It's always been an odd choice to build infra on services owned by companies from a country which doesn't recognise the ICC and, even worse, has a special law that if any of US service men were ever tried there, they will invade the Hague. (gotta love the good guys)
It's a great example from 2002 that demonstrates that while the US have ramped up its isolationism efforts lately, it has been moving in the same direction for a long time, so what's happening now shouldn't be so surprising.
Because they’ve already entered into treaties making the offenses involved matters of universal jutisdiction which any state can prosecute their citizens for, and as a State Party to the Rome Statute, they would have more influence over the fairness and process of the ICC than they would over any national system outside of their own.
Also, because they are tired of the diplomatic cost and expense of working with other countries to set up ad hoc tribunals for particular conflicts and want to get the job done once and properly. (That's actually why the US was one of the leaders of the effort that produced the ICC, even though it did a U-turn against it at the last minute.)
Why would any state enter into a treaty with a state that doesn't recognize them? Diplomacy requires it so it has been in the USA Constitution since the beginning:
Article VI, Clause 2:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
It’s like any international treaty, you agree to it because there’s something in it for you in return for signing it.
In this case, there’s a straightforward benefit to it in that it could be used to prosecute crimes against the US and US citizens, and soft benefits e.g. of the US being seen a a paragon of lawfulness and trust. There’s likely more, these are just what I could think of immediately.
That's true, but the member states agree to offer that jurisdiction. For instance, joining the treaty would allow us to arrest suspected war criminals, or at least, discourage them from traipsing around on our territory.
A lot of people toss around “war criminal” pretty loosely. And regardless of whether you think say, George W Bush was a WC (I don’t), it would be awkward for any country to have to hand over its elected leader, which could even be a popular one with broad support, to be prosecuted at The Hague, because Europeans disagreed with a military decision. Joining the ICC would mean the US would need to do just that.
> it would be awkward for any country to have to hand over its elected leader,
Since the leader (elected or not) generally controls the executive apparatus (that’s what makes them the “leader”), its unlikely that this would actually occur, irrespective of the nominal obligation. It is more likely that they would be turned over after being removed as leader (a process which an ICC warrant may or may not accelerate, depending on the response of other institutions, the populace, etc.)
At least, that is what has generally happened with the top leaders that have ended up at the ICC (or its predecessor ad hoc tribunals, back to Slobodan Milosevic, the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal—the ICTY—who wasn't turned over by Yugoslav authorities until after he resigned.)
> because Europeans disagreed with a military decision
The majority of State Parties to the Rome Statute are non-European, as are a majority of the current judges of the court, as is the current acting chief prosecutor, so it is really weird to describe ICC involvement this way.
I suppose it would be like the governor of a state getting prosecuted for Federal crimes.
Would GWB have acted differently, had he been forced to consider the legality of his actions under a broader framework? Would we have preferred for presidents to have even broader immunity from prosecution?
Same reason most people prefer living in a society with laws: you are subject to laws, but so is everyone else, and provided the laws are beneficial ("just") you are overall better off.
On a national level I agree not to steal, and in return nobody else is allowed to steal from me. On the ICC level my country agrees not to genocide anyone, and in return others aren't allowed to genocide either
The fundamental problem with this logic is that there is no enforcement body here. In a just society, the law defines who is "allowed" to steal from you and the state's enforcement arm punishes those who violate the law. The law binds but also protects.
Creating a global enforcement arm is an obvious non-starter: Which laws shall be enacted and enforced against whom, and how are fundamentally political questions. The answers to those questions necessarily change once you cross into another polity. States can coordinate and agree mutually to enforce a law... but if Poland says that despite their commitments to the contrary they simply aren't gonna extradite that suspected Nord Stream saboteur: Tough nuggets. Such situations expose international "laws" as mere window dressing on powers that emanate from and remain held by individual states.
There is no global enforcement arm and plenty of evidence that if someone starts genociding you, nobody else is gonna do anything about it. You're on your own. Such "laws" bind but do not protect.
Especially in the context of the US as world hegemon: The US fully expects to shoulder the entire burden of deterring or defeating threats to the homeland. Joining the ICC would bring precisely zero extra protection from genocide. Indeed, such a commitment may limit the US's freedom of action, discredit US deterrence, and actually make a devastating war more likely.
Seems like the US is very involved in others' business for such an "independent" spirit.
E.g. Switzerland (a country I'd argue as having a far more genuine independent spirit) was labeled as a currency manipulator by the US [0], despite the designation being fairly arbitrary, and you know, her being her own country (and so surely subject to her own laws).
What you're describing as "independence" looks a lot more like "rules for thee are not rules for me", which the US just happens to have the privelage of preaching due to its preeminent position in the world.
Currency manipulation is meant to benefit the country doing manipulation (in this case Switzerland) at the expense of another country (in this case U.S.)
It's very much the role of U.S. government to protect U.S. from other countries trying to do harm to U.S., be it by bombing U.S. territory, tariffs on U.S. goods or currency manipulation that economically hurts U.S.
You could present an argument that Switzerland wasn't trying to harm U.S. economically via currency manipulation but instead you're trying to delegitimize the very idea that U.S. can defend itself from other countries trying to harm it economically by pretending that it's purely internal affair that has no effect on U.S.
Currency manipulation does hurt U.S. and that's the reason U.S. has the right to push back on it.
I said Switzerland was labelled a currency manipulator - its attempts to devalue the Franc was in response to the sharp rise in its value as a result of Covid and the markets plowing money into safe-haven assets. This presented a real problem for the country at the time, and the primary dynamic at play wrt exports in the country is actually between CHF and EUR, not CHF and USD. The US designation was widely considered arbitrary iirc, putting Switzerland into the same grouping as countries like China, which have vastly different reasons for devaluing their currencies, and arguably ones more in line with what the US was actually supposedly targeting.
