> Van der Burg is currently grappling with the issue of Solvinity, a Dutch cloud service provider which is widely used by government departments including the Digid identity system, and which is on the verge of being sold to a US company.
> The Dutch tax office is also currently switching to Microsoft systems, despite MPs’ concerns.
They all talk about the importance of European digital sovereignty and then continue to do the exact opposite behind the scenes.
To be honest and I say this as a Dutch person, this is typical Dutch (government). Basically two rules in Dutch politics: (1) always choose the option that pleases the US the most; (2) always postpone solving issues to the latest possible moment (US dependence, nitrogen deposition, childcare benefits scandal, gas-induced earthquakes).
France, Germany, etc. are much better examples when it comes to sovereignty.
As an aside the parliament wants to stop the Solvinity acquisition or stop renewing the contract with Solvinity. But the VVD (one of the parties in government) is always going to choose what is best for big business (the party is one big revolving door) or the US.
Only way to have control is to have domestic actors you can push around.
The EU has some issues, the economy isn’t the most dynamic, but the quality of life is great and has been improving. It is a large global market and has cultural influence. Our democratic institutions have survived ok so far. I think we are doing quite ok.
I don't believe it when I see it. I call it poppycocks. Because if you do want to argue such, you need to define the path to get there. Without that, it sounds like a pipe dream. Akin to say Leninism.
True, however, the US does more export manufacturing than the EU and at higher profit margins to boot. So even without the AI industry, the US is still in a far stronger place economically than EU.
The EU's massiv offshoring efforts, lack of innovation investments, red tape, environmentalism and high energy prices have left its domestic industry weaker and more vulnerable to foreign competitors and malicious foreign dependencies it can't control since it doesn't have any hard power to use as leverage to protect its industry.
Sure, the EU started to remilitarize and move away from fossil fuels to renewables, but this titanic effort is gonna pay back and maybe restore balance in 5-15 years time, and it remains to be seen if by then its economy will have just fallen further behind, since investors and the world aren't standing still waiting for the EU to catch up with them, but are instead exploiting the EU's current weakness to pull further ahead.
Like Germany's exports are now back to 2006 levels, and its domestic giants like BASF is further downsizing operations in Germany and building a massive 10 billion $ factory in China which is totally not gonna make Germany's policies tied to the whims of the CCP the same way they were tied to Russia's gas. BOSCH just announced 20k more job cuts in Germany and moving abroad till 2030. etc
Remains to be seen if this damage can be undone in the future, as things are currently patched up by massive government spending to cover up the private industry lack of spending, which isn't sustainable and eventually the cracks will get bigger.
China's security establishment has gone public with the view that their purpose is no longer to find answers to the question 'how do we survive the US?', but instead to something like 'how do we manage the US?'.
In the coming years US power projection is not going to look anything like the stuff we grew up with, that social and military influence just does not exist anymore. Right now, things are pretty good, compared to what they'll be in a year or two. It's likely we'll get a brutal el Niño, fertilizer and lubricant shortages, gnarly energy prices and more, all at the same time. The US is closing down food production at a rate that would keep me up at night if I lived there.
The US has very little influence today compared to a decade or more ago. To the extent that the world at large cares about the US it's because they are committing genocide and destroying global trade logistics. All of their former allies are trying to substitute them out, or at least hedge with other international relations.
As far as I can tell, outside certain parts of the Occident, no one cares about new US movies or television series anymore. The Oscars gather some interest because some people want to know if any entertainment industry people will go against the regime and say something negative about mass murder of children, but that's about it. Future generations will be shaped more by chinese and indian movies than usian ones.
When apartheid South Africa was about to crumble it also initiated nasty military campaigns and faked political and military supremacy for a while, as did Idi Amin's Uganda. I'd bet something similar is going on in the US.
Some people are still stuck in the late Cold War, notably EU politicians like von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, as well as most swedish top politicians. They cannot imagine a world where the US is not calling the shots and will drag Europe further into global irrelevancy by idiotically paying tribute and kneeling for the US. Pretty much the rest of the world is disgusted and horrified by the bumbling nastiness of contemporary US empire.
