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.)
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO.
Governments are organizations like many others, with similar needs. Almost all need to be purchased in the marketplace. Is every purchase from a business, even a large business, corruption? What about cars? A phone system? Electricity?
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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).
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.
For almost every organization, outsourcing has been the right choice. It's right for almost every international organization. Really, only with Trump's second election has it become too risky for some.
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
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.)
Same reason individuals tend to want to live in a society and the rules that come with 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.
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.
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
Dead Comment
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.
Its not “service members” that are the usual defendants at the ICC.
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?
Maintaining it is.
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.
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.
Governments are organizations like many others, with similar needs. Almost all need to be purchased in the marketplace. Is every purchase from a business, even a large business, corruption? What about cars? A phone system? Electricity?
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.
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.)
EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
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...
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!
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.
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).
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
But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.
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.