So I haven't claimed that Switzerland is a currency manipulator, nor that this would be a good thing, nor that its efforts to devalue its currency had anything to do with the US. I don't see what the contention is here - unless it's that only the US is allowed to be "independent" (i.e. above all international law), here wrt the ICC, while other countries must curtail what is in their national interests (like not having their export markets decimated) for fear of provoking this one special, privileged land?
If the argument is that the US can enforce its agenda on other countries and they must just suck it, then sure. But that's not an argument about fairness or what's right, that's an argument about what to expect from the actor with the biggest stick.
yes we independently decide to invade other countries for no good reason and independently decide to extrajudicially murder people the president doesn't like, I'm so very glad
The reason has nothing to do with "independence". It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.
At least that was the reason I was given in the US military. YMMV
I wouldn't believe anything the military tells you about justice.
The US military told people whatever they needed to tell them to follow orders. That's why they follow unlawful orders like those to extrajudicially blow up non-combatant US citizens abroad, and imprison people in Guantanamo for decades without trial, assist the disarming of innocent US citizens in NOLA in the aftermath of Katrina, blackball soldiers in Vietnam that reported war crimes, and all manner of other things that hardly anyone seems to be held to account for.
> The ICC is intended to complement, not replace, national judicial systems; it can exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals.
Interesting. Thanks for posting that. I hope the US will always prosecute war crimes of its own soldiers, but I'm skeptical--I don't think that's how war and power work.
> It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.
> At least that was the reason I was given in the US military.
That's obviously nonsense. For many reasons:
(1) ICC jursidiction does not supercede national jurisdiction that is actually exercised—that's explicitly a basis for ICC jurisdiction not to be applied (it can be applied in the case of sham proceedings designed to provide cover). So it wouldn't stop the US from trying, and applying the death penalty to, any war criminals.
(2) The actual reasons for the the US opposition, including Congress passing a law threatening the ICC, are matters of public record, and are much more about the US wanting impunity for accused (American) war criminals than any fear of inadequate punishment.
(3) The US response to its own war criminals that it has had the opportunity to punish since the establishment of, and its refusal to join, the ICC has shown a singular lack of capital punishment. And even the occasional Presidential pardon after conviction.
Even for US military propaganda directed at is own personnel, that's pretty lazy, low-effort stuff.
Every country tries that on a regular basis. The US might have more power on the world stage, but everyone tries it once in a while. If you look at history the US has been very restrained with using their power (which isn't a high bar)
Do you also think it's hypocritical that the Dallas Cowboys try to sack the other team's quarterback even though they don't want their own quarterback sacked?
The Dallas Cowboys operates according to team rules that encourages such violence. The entire point of international cooperation is to prevent the sort if wonton violence our military engaged in the last 80 years.
God willing, someone in this country or in another one will work up the nerve to erase such a malignant cancer out of existence eventually.
No man is an island, and no country is either. You live in an international community, whether you like it or not. You can choose to be a rogue state, but it doesn't reflect well on you.
Why would the US choose to cede authority to the ICC here? If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do. Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.
If US soldiers are (once again) committing war crimes, will the US do anything? What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes? Should there not be one?
> What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes?
The war crimes (and some others) that are subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC are already crimes recognized explicitly in the treaties establishing them as crimes matters of universal jurisdiction. Yeah, its difficult to get your hands on them to exercise that jurisdiction, but... that hasn’t really been a problem the ICC has solved with regard to significant powers when their personnel are subject to its jurisdiction, either.
It's quite funny that they will switch to german technology now, because I can think of no german service provider that would not immediately comply with any and all US sanctions.
Sanctions are official, but Trump phoning up the CEO and whining about nonsense is something else. I'd be concerned that a US company would be vastly more likely to fold from the latter than a German one would. Sanctions enacted against a German or EU company on a whim would perhaps cause some international response.
Point taken, but reading that official sanction just shows a load of whining.
However, I was able to read it, which would not be the case if he had just phoned Nadella. Who knows, perhaps he did and Nadella refused to play? I see that he did not attend the inauguration..
Right, it is definitely whining. But it also makes the case that it's risky to depend on services from a US company, as the whims of a tyrant may force all US companies to cut ties.
I doubt Trump even knew how the sanctions would play out, in terms of all the effects on the ICC. But the IT services are a clear one for the HN crowd to pay attention to.
If Trump asked a german company hosting a politicians email to shut down access to their emails, would they really comply with that? Because that's what happened with the ICC it seems, and why we're seeing this move right now.
The only way to combat this behavior by the United States is for the European Union to finally stand up for itself and take retaliatory measures against the US. Start sanctioning prominent Americans until the US agrees to cut it out.
That is the good electroshock that was needed to start doing good things.
But:
"Zendis is part of an EU-level organisation that four EU countries founded on Tuesday with the aim of building sovereign digital infrastructure."
My intuition:
That is the usual European recipe for disaster. A public funded initiative to waste money in the usual way by giving it indirectly to consulting groups while producing nothing concrete and having to be scraped after a few years.
At the same time, a big part of the money will be use to fund largely a big group of useless executives, representatives, communicators, and have countless workshops and conferences.
At the same time, almost zero money will go to the real existing Open Source project, their developers and maintainers.
It sounds as if this was kicked off in response to an MS e-mail account being shut off.
I'd like to see how well it goes for you if you run your own e-mail server. Even when I did that in the near dot-com days, it was already getting locked down to the point you would get filtered out going into any of the big boys to the point it was largely a futile effort. It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.
> It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.
I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"?
Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).
I'm not parroting anything. Might be outdated. It is my own experience circa 2010. I could send to other private servers without trouble, sometimes made it to spam in larger providers or sometimes blocked altogether.
I never tried again because it was such an abysmal failure.
I also used to run my own mail server for a good while. I did have some issues with Google rejecting me at first, but they had some admin panel somewhere I had to register my domain, and after that I never had issues again.
