The independent web is already here, quietly thriving while Big Tech implodes under its own extractive weight. All you have to do is join it.

We must find moments of joy in the horror of our present. Joy is not a prize for getting through it all—joy is a tool that enables us to get through the horror. Our joy is an act of resistance.

This is less about nostalgia than it is survival. Search engines fail and AI floods the void with slop. Human curation becomes essential infrastructure. We need directories. We need blogrolls. We need people pointing to other people.

Google search is collapsing. Between 2021 and 2025, websites experienced traffic losses exceeding 60% from organic search, with quality content creators punished while AI-generated spam flourished. Confirmed algorithm updates decreased from 10 annually in 2021-2022 to just 4 in 2025, yet volatility reached record-breaking levels.

The State of Search (Why This Guide is Needed) Before we dive into resources, we need to talk about why human curation matters more than ever.

het regime

Die aspecten van het trumpisme – wetteloosheid, vijanddenken, leugens, omdraaiingen en geweld – zijn de pijlers van zowel zijn binnenlandse als buitenlandse beleid. Dat is al tien jaar het geval,

The blog won't save us. But it's one of the tools we'll need if we're going to save ourselves.

We're not going to get a better internet by waiting for platforms to become less extractive. We build it by building it. By maintaining our own spaces, linking to each other, creating the interconnected web of independent sites that the blogosphere once was and could be again.

He kept going because the infrastructure mattered, because how we structure the presentation of ideas affects the ideas themselves.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of having a room of one's own: physical space for creative work, free from interruption and control. A blog is a room of your own on the internet. It's a place where you decide what to write about and how to write about it,

And the fragmentation of social media is actually creating demand for alternatives. Every time a platform implodes (Twitter's ongoing collapse, Instagram's slow retirement // decay into a metaphorical Floridian condo, TikTok's uncertain status, Facebook's demographic hollowing) people start looking for more stable ground. The infrastructure exists. It's waiting.

Newsletters are still a discovery layer, no matter how many people pronounce their untimely death. You can write on your own site and distribute via email, getting the permanence of a blog with the push distribution of a newsletter. The writing lives at your domain; the email is notification infrastructure.

RSS never actually died.

Search engines still index blogs far better than social media posts. A well-written blog post on a specific topic can draw readers for year

I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they've moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. These are people who used to produce ten-thousand-word explorations of complex topics, and now they produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each one optimized for immediate engagement and none of them building toward anything coherent.

Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration

Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are dying. He called these writings essais, meaning "attempts" or "tries." The form was explicitly provisional. Montaigne was trying out ideas, seeing where they led, acknowledging uncertainty as a fundamental feature rather than a bug to be eliminated.The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne's direct descendant.

Diderot understood that the container shapes the contents. The Encyclopédie was a collection of facts, yes, but more fundamentally it was an argument about how knowledge should be organized. Cross-references between entries were themselves a form of commentary, connecting ideas that authorities wanted kept separate.

Everything I produce has to compete, in real-time, with everything else that could possibly occupy that user's attention.

When I write a blog post, I'm writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they're interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who's made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.

The platform has no interest in whether your post is found next week or next year; it has a vested interest in keeping users scrolling through new content right now.

But it also produced actual intellectual communities. Remember those?People wrote long responses to each other's posts, those responses generated further responses, and you could follow the thread of an argument across multiple sites and weeks of discussion. The format rewarded careful thinking because careful thinking was legible in a way that it simply isn't on platforms designed for rapid-fire engagement.

And I think the fix, or at least part of it = going backwards to a technology we've largely abandoned: the blog, humble // archaic as it may seem.

When people talk about the Enlightenment as if it were an intellectual garden party where everyone sipped wine and agreed about reason, they're missing the part where producing and distributing ideas was (in fact) dangerous and thankless work

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

I am hopeful. Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed. Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

t's national security hawks who are worried about Trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, and who are also worried – with just cause – about Xi Jinping bricking all their solar inverters and batteries. Because, after all, the post-American internet is also a post-Chinese internet!