Of course, that is mostly paid for via massive amounts of debt, not from savings of military spending. But government spending on healthcare is more than twice (2.5 to 3 times) that of military spending. So slashing military spending to zero would just mean the amount of government-provided healthcare spending could go from 47% to 56% or so. (Not taking into account that a lot of "military spending" is actually healthcare spending!)
Single payer would be drastically cheaper than the current system.
The other benefits are just policies that slightly reduce GDP per capita based on a first order analysis.
We are able to afford so many other subsidies, so unclear why housing would be different.
Uh, no. The US soft power is turning to dust whilst the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin.
What has happened the past ±30 years is that most EU countries cut spending on their militaries to the bone, because big brother USA would take care of it anyway. Now that we are returning to a multi-polar world, suddenly the EU is left scrambling for hard power that it doesn't have. That's why they can't play hardball when the US does a new ridiculous thing, because they simply lack the hard power to back up Ukraine.
The US is sorely going to regret their antics though. Long term, the EU is going to switch to their own stacks, both for military but also things like cloud and other tech. It's trillions of $ the US economy will be missing out on. And voting in a Democratic president, senate and house is not gonna change a thing about it, because the US has proven itself to be a fundamentally unreliable, if not outright hostile partner.
In the same way America is stuck in its military heyday past, the EU is stuck pretending its brand of multilateralism is still a thing outside its own borders.
At its usual pace ... do you know when the negotiations with Mercosur started? Year 2000. Only now we have an agreement. Still, better than not doing anything at all. But I wonder how many of the original negotiators are still alive.
It also yet remains to be seen what happens if China puts a real pressure on us. Our list of allies is now somewhat thin and we have to cozy up to India, which indirectly funds the Russian war against Ukraine by importing Russian weapons and Russian oil/gas, the latter in huge quantities. Still, better than cozying up to China, because the possibility that Beijing teaches Brussels some cool tricks to keep the population under perfect surveillance scares me.
How is Mercosur better for the EU citizens?
Being an international pushover with no teeth that folds like a deck chair to the demands of the rest of the world at negotiations, isn't "building the new free [trade] world,", or at least not one that benefits the EU. Absolute free trade isn't always a benefit for your own citizens and industries. Do you want to import low quality agriculture made by slave labor that will undercut your own farmers and put them out of business? Do you want to import unlimited people without assurance the government has enough housing, childcare and medical staff already in place for said new people? There's a reason borders and goods have some restrictions, because sudden heavy imbalances lead to destabilization of society and democracy.
The recent free trade agreements the EU has been desperately signing lately (mercosur, etc) are just short term gain for long term pain down the road, since everyone has the EU by the balls right now so other countries are squeezing as much as they can from the EU now while they're busy with Russia, expensive energy and losing China as an export market for their expensive cars.
EU capitulating to foreign trade pressures, is not gonna create a superpower like dreamers think, it's gonna create new dependencies with other (less democratic) countries, which is gonna backfire just like their dependency to US tech and Russian and China market did, in the future when those countries will have a strong grip over EU critical sectors, they will then demand concessions from the EU, and the EU will again fold like a deckchair because the EU is never in a position to bully others or retaliate to preserve its own interest let alone impose them around the world, further losing power internationally and remaining a pushover where its citizens lose, while the core issues plaguing the EU(demographics, debt, government speeding on welfare, lack of innovation and manufacturing in key sectors, no VC funding) will remain and continue to grow.
Signing deals to import more people and cheap food and stuff from Latam, India or wherever to depress wages and prices, doesn't fix any of that not make the EU a superpower, it just kicks the can down the road.
To quote when harry met sally - I'll have what she's having.
Actually EU is getting fucked on every possible turn. We are the ones that pay trough the nose for all his follies. We are weaker than ever and we have delusional commission in charge.
Compared to Ursula Trump is the reincarnation of Richelieu and Bismarck with a pinch of Disraeli
Trade within Europe has massive restrictions. I have no idea why, given the stated aims of Europe...we are posting this on a post about the Netherlands trying to protect office software ffs, people think this isn't the case. One of the reasons why the EU created a trade bloc, and the same reasons why you see the same attempts in areas of the world like South America, was to limit the impact of free trade. This should be completely obvious given that the EU is not competitive in areas where they lack the ability to limit competition.