Personal experience from mid 2000s to early 2010s. I lost too many outbound emails to the void. Not even spam or bounced; just genuinely gone. Gmail was the only honest receiver, Hotmail and yahoo were particularly egregious. Obviously set up everything: dkim, spf, constant ip blocklist monitoring, etc etc. It got so bad that I started sending follow ups from a Gmail address to ask if they received my email. That’s when I stopped and never tried again.
I self-hosted for 25 years. My SMTP server is at Hetzner for the last 15 years.
I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.
I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.
That time period was during my IT consultant days.
We were installing on site Windows Small Business server for them. Issues were rare and one offs with self hosted email. The only issue of delayed messages was during changing IP addresses and DNS records, waiting for the updates to replicate to root servers.
Companies would often have a server just for email hosting running Linux on low power hardware. [0]
Some of it is luck. I moved to fastmail 15 years ago, so I don't have current experience. However there is plenty of indication that large blocks of IPs get blocked by all the major providers - this is a matter of luck though, most blocks of IPs are not blocked and so you might never have a problem while others can't.
Note that a large part of the problem is if you are blocked there is nothing you can do about it. You can't contact anyone at google to get help.
My company avoids most of the "cloud" hype. We've found it more cost effective to self-host our internal services, plus it gives us more control over our configurations and data. We don't need 24/7 guaranteed up-time; we have occasional hiccups and resolve them in minutes or hours.
But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.
That depends on your scale. The big email providers cannot afford to block large organizations. However a "little guy" they can ignore.
The US isn't part of the ICC, but there are plenty of other governments who are and take this seriously. At least one will make a big deal about the ICC being blocked and governments have more power than even large companies.
The responsible executive should be jailed for many years for massive fraud. Even if such a court decision in another country won't be enforced by the US against their citizens, it will likely mean that the responsible executive won't be able to enter quite a list of countries anymore.
Reminder for those that don't click through: Microsoft killed the email account of an ICC prosecutor, at the request of Trump:
> According to Handelsblatt, the decision is to be seen against the backdrop of sanctions by the current US administration under President Donald Trump against employees such as Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Microsoft simply blocked his email access. He therefore had to switch to the Swiss email service Proton. Since the ICC is highly dependent on service providers like Microsoft, its work is being paralyzed, it was stated in May.
While there are clear financial wins too, basic sovereignty is at stake.
Yeah, seems like a no-brainer to react to something like that. Is there anyone in any circumstances that wouldn't want to move as far away from a company like Microsoft who acts on the whims like that? Even as a business strategy, it doesn't make any sense, but seems most companies are trying to kiss the ring of the king, rather than focusing on providing stable, robust and trustworthy services, so you reap what you sow.
Microsoft, being a U.S. company, had no choice in the matter. U.S. imposed sanctions on the guy. One component of sanctions is "Prohibition on U.S. persons (individuals or entities) conducting business or transactions with Khan."
If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan."
So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.
The ICC sanctions are politically unpopular in Europe, whereas the Russia sanctions are popular in Europe. But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump." Companies face serious consequences if they do business with sanctioned persons or entities - that's what makes sanctions work.
Agreed that the sanctions aspect is an important part here. But the sanctions are only for the personal and partisan benefits of President Trump, there was no benefit to the United States here.
The tariffs in your second link are not sanctions, and in fact the President levying tariffs as a normal course of business is illegal and unconstitutional in the United States. But it's a good example of the lawlessness of the current President, and his grabs at more power in an attempt to become a tyrant.
> But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump."
Yes, it absolutely was closed at the request of Trump, via sanctions. That's the entire point. The President of the United States can and will target anybody he does not like for whatever minor reason crosses his mind on a random afternoon. That makes it risky to engage in any sort of long-term transaction with a US company.
No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO. There are so many smaller, cheaper, better alternatives. And these days, building software is not that difficult. There are a lot of open source stacks to start with.
I'd love to see more support for locally developed solutions, but many of the governments in the EU are just reaching out to the most popular cross-EU businesses, often German or Austrian, instead of their local companies.
But then I guess the argument could be made for that you should go for the best option possible, as long as it's within EU, and I can certainly see the point of that too.
I disagree with this as well to some extent. I see how much big corporations spend on "maintenance" and all the bureaucracy involved. It's easy money for them and their employees. Too easy.
The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.
Regardless of politics, it's still a good idea to try and avoid dependence on these globomegacorps that have revenues and market caps higher than the GDP of many countries. It seems like modern civilization is building toward an ultimate centralization of everything and we're just one catastrophic failure away from extreme societal problems of all kinds because of it.
My hope is that all these "independent of US technologies" actually end up being "independent of for-profit companies" rather than about the specific technologies and companies involved, as what countries are "the good countries" change all the time, but non-profit/for-profit choices seem to last a lot longer than the status of any country.
I don't think profit is the core problem here. It's control. A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization.
Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.
> A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization.
Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"?
Money perverse the actions of the for-profit companies, as suddenly you have someone like Tim Cook giving gifts to the president, as the survival of his company depends on a specific person having a good view of them personally.
If neither of these companies were so hellbent on doing everything they can for profit, and instead focused on providing reliable, trustworthy and user-focused services, they wouldn't have that worry anymore. But of course, this is a pipe-dream and not at all realistic in the current climate.
As someone who previously was part of the management of a small non-profit, we absolutely cared about things that lead to us losing money...
Now, we might have had good reason to pursue a plan that cost us money, but in general, threats to our funding are effectively threats to our existence.
>
Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"?
There exist other techniques to bring open source projects and their maintainers into line.
Non-profits follow the laws of the country where they are located. This means that if somebody like Trump decides to abuse their authority by placing sanctions on ICC prosecutors, the non-profit Microsoft will similarly follow local law, or be at risk of other enforcement actions against them.
Profit and money have nothing to do with what the ICC was reacting to. It's about power, law, and autocracy.