The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you're trying to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram – that is just the most Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve-ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1990 called and they want their walled gardens back

But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon Sector presented on their research into this disgusting racket in this very hall, and now, they're being sued by Newag under anticircumvention law, for making absolutely true disclosures about Newag's deliberately defective products

that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros

Congress just killed a military "right to repair" law. So now, US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers

Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends it is Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest med-tech company, having purchased all their competitors, and then undertaken the largest "tax-inversion" in history, selling themselves to a tiny Irish firm, in order to magick their profits into a state of untaxable grace, floating in the Irish Sea.

From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine if you buy a monthly subscription; to BMW, which rents you the automated system that automatically dims your high-beams if there's oncoming traffic.

Anticircumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate.

But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of anticircumvention laws? Well, there's good news there, too. "Good news," because the EU firms that rely on anticircumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.

It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing food, medical and cash supports if they pissed off America. But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter.

Besides, we don't need Europe to lead the charge on a post-American internet by repealing anticircumvention. Any country could do it! And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits

But crises precipitate change. Remember when another mad emperor – Vladimir Putin – invaded Ukraine, and Europe experienced a dire energy shortage? In three short years, the continent's solar uptake skyrocketed. The EU went from being 15 years behind in its energy transition, to ten years ahead of schedule.

the project of building a post-American internet: a project to reduce tech debt, to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide them among the world's entrepreneurs (for whom they represent untold profits), and the world's technology users (for whom they represent untold savings); all while building resiliency and sovereignty.

When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood during the writer's strike, a writer told me that you prompt an AI the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's room: "Make me ET, but make it about a dog, and give it a love interest, and a car-chase in the third act.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it's a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That's a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software upstream of it, downstream of it, and adjacent to it is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies in systems that may have performed well for years.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

But there's one post-American system that's easy to imagine. The project to rip out all the cloud connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors; and replace it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code. This project is the only one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale. That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution – like the Eurostack services – can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every other country.

also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on American platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention law, so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware and generally seize the means of computation.

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.

But Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of Big Tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability tools that allow for mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

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.

he-said/Clippy-said between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists of Microsoft, I know who I believe.

When the EU explained that this would not satisfy the regulation, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU. Then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen bullshit objections to the order hoping to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

When the EU hit Apple with an enforcement order under the Digital Markets Act, Apple responded by offering to allow third party app stores, but it would only allow those stores to sell apps that Apple had approved of.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but not for me." When they do it to us, that's progress. When we do it to them, it's piracy, and every pirate wants to be an admiral. Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break kings!

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA

USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law, it's a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service, unless the manufacturer approves of your modification, and – crucially – this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law.

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.

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.

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.

been embroiled in something I call "The War on General Purpose Computing.

Und die Bundesregierung sollte sich endlich von X verabschieden und damit Elon Musks Plattform die Relevanz entziehen.

Dänemark steuert im Urheberrecht nach: Es soll künftig verboten sein, Deepfakes und andere „digitalen Imitationen der persönlichen Merkmale einer Person“ zu teilen und zu verbreiten. Das „einklagbare Copyright auf Aussehen, Stimme und generelle“ (heise.de) soll um Rechtsschutzmöglichkeiten gegenüber Plattformen flankiert werden. Kulturminister Jakob Engel-Schmidt erklärte gegenüber dem Guardian: "Mit dem Gesetzentwurf einigen wir uns auf die eindeutige Botschaft, dass jeder das Recht auf seinen eigenen Körper, seine eigene Stimme und seine eigenen Gesichtszüge hat.“

Es ist deshalb nachvollziehbar, dass Italien nun auch das Strafrecht nachjustiert. Dort gilt künftig: Wer einer Person einen unrechtmäßigen Schaden zufügt, indem er ohne deren Zustimmung Bilder, Videos oder Stimmen weitergibt, veröffentlicht oder auf andere Weise verbreitet, die durch den Einsatz künstlicher Intelligenz gefälscht oder verfälscht wurden und geeignet sind, hinsichtlich ihrer Echtheit zu täuschen, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe von einem bis zu fünf Jahren bestraft.

