’s progress in electromagnetism over the next decade. China’s industrial ecosystem is leading the way in replacing combustion with electromagnetic processes. Everything is now drone, as the combination of cheaper batteries and better permanent magnets displaces the engine.

Today, AI dictates everything in San Francisco while the tech scene plays a much larger political role in the United States. I can’t get over how strange it all feels. In the midst of California’s natural beauty, nerds are trying to build God in a Box; meanwhile, Peter Thiel hovers in the background presenting lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. This eldritch setting feels more appropriate for a Gothic horror novel than for real life.

the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states.

Which of the tech titans are funny?

et Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) becijferde onlangs dat het totale stroomverbruik van datacenters in 2024 steeg naar ruim 5.000 gigawattuur, 4,5 procent van het totale stroomverbruik van Nederland – net zoveel als het verbruik van 2 miljoen huishoudens. En dat is buiten alle lopende aanvragen voor stroomaansluitingen gerekend. De netbeheerders, die deze aanvragen kennen, schrijven in hun meest recente toekomstscenario dat het stroomverbruik van datacenters over vijf jaar van 5 naar 15 procent van het totaal in Nederland zal zijn gegroeid.

de Amerikanen leggen de Europese regels in hun eigen voordeel uit en tot nu toe heeft geen enkel Europees land zin in een potje armpje drukken met de Amerikaanse techreuzen over hun energiegebruik. Ook Nederland niet. Dat ondervond De Valk, die opheldering vroeg bij de RVO. Ze stuurt NRC de antwoorden die de dienst haar gaf op haar vragen over de hyperscales bij Middenmeer. „Het klopt dat een groot gedeelte van de vragen niet zijn ingevuld”, schreef de dienst haar. „We hebben geen wettelijke middelen om datacentra te dwingen.”

De nieuwe Europese energie-efficiëntierichtlijn, de EED, moest dat veranderen. De Europese richtlijn dwingt bedrijven transparant te zijn over hun energieverbruik en meer werk te maken van energiebesparing. Alle grote bedrijven in Europa, inclusief datacenters, moeten daarom vanaf 2024 jaarlijks bij hun eigen overheid hun energie- en waterverbruik opgeven. In Nederland is dat bij de Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland, de RVO.

he also disagrees that the transition from Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI), based on programmed rules, to second-generation AI, based on pattern finding, is programming's actual arc of progress. He values the various contemporary modes of machine learning but sees today's AI shift as a detour away from a powerful programming tradition built on increasing human agency rather than replacing it.

Wat die bedrijven voor hun klanten zo aantrekkelijk maakt, is dat achter één loket een hele wereld schuilgaat. Wie in Europa iets vergelijkbaars wil kopen, moet zakendoen met allerlei kleine en middelgrote bedrijven. En rekening houden met de kans dat die technische ‘oplossingen’ (ict-jargon) nét niet lekker op elkaar aansluiten.

In februari zegt Vance tijdens een speech op de jaarlijkse veiligheidsconferentie in München onder meer dat Europa zichzelf van binnenuit uitholt. De democratie in de EU zou niet meer functioneren, wat onder meer zou komen door de Europese regels voor de digitale wereld – die in de praktijk vooral de grote Amerikaanse sociale mediabedrijven als Meta en X treffen.

* "Digital platforms are used for hybrid campaigns."* "EU can't compete with US tech ON THEIR TERMS."* "Post-reality US is what happens when tech is unregulated."* "Ireland is a Trojan Horse for Big Tech."* "The Digital Omnibus is sabotage."

Maar zonder een persoonlijke ontologie ben je overgeleverd aan de techreuzen.

Die Rede der ZukunftspreisträgerinMeredith Whittaker warnt in ihrer Rede vor der Macht der Techindustrie und erklärt, warum es sich gerade jetzt lohnt, positiv zu denken.