Agree, but non-profits can rely on other non-profits, foundations or similar entities, rather than for-profit entities, and you're still collaborating with the world at large, just avoiding one particular hairball that has a tendency to infect everything it comes into touch with.
Sure. But this is exactly why we'd be better off with open-source software, hardware, etc, managed and maintained in a distributed fashion by nonprofits in many different countries. (I have no idea if there's legally such a thing as a "multinational nonprofit", though certainly such things exist in practice—eg, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders.)
Any for-profit company is highly incentivized to keep their products proprietary, locked behind copyright, obfuscation, etc, or even provided only as SaaS. They are also highly incentivized to avoid the negative attention of the governments of any of the countries they operate in, because their primary goal is to remain profitable.
Nonprofits do not have that requirement, and are much more likely to be able to attract people who are willing to defy oppressive, censorious, or outright fascist governments in order to continue to provide high-quality software & hardware to everyone without limitation or discrimination.
There's also the problem that "non-profit" is a weird, inconsistent designation that a lot of people get very rich on.
I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of.
Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement?
edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)
One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history.
The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism.
I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.
Except that a person born has rights granted to them about land and property mostly decided on capital. Very few farmers can refuse to sell the a megacorp. If you think this has no impact, find some un-used land that you have not inherited or purchased using capital and see how long you can grow food on it before someone objects. They might say it is a park, or a front yard, or a military training ground, but realistically, all those concepts of ownership were originally tied to capital and without substantial capital, you are a serf. A lesser. There is no commonhold for you to use. There are no unclaimed natural resources.
That’s kind of an interesting and profound question. I’m inclined to answer that it’s a way of efficiently allocating resources without making decisions in other words, there is no group voting about allocating resources. Of course, “efficiency” is probably in the eye of the beholder.
I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.
Yep, I agree with this. No one is making macro scale resource allocation decisions and yet resources are allocated reasonably efficiently (for some value of “efficiency”). The collective “decision” is an emergent property of countless individual decisions, much like an ant colony exhibits complex and sophisticated decision making as an emergent property of simple individual decisions.
Neither of these seem viable to me. You definitely can’t run an organization without doing business with for-profit companies. Probably the most feasible solution is diversifying dependencies so you can’t be extorted by any one country.
EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
I have not had much luck in the past in getting substantive discussion around "profit" centered critiques. Except for once, and that individual person didn't have a problem with smaller companies making profits, it was only big companies, and I wasn't quite sure that they cared about profit as much as too much centralized control. So I'm commenting here as a bookmark to hopefully learn more, should you get some thoughtful responses.
Thats a good idea for any government and major org.
Data sovereignty is such a massively huge issue. But when some nameless market-droid can go "pay us more in 10 days or we purge everything", or "account disabled" - those can absolutely wreck an org.
Now, non-critical stuff happens. And use 3rd party services for those. The key there is cancellation isn't a big deal. But the moment they do turn critical, replicate in-house.
Also, keep in mind that the AP reported killing Hague's ICC contracts. Lots of misinformation, but this is the starting point.
Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector. Migrating away all of the legacy systems is nigh impossible. Then you'd have to retrain all staff.
While this is not justified from an economic perspective one can only hope that these institutions have higher values to adhere to.
EDIT: This is great news, I should be more optimistic about this effort.
> Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector
Thanks! Marathons aren't won by speed or doing everything at once, but progressing towards a far away goal step by step, and surely we'll need all the "good lucks" we can receive.
I'll disagree it's nigh impossible, and find such defeatist perspectives well, defeatists. One shall have hope we can continuously improve things by taking care of what decisions we make, this hopefully is one of those steps.
I agree that my perspective could use more optimism, after all, the sibling comment highlighted a couple success cases.
You are right. We need to make an effort, start small and tackle this issue step by step. I do support this effort and I think these are great news.
I stand by the comment of this being dependent on a commitment to higher values than "cheapest ok solution" which is all too common in the private sector.
It's always been an odd choice to build infra on services owned by companies from a country which doesn't recognise the ICC and, even worse, has a special law that if any of US service men were ever tried there, they will invade the Hague. (gotta love the good guys)
Dropping a cite for the last bit, as it's so goofy people tend to think it's made up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
It's a great example from 2002 that demonstrates that while the US have ramped up its isolationism efforts lately, it has been moving in the same direction for a long time, so what's happening now shouldn't be so surprising.
Passed in August 2002, how very Patriot Act of them.
To be fair, the Rome Statute entered into force in July 2002.
I don't understand the whole concept. Why would any country recognize a law above their own?
Because they’ve already entered into treaties making the offenses involved matters of universal jutisdiction which any state can prosecute their citizens for, and as a State Party to the Rome Statute, they would have more influence over the fairness and process of the ICC than they would over any national system outside of their own.
Also, because they are tired of the diplomatic cost and expense of working with other countries to set up ad hoc tribunals for particular conflicts and want to get the job done once and properly. (That's actually why the US was one of the leaders of the effort that produced the ICC, even though it did a U-turn against it at the last minute.)
Because borders aren't hermetically sealed?
Same reason individuals tend to want to live in a society and the rules that come with it.
Why would any state enter into a treaty with a state that doesn't recognize them? Diplomacy requires it so it has been in the USA Constitution since the beginning:
Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
It’s like any international treaty, you agree to it because there’s something in it for you in return for signing it.
In this case, there’s a straightforward benefit to it in that it could be used to prosecute crimes against the US and US citizens, and soft benefits e.g. of the US being seen a a paragon of lawfulness and trust. There’s likely more, these are just what I could think of immediately.
Another benefit is discouraging our government from committing war crimes.
that only works if the ICC has any jurisdiction any power
That's true, but the member states agree to offer that jurisdiction. For instance, joining the treaty would allow us to arrest suspected war criminals, or at least, discourage them from traipsing around on our territory.