Aktuell besteht die Gefahr, dass der „Digitale Omnibus“ die Fristen um mindestens ein weiteres Jahr verschiebt.

Wenn Grok also Bilder generiert und auf X veröffentlicht, ohne sie als Deepfake zu kennzeichnen, verstößt das gegen EU-Recht - jedenfalls ab August 2026, wenn die relevanten Vorschriften anwendbar werden.

Blood biomarkers have emerged as accurate tools for detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology, offering a minimally invasive alternative to traditional diagnostic methods such as imaging and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis.

Yet, further refinement of collection and analytical protocols is needed to fully translate this approach to be viable and useful as a clinical tool.

indings underscore the potential of dried blood collection and capillary blood as a minimally invasive, scalable approach for AD biomarker testing in research settings

The study also explored unsupervised blood collection, finding high concordance between supervised and self-collected samples.

DROP-AD project investigates the potential of dried plasma spot (DPS) and dried blood spot (DBS) analysis, derived from capillary blood, for detecting AD biomarkers,

Yet, the logistics surrounding venipuncture for blood collection, although considerably simpler than the acquisition of imaging and CSF, require precise processing and storage specific to AD biomarkers that are still guided by medical personnel. Consequently, limitations in their widescale use in research and broader clinical implementation exist. T

without mechanisms to protect European champions from foreign acquisition, any progress can be undone overnight

Kim Loohuis

For Europe, the question is no longer whether it should pursue digital sovereignty, but whether it has the collective will to stop talking, start building, and, most importantly, distinguish real autonomy from clever marketing.

They prove that alternatives exist and that the benefits extend beyond mere compliance. Yet, the case of Solvinity in the Netherlands serves as a stark warning that procurement alone is not enough;

For these individual successes to scale into a continent-wide shift, however, structural barriers must be addressed. The path to digital sovereignty is not a single, grand gesture but a series of deliberate, often difficult, choices. The examples from Austria, France, and the ICC show that the journey begins with a single, courageous step, often prompted by the mundane reality of a data protection assessment.

These cases illustrate that while a complete break from US hyperscalers may seem unrealistic, as Forrester predicts, targeted migrations for specific, high-risk applications are not only possible but are actively being pursued. They represent a grassroots movement, driven by legal obligations and a growing desire for autonomy.

the Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO, an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.

the state of Schleswig-Holstein is undertaking an even more ambitious project to replace Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for its 30,000 civil servants. The state began its migration in March 2024 and has already transitioned 24,000 employees to LibreOffice, Nextcloud, Open Xchange, and Thunderbird.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague announced in November 2025 it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative.

pushing back against hyperscaler dominance

and involves the Dutch national health institute RIVM.

The decision to adopt OpenDesk, an open-source office and collaboration suite delivered by the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS), was seen as a direct response to political pressure from the United States, which has sanctioned ICC employees in the past.

exposing a critical flaw in Europe's strategy that cannot be solved by procurement alone.

Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider.

Today, "sovereignty-washing" represents a more sophisticated version of the same tactic: coopting the language of autonomy to entrench dependency.

American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this ‘sovereignty washing’. Caffarra warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act.

distinguishing real alternatives from false promises has become increasingly difficult.

For Caffarra, this trend is dangerously reminiscent of Gaia-X, a previous flagship initiative for a federated European cloud. "The intention behind Gaia-X was good," she says. "The problem was that American companies lobbied to be included. Once Microsoft, Google, and AWS were inside Gaia-X, the initiative lost its purpose.". In her opinion: "That is why it failed."

from talking to building, from regulating to investing, and from passivity to action. Europe cannot rely on Brussels to deliver this transformation. The market must build it, but governments must create the conditions, through procurement preferences and initial funding, that make it viable.

The goal, she emphasizes, is not autarky or protectionism, but resilience. Europe does not need to achieve complete independence from American technology, but it does need to reclaim a meaningful share of its own market. "Can we please have 30 to 40 percent for ourselves?"

