Comment by beloch
3 days ago
If a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data.
Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens.
It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act. Their lunch is sitting out in the open, completely unwatched, waiting to be eaten by somebody else and it's far too late to do anything about it.
The more astonishing thing is that people regularly talk about this in the context of hosting providers when by far the more significant threat is mobile platforms.
There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
I have a sliding scale of devices I trust more or less (I trust nothing completely).
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
Soon thanks to Digital ID all your important business will have to go through the devices you trust the least.
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This is in no way a solution to the population-scale problem of a belligerant nation having root on the citizenry's mobile phones/cameras/GPS units/network scanners
> Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
HarmonyOS
Something with ~0% market share outside of China and which trades the US having root for China having root is not a viable alternative.
In theory you could have something produced by a country other countries might be willing to trust, but the number of countries that are both trustworthy and large enough to sustain a globally-viable platform is practically the empty set at this point.
Which means the thing it calls for is something open source, since that both allows contributions from multiple countries and solves the trust issue by leaving no single entity in control of it.
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You could take your analogy further, and consider why the Swiss banking isn’t so opaque anymore. Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
> ...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies
But ultimately the Swiss decides what Switzerland does, and the population deciding they didn't want that, was the deciding factor. Been pressure on Switzerland about that for a long time, from many countries, and in fact still there is, as many still think they're not doing enough. Not everything in the world happens because of the US :)
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> Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
That's a nice re-write of history.
What actually happened is that the US said: cut the crap and leave the opaque banking to us, else...
Exactly. Post that pressure, the US, specifically Wyoming, is a much better tax haven than any Swiss canton.
> Swiss society decided
Nice attempt at whitewashing and gaslighting, but the only entity here that decided that is the fucking US of A.
The Swiss didn't vet their clients. If Vladimir Putin wants to contract a data centre on your soil for the privacy, you can always have regulations that say, "No.".
The entire premise of "other countries can trust your companies to protect their privacy" is that you can't. "US reads Dutch emails" is the thing you have to not do.
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If the payments go through SWIFT, the problem is solved if either party is sanctioned.
> It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act
The US big tech has been in bed with the US establishment since eternity.
> Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations
neither are Microsoft 365 subscriptions at governmental scales
No offence, but I do believe a few Dutch ppl could run email servers for cheaper
It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.
> people tend to want low-latency and high-speed
that might change is privacy is an option. The real problem is the cost of building in the middle of nowhere, even if you use spare Starlink capacity, where do you get power & personnel from?
> where do you get power
Wind, hydro, sun? This is 2026 after all.
> personnel
Depends on what that theoretical country would offer. Some kind of strong constitutionally-enshrined protections for privacy and perhaps from tyranny-of-the-majority exploiting upper-middle class like all other western countries and with strong IT jobs market? Are you kidding, sign me up!
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If the premise is that you want to host data for people in Europe who don't want it to be under the control of the US then Frankfurt is a lower latency place to be than Virginia anyway.
OP had a much stronger premise ("guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil") than what you described.
that's a psyop from the cloud evangelism era. a few hundred milliseconds of latency make fuck all any difference for 95% of things, even voice/video calls.
That is just like, your opinion, man? I personally find it a very poor experience talking to someone over high latency connection when we tend to always start talking over each other.
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