A lot of people toss around “war criminal” pretty loosely. And regardless of whether you think say, George W Bush was a WC (I don’t), it would be awkward for any country to have to hand over its elected leader, which could even be a popular one with broad support, to be prosecuted at The Hague, because Europeans disagreed with a military decision. Joining the ICC would mean the US would need to do just that.
> it would be awkward for any country to have to hand over its elected leader,
Since the leader (elected or not) generally controls the executive apparatus (that’s what makes them the “leader”), its unlikely that this would actually occur, irrespective of the nominal obligation. It is more likely that they would be turned over after being removed as leader (a process which an ICC warrant may or may not accelerate, depending on the response of other institutions, the populace, etc.)
At least, that is what has generally happened with the top leaders that have ended up at the ICC (or its predecessor ad hoc tribunals, back to Slobodan Milosevic, the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal—the ICTY—who wasn't turned over by Yugoslav authorities until after he resigned.)
> because Europeans disagreed with a military decision
The majority of State Parties to the Rome Statute are non-European, as are a majority of the current judges of the court, as is the current acting chief prosecutor, so it is really weird to describe ICC involvement this way.
I suppose it would be like the governor of a state getting prosecuted for Federal crimes.
Would GWB have acted differently, had he been forced to consider the legality of his actions under a broader framework? Would we have preferred for presidents to have even broader immunity from prosecution?
The ICC demonstrably has some of each of those things, though less than proponents would like in both cases.
If the US wants to prosecute someone who is residing outside it's jurisdiction, we do a rendition. Not all countries have that option.
Same reason most people prefer living in a society with laws: you are subject to laws, but so is everyone else, and provided the laws are beneficial ("just") you are overall better off.
On a national level I agree not to steal, and in return nobody else is allowed to steal from me. On the ICC level my country agrees not to genocide anyone, and in return others aren't allowed to genocide either
The fundamental problem with this logic is that there is no enforcement body here. In a just society, the law defines who is "allowed" to steal from you and the state's enforcement arm punishes those who violate the law. The law binds but also protects.
Creating a global enforcement arm is an obvious non-starter: Which laws shall be enacted and enforced against whom, and how are fundamentally political questions. The answers to those questions necessarily change once you cross into another polity. States can coordinate and agree mutually to enforce a law... but if Poland says that despite their commitments to the contrary they simply aren't gonna extradite that suspected Nord Stream saboteur: Tough nuggets. Such situations expose international "laws" as mere window dressing on powers that emanate from and remain held by individual states.
There is no global enforcement arm and plenty of evidence that if someone starts genociding you, nobody else is gonna do anything about it. You're on your own. Such "laws" bind but do not protect.
Especially in the context of the US as world hegemon: The US fully expects to shoulder the entire burden of deterring or defeating threats to the homeland. Joining the ICC would bring precisely zero extra protection from genocide. Indeed, such a commitment may limit the US's freedom of action, discredit US deterrence, and actually make a devastating war more likely.
I'm glad we don't. The US is her own country and subject to her own laws. Independence is the spirit of America.
Seems like the US is very involved in others' business for such an "independent" spirit.
E.g. Switzerland (a country I'd argue as having a far more genuine independent spirit) was labeled as a currency manipulator by the US [0], despite the designation being fairly arbitrary, and you know, her being her own country (and so surely subject to her own laws).
What you're describing as "independence" looks a lot more like "rules for thee are not rules for me", which the US just happens to have the privelage of preaching due to its preeminent position in the world.
[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/switzerland-branded-as...
Strange framing.
Currency manipulation is meant to benefit the country doing manipulation (in this case Switzerland) at the expense of another country (in this case U.S.)
It's very much the role of U.S. government to protect U.S. from other countries trying to do harm to U.S., be it by bombing U.S. territory, tariffs on U.S. goods or currency manipulation that economically hurts U.S.
You could present an argument that Switzerland wasn't trying to harm U.S. economically via currency manipulation but instead you're trying to delegitimize the very idea that U.S. can defend itself from other countries trying to harm it economically by pretending that it's purely internal affair that has no effect on U.S.
Currency manipulation does hurt U.S. and that's the reason U.S. has the right to push back on it.
I said Switzerland was labelled a currency manipulator - its attempts to devalue the Franc was in response to the sharp rise in its value as a result of Covid and the markets plowing money into safe-haven assets. This presented a real problem for the country at the time, and the primary dynamic at play wrt exports in the country is actually between CHF and EUR, not CHF and USD. The US designation was widely considered arbitrary iirc, putting Switzerland into the same grouping as countries like China, which have vastly different reasons for devaluing their currencies, and arguably ones more in line with what the US was actually supposedly targeting.
So I haven't claimed that Switzerland is a currency manipulator, nor that this would be a good thing, nor that its efforts to devalue its currency had anything to do with the US. I don't see what the contention is here - unless it's that only the US is allowed to be "independent" (i.e. above all international law), here wrt the ICC, while other countries must curtail what is in their national interests (like not having their export markets decimated) for fear of provoking this one special, privileged land?
If the argument is that the US can enforce its agenda on other countries and they must just suck it, then sure. But that's not an argument about fairness or what's right, that's an argument about what to expect from the actor with the biggest stick.
yes we independently decide to invade other countries for no good reason and independently decide to extrajudicially murder people the president doesn't like, I'm so very glad
The reason has nothing to do with "independence". It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.
At least that was the reason I was given in the US military. YMMV
I wouldn't believe anything the military tells you about justice.
The US military told people whatever they needed to tell them to follow orders. That's why they follow unlawful orders like those to extrajudicially blow up non-combatant US citizens abroad, and imprison people in Guantanamo for decades without trial, assist the disarming of innocent US citizens in NOLA in the aftermath of Katrina, blackball soldiers in Vietnam that reported war crimes, and all manner of other things that hardly anyone seems to be held to account for.
Nothing about the ICC stops the US from executing war criminals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
> The ICC is intended to complement, not replace, national judicial systems; it can exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals.
