I wrote a little note on Cloud Operating Systems on Linkedin, provoked by an article, entitled “International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger” and published in “The Dissident”, this blog, is a fairly faithful reprint. The authors articulate the threat to civil society that the US corporate monopoly and Trump’s aggressive and unaccountable sanctions capability poses to progressives around the world. Trump has instructed the US cloud providers to sanction the International Criminal Court. The Dissident’s article asks how long it’ll be before progressive NGO’s are similarly targeted and whether US Banks and payment processors will similarly be mandated, as the US has done before.
It’s another example where the USA’s erratic and selfish political agenda must lead once friendly foreign governments to consider their “security of supply”. Most of the code required to run a cloud is open source, at the moment, and I would recommend that the British and EU governments ensure they can sustain access to this code as well as other critical open-source resources such as Office productivity and email products. We should also be looking at distributive governance models like mastodon and diaspora.
Fortunately, the EU has a massive, distributed computing capability and while the basic architecture of supercomputers and Internet platforms differs, they are in fact exceedingly similar. It’s also fortunate for the UK, while Rachel Reeves cancelled Sunak’s supercomputing projects, that the previous Tory government agreed to rejoin the EU’s supercomputing consortium.
Escaping from the US monopoly control requires will and knowledge and I am unsure that it exists within the UK’s political leadership, equally I’m unsure that it exists within the leadership of the EU member states. I should also add, it’s not really about the hardware, nor the land and electricity. …