Post #631297

2026-02-18 12:51 UTC

&quot;Digital sovereignty,&quot; if taken to mean we should switch from unaccountable American companies to unaccountable European companies, is largely missing the point of the problem. In a globalized economy the two are going to be functionally indistinguishable. What we need is non-profit digital infrastructure that&#39;s not beholden to the perversions of financialization.

Replies (8)

@liebach@mastodon.art 2026-02-18 13:56

@marijn@mastodon.social So many people are cloud-brained by now, they have forgotten—or never learned—how to do things for themselves, and think throwing money at some cloud is always the solution. So of course they think more in terms of switching cloud than switching away from cloud services altogether.

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@kingcons@tiny.tilde.website 2026-02-18 14:15

@marijn@mastodon.social hell yeah marijn ❤️

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@raymaccarthy@mastodon.ie 2026-02-18 14:24

@marijn@mastodon.social Better regulation of the commercial ones & zero funding/lobbying. Mechanisms to avoid regulatory capture. USA is very poor on regulation. FCC is waste of space (deliberate pun). Ofcom & Comreg are "captured". Irish Data & Finance regulators are useless..

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@Rastal@mastodon.social 2026-02-18 15:03

@marijn@mastodon.social To be fair, China woke up to this issue long before #eu and has been trying to move away from US tech into #opensource As a result, US decided to pump everything it has into AI and LLMs - which are themselves an attack on open source The real target of that attack is every country who tries to move away from US tech and use open source software or develop their own #digitalsovereignty. - It's the digital version of America's Wolfawitz Doctrine, not allowing any competitors to emerge!

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@miket330@mastodon.social 2026-02-18 16:20

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

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@ikuturso@mastodon.social 2026-02-18 16:56

@marijn@mastodon.social I don't think it has to be non-profit but it needs to be using free/open source software that is licensed in a way that ensures users keep having the rights afforded by that. Like Mastodon. Drupal's founder & project lead @dries@indieweb.social wrote an article that I thought was insightful about this: https://dri.es/the-software-sovereignty-scale

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@hc@mastodon.africa 2026-02-18 16:59

@marijn@mastodon.social I am ok if it is a journey. I rather support an evil non-US company than evil Google & Co. If there's competition, accountability can be a good product differentiator. When I saw this diagram I thought, yes those are the companies I always complain about (excluding Nvidia, which I know too little about except for non-free Linux drivers, I think)

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@KitsuneVixi@sakurajima.social 2026-02-18 17:53

@marijn@mastodon.social If forced to choose I'd take GDPR jurisdicted companies over non GDPR jurisdicted companies. I say this as someone outside Europe. I prefer European tech companies than my local ones.

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