Has the US ever executed an American soldier war criminal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Day
Interesting. Thanks for posting that. I hope the US will always prosecute war crimes of its own soldiers, but I'm skeptical--I don't think that's how war and power work.
Oh, I'm skeptical as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL) is more the norm.
> It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.
> At least that was the reason I was given in the US military.
That's obviously nonsense. For many reasons:
(1) ICC jursidiction does not supercede national jurisdiction that is actually exercised—that's explicitly a basis for ICC jurisdiction not to be applied (it can be applied in the case of sham proceedings designed to provide cover). So it wouldn't stop the US from trying, and applying the death penalty to, any war criminals.
(2) The actual reasons for the the US opposition, including Congress passing a law threatening the ICC, are matters of public record, and are much more about the US wanting impunity for accused (American) war criminals than any fear of inadequate punishment.
(3) The US response to its own war criminals that it has had the opportunity to punish since the establishment of, and its refusal to join, the ICC has shown a singular lack of capital punishment. And even the occasional Presidential pardon after conviction.
Even for US military propaganda directed at is own personnel, that's pretty lazy, low-effort stuff.
The US happily enforces its rules on other nations on a regular basis.
Every country tries that on a regular basis. The US might have more power on the world stage, but everyone tries it once in a while. If you look at history the US has been very restrained with using their power (which isn't a high bar)
I don't disagree; the point is it's a little rich to go on about "her own country", "subject to her own laws", and "independence" given that context.
Do you also think it's hypocritical that the Dallas Cowboys try to sack the other team's quarterback even though they don't want their own quarterback sacked?
Gridiron football is explicitly a zero sum game. Coexisting as sovereign states isn’t, and it would be quite sad to learn any of us see it that way.
This is more like the Dallas Cowboys threatening to shoot up your locker room if you sack their quarterback.
The Dallas Cowboys operates according to team rules that encourages such violence. The entire point of international cooperation is to prevent the sort if wonton violence our military engaged in the last 80 years.
God willing, someone in this country or in another one will work up the nerve to erase such a malignant cancer out of existence eventually.
No man is an island, and no country is either. You live in an international community, whether you like it or not. You can choose to be a rogue state, but it doesn't reflect well on you.
Why would the US choose to cede authority to the ICC here? If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do. Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.
> Why would the US choose to cede authority to the ICC here?
For the same reason as any other treaty - the corresponding benefits.
> If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do.
That's not what the ICC is for. The ICC is for when a country won't do so when they should be.
> Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.
The US has a very long history of telling other foreign entities what they can and cannot do.
> If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do.
Its not “service members” that are the usual defendants at the ICC.
Why have an ICC at all then?
If US soldiers are (once again) committing war crimes, will the US do anything? What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes? Should there not be one?
> What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes?
The war crimes (and some others) that are subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC are already crimes recognized explicitly in the treaties establishing them as crimes matters of universal jurisdiction. Yeah, its difficult to get your hands on them to exercise that jurisdiction, but... that hasn’t really been a problem the ICC has solved with regard to significant powers when their personnel are subject to its jurisdiction, either.
The recourse is for the country of those citizens to declare war against the US.
Well they also don't want their own citizens to have any say. So whose interests in the end does our military actually answer to?
It's quite funny that they will switch to german technology now, because I can think of no german service provider that would not immediately comply with any and all US sanctions.
Sanctions are official, but Trump phoning up the CEO and whining about nonsense is something else. I'd be concerned that a US company would be vastly more likely to fold from the latter than a German one would. Sanctions enacted against a German or EU company on a whim would perhaps cause some international response.
In this case it was official sanctions enacted on a whim against a person, the ICC prosecutor.
Point taken, but reading that official sanction just shows a load of whining.
However, I was able to read it, which would not be the case if he had just phoned Nadella. Who knows, perhaps he did and Nadella refused to play? I see that he did not attend the inauguration..
Right, it is definitely whining. But it also makes the case that it's risky to depend on services from a US company, as the whims of a tyrant may force all US companies to cut ties.
I doubt Trump even knew how the sanctions would play out, in terms of all the effects on the ICC. But the IT services are a clear one for the HN crowd to pay attention to.
If Trump asked a german company hosting a politicians email to shut down access to their emails, would they really comply with that? Because that's what happened with the ICC it seems, and why we're seeing this move right now.
The only way to combat this behavior by the United States is for the European Union to finally stand up for itself and take retaliatory measures against the US. Start sanctioning prominent Americans until the US agrees to cut it out.
https://archive.today/8BuB9
That is the good electroshock that was needed to start doing good things.
But: "Zendis is part of an EU-level organisation that four EU countries founded on Tuesday with the aim of building sovereign digital infrastructure."
My intuition:
That is the usual European recipe for disaster. A public funded initiative to waste money in the usual way by giving it indirectly to consulting groups while producing nothing concrete and having to be scraped after a few years. At the same time, a big part of the money will be use to fund largely a big group of useless executives, representatives, communicators, and have countless workshops and conferences.
At the same time, almost zero money will go to the real existing Open Source project, their developers and maintainers.
Many years ago, all organisations - "Hey we can cut costs by getting rid of all of our expensive experts and not running our own data centres!"
Many years later - "Oh no! Not running our own data centres means our data is no longer fully in our control!"
Who would have thought it!
It sounds as if this was kicked off in response to an MS e-mail account being shut off.
I'd like to see how well it goes for you if you run your own e-mail server. Even when I did that in the near dot-com days, it was already getting locked down to the point you would get filtered out going into any of the big boys to the point it was largely a futile effort. It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.
> It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.
I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"?
Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).
I'm not parroting anything. Might be outdated. It is my own experience circa 2010. I could send to other private servers without trouble, sometimes made it to spam in larger providers or sometimes blocked altogether.
I never tried again because it was such an abysmal failure.