Also, I will point out: US policy is for the EU to do exactly the thing that you are suggesting. This has been the consistent position of Trump since 2016. The main blockers for this have been politicians in the EU. I am not sure how you equate being unreliable with subsidising EU defence spending to the tune of multiple trillions so that EU countries can spend on welfare either.
The EU self-image is totally bizarre, it is so out of touch with reality. Hostile to all forms of change and innovation: actually one of the greatest free traders there has ever been. Xenophobic and hostile to certain countries: possibly one of the greatest allies to these countries ever. Never gets any support on Ukraine, would be a leader if the US weren't such bastards: spent multiple decades fuelling Putin's state.
Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.
I'm not sure what "Trade within Europe has massive restrictions." means without context. Compared to some Randian capitalist utopia where there are no rules and no governments? Or compared to before the creation of the European single market?
We actually do have a good amount of issues regarding internal trades, according to https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7792....
“The International Monetary Fund estimates that the persistent barriers to the EU single market still represented the equivalent of a 110 % tariff on services.”
There is a good amount of work to be done to complete the single market, what we currently have is way too fragmented
The limitations on trade within Europe are intentional design. The attempts to stop the economy from collapsing with these massive government spending packages are the death throes.
The EU was a certainty in a region that is hostile to change, wants big government, wants centralization, is suspicious of democracy, etc. Free trade would be a massive change, that is why it hasn't happened. The EU is basically the logical conclusion of European forms of governing.
I don’t understand how you can say that with a straight face, it’s such a contradictory statement
How can you take them seriously?
I don’t understand how you can believe that about the EU. The union has been evolving so much since its creation. It is itself one of the greatest innovation in governance ever created. GDPR is an innovative framework making the EU leader in privacy protection. European open banking initiatives/frameworks are unique and have been leading the way forward for the past 20 years, and we are now reaping all the benefits with the latest payment system developments (PSD2 and others were already awesome but the payment standard is what makes the day to day citizens actually see the results). The 28th regime[0] in development is innovative. Schengen/TFEU Art. 45 is such an innovative policy. Where else can you move freely between so many countries?
That’s only from the top of my head and the few examples I’m familiar with
For example, Poland defends its rail operator, PKP Intercity, against foreign competition by a series of dirty tricks, including "just never registering a sale of a depot to a competing corporation in the land registry".
Germany has the exact same issue. Always looking to keep the status quo for as long as possible. It’s really a structural problem, it’s the result of the political system, elected leadership, demographics (mostly the voting population aging rapidly). I expect the same issue is shared by most Western European countries
Maybe another framing, is there any countries where this isn't true? Where truly the default is to go against the status quo and continuously improve no matter what? I know there are a few countries people think are like that, but when you start reading about it, turns out to be kind of "hyped" and not matching reality.
Status quo is not a stable state, it's a state you defend.
Not that I would want to live under their political system, to be clear. I wish we could have a democratic system AND also be eager to develop our regions instead of being so protective of everything
In europe we’ve been generally pretty bad over the past decades at presenting positive arguments for liberalism, which is a shame. Similarly the EU is notoriously bad at communicating how it benefits the people, most of the communication assumes people already accepted it was a positive thing and already bought into European values, isn’t of arguing why they matter. The fact EU members blame EU institutions for their own local issues whenever something goes wrong doesn’t help…
We'll start seeing government bodies moving away from US IT suppliers in a couple of years.
Europe is an excellent value prop if you want to be a bartender or baker. Its decidedly less so if you want to be a white collar/gold collar worker.
France maybe, Germany most definitely not.
The issue with the EU is that they lack the capacity for any kind of strategic thought. There are multiple reasons why but the underlying cause is that it is possible to move into local minimum where there is a very strong disincentive for any kind of change. Countries in the EU have generally been in that place since before the EU...that is why the EU was created, to limit change. It is isn't political incentives, it is a fundamental aspect of the political culture. If you also look at the stuff that has changed, this only becomes more strange (i.e. government intervention, immigration, regulations). Change is limited to preserve control.
To add to your point, despite this the German population seems to strongly believe there is no corruption in their government. Local minima, everything is fine, there is no fire, I'm going to make some tea while the tables turns to ash under the pot.
You might be comfortable in that life, but you won't be competitive.