First, buy European: procurement rules must prioritize European providers for critical infrastructure, as is standard practice in the United States and Asia. Second, build European: the private sector must invest in developing European alternatives, rather than relying on subsidies or waiting for government intervention. And third, fund European: a dedicated fund should support the development of Europe's technology stack, with public bodies acting as launching customers to create initial demand and prove viabilit

Her proposed solution, embodied in the Eurostack Foundation, is not more regulation but an industrial strategy focused on three pillars:

While Brussels focuses on regulating consumer-facing services, the underlying infrastructure has been handed over entirely. "What Europeans don't realize is that while they regulate e-commerce and app stores, the digital infrastructure on which everything rests is now owned by non-Europeans," she says.

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.

If a major American cloud provider were to restrict European access or cease operations, the consequences would be immediate and severe. This fragility has created a market opportunity that American hyperscalers are now exploiting.

A recent analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that of 64 crucial technologies, China leads in 57 and the United States in the remaining seven. Europe leads in none.

The scale of Europe's technological deficit makes migrations like Austria’s daunting for most organisations.

Its use is strictly limited to external communication with parties that still rely on it, such as the European Commission. Even then, strict rules apply: no sensitive information may be discussed on Teams, and usage is kept to an absolute minimum. This hybrid approach reflects a pragmatic recognition that complete independence is not always immediately possible when external partners remain locked into US platforms.

Yet the Austrian case also illustrates the practical limits of digital sovereignty. Nextcloud now serves as the primary collaboration platform for internal communication and file sharing, but Microsoft Teams has not been banned entirely.

"You don't achieve digital sovereignty overnight," Ollrom tells The Register. "You have to do this in many steps, but you have to start with the first step. Don't just talk about it, but execute it."

The decision has triggered a ripple effect, as several other Austrian ministries have since begun implementing Nextcloud. For Zinnagl and Ollrom, this proves that one organization willing to take the first step can inspire others to follow.

Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism is a case in point. The ministry recently completed a migration of 1,200 employees to the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, but the project was not a migration away from an existing US cloud provider. It was a deliberate choice not to adopt one

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) before deploying any new technology that is "likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons." When conducted for US hyperscaler services, these DPIAs invariably flag the CLOUD Act as a significant, often unacceptable, risk. This legal obligation is increasingly becoming the primary driver of public bodies to seek alternatives.

If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot.

Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless.

This creates a risk that is difficult, if not impossible, to mitigate contractually. Any private contract between a European customer and a US cloud provider is ultimately subordinate to US federal law. A warrant issued under the CLOUD Act legally compels an American company to hand over data, overriding any contractual commitments of data residency or privacy.

This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally

grappling with its technological autonomy

urope’s quest for digital sovereignty is hampered by a 90 per cent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, claims Cristina Caffarra, a competition expert and a driving force behind the Eurostack initiative.

Plus–Minus–Next ist eine einfache dreiteilige Reflexionsstruktur. Sie stammt von Anne-Laure Le Cunff und wurde über ihr Projekt Ness Labs und später ihr Buch Tiny Experiments bekannt. Der Kern ist schnell erklärt:

Next ist kein zusätzlicher Aufgabenstapel. Es ist auch keine Zielplanung. Next beantwortet eine engere Frage: Was mache ich nächste Woche leicht anders als diese Woche?

Entscheidend ist die Reihenfolge. Zuerst wird gesammelt, ohne sofort zu reagieren. Erst danach wird eine Konsequenz gezogen.

Eine der schlichtesten und zugleich brauchbarsten Formen dafür ist die Methode Plus–Minus–Next.

But [it] has expanded drastically after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That saw what we call the shadow fleet explode to some 900-1,200 vessels globally.

When we organise our culture around renewal, we devalue the quieter labour of holding things together, of getting through

I am not uninterested in change. I am uninterested in pretending that it is always available, or that it arrives at midnight. So, this is how I have entered 2026. Not with a clean page but with a pen hovering over old ink, writing in the margins where I can. I am not starting again, I am continuing, carefully. Happy New Year. Same old life.

Vlam.ai

In terms of the EU's digital rulebook, it has already started in May with the deletion of a core compliance element in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - the obligation to keep records of your processing activities.