I also used to run my own mail server for a good while. I did have some issues with Google rejecting me at first, but they had some admin panel somewhere I had to register my domain, and after that I never had issues again.
Personal experience from mid 2000s to early 2010s. I lost too many outbound emails to the void. Not even spam or bounced; just genuinely gone. Gmail was the only honest receiver, Hotmail and yahoo were particularly egregious. Obviously set up everything: dkim, spf, constant ip blocklist monitoring, etc etc. It got so bad that I started sending follow ups from a Gmail address to ask if they received my email. That’s when I stopped and never tried again.
I self-hosted for 25 years. My SMTP server is at Hetzner for the last 15 years.
I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.
I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.
That time period was during my IT consultant days.
We were installing on site Windows Small Business server for them. Issues were rare and one offs with self hosted email. The only issue of delayed messages was during changing IP addresses and DNS records, waiting for the updates to replicate to root servers.
Companies would often have a server just for email hosting running Linux on low power hardware. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube
Some of it is luck. I moved to fastmail 15 years ago, so I don't have current experience. However there is plenty of indication that large blocks of IPs get blocked by all the major providers - this is a matter of luck though, most blocks of IPs are not blocked and so you might never have a problem while others can't.
Note that a large part of the problem is if you are blocked there is nothing you can do about it. You can't contact anyone at google to get help.
It doesn't seem particularly hard to have citizen.name@earth.eu mailboxes with lavish storage if money isn't an issue.
I second this from my experience.
My company avoids most of the "cloud" hype. We've found it more cost effective to self-host our internal services, plus it gives us more control over our configurations and data. We don't need 24/7 guaranteed up-time; we have occasional hiccups and resolve them in minutes or hours.
But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.
That depends on your scale. The big email providers cannot afford to block large organizations. However a "little guy" they can ignore.
The US isn't part of the ICC, but there are plenty of other governments who are and take this seriously. At least one will make a big deal about the ICC being blocked and governments have more power than even large companies.
> However a "little guy" they can ignore.
Sure, but this will turn off any large organization large enough to piss off the US, which seems inevitable.
Been using self hosted mailinabox on a cheap racknerd vps for last 4 years. Zero hiccups.
The trick is to send an email, have it whitelisted a bunch of times. Then it just works.
Once I massmailed by mistake. Google rightly spammed the emails. Had to unspam them and was back within a few days.
Outlook was worst but even that worked.
Its 100% doable
Seems absolutely harebrained to have done so. What was the upside of such pettiness? Just to suck off the government?
And of course, equally surprising, it turns out getting services from US companies "but your data stays in the EU" means exactly nothing.
The responsible executive should be jailed for many years for massive fraud. Even if such a court decision in another country won't be enforced by the US against their citizens, it will likely mean that the responsible executive won't be able to enter quite a list of countries anymore.
The article mentions OpenDesk. Did they mean OpenDesktop?
Probably they meant OpenDesk as it's a real thing, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
Reminder for those that don't click through: Microsoft killed the email account of an ICC prosecutor, at the request of Trump:
> According to Handelsblatt, the decision is to be seen against the backdrop of sanctions by the current US administration under President Donald Trump against employees such as Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Microsoft simply blocked his email access. He therefore had to switch to the Swiss email service Proton. Since the ICC is highly dependent on service providers like Microsoft, its work is being paralyzed, it was stated in May.
While there are clear financial wins too, basic sovereignty is at stake.
Yeah, seems like a no-brainer to react to something like that. Is there anyone in any circumstances that wouldn't want to move as far away from a company like Microsoft who acts on the whims like that? Even as a business strategy, it doesn't make any sense, but seems most companies are trying to kiss the ring of the king, rather than focusing on providing stable, robust and trustworthy services, so you reap what you sow.
Microsoft, being a U.S. company, had no choice in the matter. U.S. imposed sanctions on the guy. One component of sanctions is "Prohibition on U.S. persons (individuals or entities) conducting business or transactions with Khan."
If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan."
So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.
> Microsoft killed the email account of an ICC prosecutor, at the request of Trump
These are legally-binding sanctions, issued under the same authority as those levied against Putin and Russia for the invasion of Ukraine:
* ICC: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
* Russia: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/addr...
The ICC sanctions are politically unpopular in Europe, whereas the Russia sanctions are popular in Europe. But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump." Companies face serious consequences if they do business with sanctioned persons or entities - that's what makes sanctions work.
Agreed that the sanctions aspect is an important part here. But the sanctions are only for the personal and partisan benefits of President Trump, there was no benefit to the United States here.
The tariffs in your second link are not sanctions, and in fact the President levying tariffs as a normal course of business is illegal and unconstitutional in the United States. But it's a good example of the lawlessness of the current President, and his grabs at more power in an attempt to become a tyrant.
> But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump."
Yes, it absolutely was closed at the request of Trump, via sanctions. That's the entire point. The President of the United States can and will target anybody he does not like for whatever minor reason crosses his mind on a random afternoon. That makes it risky to engage in any sort of long-term transaction with a US company.
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If your concern is genuinely sovereignty, you should be appalled that the US is attempting to take away sovereignty from ICC member states.
No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO. There are so many smaller, cheaper, better alternatives. And these days, building software is not that difficult. There are a lot of open source stacks to start with.
I'd love to see more support for locally developed solutions, but many of the governments in the EU are just reaching out to the most popular cross-EU businesses, often German or Austrian, instead of their local companies.
But then I guess the argument could be made for that you should go for the best option possible, as long as it's within EU, and I can certainly see the point of that too.
> building software is not that difficult.
Maintaining it is.
Only if you’re constantly trying to zero the budget after it’s built.
s/is difficult/requires ongoing expenditure of resources/
I disagree with this as well to some extent. I see how much big corporations spend on "maintenance" and all the bureaucracy involved. It's easy money for them and their employees. Too easy.
The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.
> the EU outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions
Is that very different than the US? That seems more like a timeless endeavor, not a European tech one.