More money and material comforts? Well perhaps, but then again, I do wonder just how many would willingly take that rather than for example a proper work-life balance or clean environment. And we'll probably have to rethink the relationship of our societies with material consumption etc. in the coming decades anyway due to the climate emergency, and so maybe it'd actually be better for the US or China to adopt our "less competitive" stance rather than for us to try to agonise on trying to get ourselves competitive with them.
No one has yet figured out just what one's material possessions will do for them after they're dead. At best you can pass them to your next of kin, but that doesn't need the kind of hyper competitive, hyper capitalistic mindset espoused by the US or China.
I think you see the same thing in every Western democracy where people believe there is no corruption or believe in rather comical forms of corruption, but the corruption is actually systemic and a function of some political configuration that can't really stand change. This is certainly the case in Germany where you have this odd alliance between unions and billionaires that has basically led to, despite the amazing talent of their people, amazingly poor policy delivery.
Because Germans only believe what their state speech controlled media is telling them. The prussian school is based on getting people to respect authority not about free critical thinking. Makes the population easily susceptible to government propaganda which has been used against them for 100 years already and they still haven't learned.
They also don't believe any foreigners pointing out their internal issue: "no, YOU are wrong, we make ze best cars in ze world(not anymore lol), so our country can't be doing anything wrong".
From my own experience, big changes can take place in smaller gov. organizations, and pretty fast too. I've worked at a place where we swapped out all Microsoft and commercial products to open source alternatives in just a couple of weeks. But it was a smaller and specialized part of an organization, with 30 users.
Trying to do the same change, where there are millions of users involved? It will almost certainly take a decade or more.
The only thing that would accelerate such a process, would be Microsoft shutting down services at the command of, say, the US president. But that would only be the case if said country ended up being sanctioned by the US.
> The Dutch tax office is also currently switching to Microsoft systems
They're not even trying though. They're not even starting the clock. They are actively going in the opposite direction.
It will never happen.
Now that the US has pivoted to Asia since Obama, they expect the EU to fill the gap they leave behind. But that’s new, the US wanted it exactly like it was pre 2014 or so.
Meanwhile you live in the same society and eat healthy without issue or expense.
Look at the Trump, connected to p*dos, instead of stopping wars, started a war, betrayed MAGA, but still no action taken against him, because there is no legal action for lying to become a politican
The reason given "for your own safety"
At the same time, the public tendering process makes no mention of the tools. The L1 uses excel and that inturn FORCES thousands and thousands into using paid excel.
I use masgrave but thats irrelevant. I also use libreoffice which works most of the time but yeah
It is a central theme covered in too many sources to list, but it is always a deal with the figurative devil, treason, betrayal of not just oneself, but everyone else who trusted you, lifted you, and relied on you.
It is why treason is such a pernicious and evil act even when one is ignorant of perpetrating it, because you may personally advance your own position for a moment by making a deal with the devil, but the real price is always immeasurably greater.
It is also why no one hates the traitor more than the devil himself, because he knows best what a vile and untrustworthy traitor the person is that would betray his own people. Even the devil cannot even respect that, hence why the only thing one can be sure of when making a deal with the devil is that the devil and his children will always stab you in the back.
It is the existential question all of “the west” is wrestling with right now. Whether they can stop the traitors among them who have long ago made many deals with many devils and his many children…or will they personally “profit” in the short term all the way to figurative hell.
The article title seems like click bait, even though the article content goes on to have interesting details about EU attempts to reduce dependence on US technology companies.
Very few people are martyrs or want to become martyrs. Even fewer in places where life is generally fine and for a cause that isn't dire to their loved ones.
Similarly UK OfCom is a non governmental organisation, so not civil servants either.
This is a very naive interpretation. Bureaucrats have MASSIVE amount of power and control, and in actuality decide many things and how the law is written.
.. in the Netherlands. Where the EU and the Dutch government get to decide what happens. That's what national sovereignty means.
For obvious reasons, the linked article does not explain that fully.
It is kind of weird to see the turnaround on here from people who complain about the US government being too powerful but, for some reason, are quite okay with an unelected EU bureaucrat being able to govern their internet usage. There are no principles at play here.
Magic mushroom truffles are decriminalized here in NL, you can sell them openly in shops. Doesn't mean you won't get in trouble if you send them to the US.
Reference: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/icc-strongly-rejects-new-us-san...
It's good that bureaucrats can't hide behind bureaucracy.