Regardless of politics, it's still a good idea to try and avoid dependence on these globomegacorps that have revenues and market caps higher than the GDP of many countries. It seems like modern civilization is building toward an ultimate centralization of everything and we're just one catastrophic failure away from extreme societal problems of all kinds because of it.
My hope is that all these "independent of US technologies" actually end up being "independent of for-profit companies" rather than about the specific technologies and companies involved, as what countries are "the good countries" change all the time, but non-profit/for-profit choices seem to last a lot longer than the status of any country.
I don't think profit is the core problem here. It's control. A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization.
Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.
> A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization.
Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"?
Money perverse the actions of the for-profit companies, as suddenly you have someone like Tim Cook giving gifts to the president, as the survival of his company depends on a specific person having a good view of them personally.
If neither of these companies were so hellbent on doing everything they can for profit, and instead focused on providing reliable, trustworthy and user-focused services, they wouldn't have that worry anymore. But of course, this is a pipe-dream and not at all realistic in the current climate.
As someone who previously was part of the management of a small non-profit, we absolutely cared about things that lead to us losing money...
Now, we might have had good reason to pursue a plan that cost us money, but in general, threats to our funding are effectively threats to our existence.
> Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"?
There exist other techniques to bring open source projects and their maintainers into line.
Non-profits follow the laws of the country where they are located. This means that if somebody like Trump decides to abuse their authority by placing sanctions on ICC prosecutors, the non-profit Microsoft will similarly follow local law, or be at risk of other enforcement actions against them.
Profit and money have nothing to do with what the ICC was reacting to. It's about power, law, and autocracy.
No man is an island. There must always be a dependency on the outside world. But you can reduce risk by using commodified products.
Agree, but non-profits can rely on other non-profits, foundations or similar entities, rather than for-profit entities, and you're still collaborating with the world at large, just avoiding one particular hairball that has a tendency to infect everything it comes into touch with.
Sure. But this is exactly why we'd be better off with open-source software, hardware, etc, managed and maintained in a distributed fashion by nonprofits in many different countries. (I have no idea if there's legally such a thing as a "multinational nonprofit", though certainly such things exist in practice—eg, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders.)
Any for-profit company is highly incentivized to keep their products proprietary, locked behind copyright, obfuscation, etc, or even provided only as SaaS. They are also highly incentivized to avoid the negative attention of the governments of any of the countries they operate in, because their primary goal is to remain profitable.
Nonprofits do not have that requirement, and are much more likely to be able to attract people who are willing to defy oppressive, censorious, or outright fascist governments in order to continue to provide high-quality software & hardware to everyone without limitation or discrimination.
There's also the problem that "non-profit" is a weird, inconsistent designation that a lot of people get very rich on.
I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of.
Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement?
edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)
What is capitalism if not a particular way of making decisions?
Capitalism is arrived at through two primary ways
One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history.
The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism.
I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.
Except that a person born has rights granted to them about land and property mostly decided on capital. Very few farmers can refuse to sell the a megacorp. If you think this has no impact, find some un-used land that you have not inherited or purchased using capital and see how long you can grow food on it before someone objects. They might say it is a park, or a front yard, or a military training ground, but realistically, all those concepts of ownership were originally tied to capital and without substantial capital, you are a serf. A lesser. There is no commonhold for you to use. There are no unclaimed natural resources.
That’s kind of an interesting and profound question. I’m inclined to answer that it’s a way of efficiently allocating resources without making decisions in other words, there is no group voting about allocating resources. Of course, “efficiency” is probably in the eye of the beholder.
I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.
Yep, I agree with this. No one is making macro scale resource allocation decisions and yet resources are allocated reasonably efficiently (for some value of “efficiency”). The collective “decision” is an emergent property of countless individual decisions, much like an ant colony exhibits complex and sophisticated decision making as an emergent property of simple individual decisions.
Neither of these seem viable to me. You definitely can’t run an organization without doing business with for-profit companies. Probably the most feasible solution is diversifying dependencies so you can’t be extorted by any one country.
EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
I have not had much luck in the past in getting substantive discussion around "profit" centered critiques. Except for once, and that individual person didn't have a problem with smaller companies making profits, it was only big companies, and I wasn't quite sure that they cared about profit as much as too much centralized control. So I'm commenting here as a bookmark to hopefully learn more, should you get some thoughtful responses.
All those scifi stories where giant corporations rule the planet and national governments fade into irrelevancy are looking awfully prescient.
Thats a good idea for any government and major org.
Data sovereignty is such a massively huge issue. But when some nameless market-droid can go "pay us more in 10 days or we purge everything", or "account disabled" - those can absolutely wreck an org.
Now, non-critical stuff happens. And use 3rd party services for those. The key there is cancellation isn't a big deal. But the moment they do turn critical, replicate in-house.
Also, keep in mind that the AP reported killing Hague's ICC contracts. Lots of misinformation, but this is the starting point.
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
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I remember writing about this one.
Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector. Migrating away all of the legacy systems is nigh impossible. Then you'd have to retrain all staff.
While this is not justified from an economic perspective one can only hope that these institutions have higher values to adhere to.
EDIT: This is great news, I should be more optimistic about this effort.
It doesn't appear to be impossible; two days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
> Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector
Thanks! Marathons aren't won by speed or doing everything at once, but progressing towards a far away goal step by step, and surely we'll need all the "good lucks" we can receive.
I'll disagree it's nigh impossible, and find such defeatist perspectives well, defeatists. One shall have hope we can continuously improve things by taking care of what decisions we make, this hopefully is one of those steps.
I agree that my perspective could use more optimism, after all, the sibling comment highlighted a couple success cases.
You are right. We need to make an effort, start small and tackle this issue step by step. I do support this effort and I think these are great news.
I stand by the comment of this being dependent on a commitment to higher values than "cheapest ok solution" which is all too common in the private sector.