When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the consequences were far-reaching yet quickly enforced.
The restrictions cut off the ICC chief prosecutor’s access to Microsoft services, including email, followed by a freezing of his personal and institutional bank accounts in affected jurisdictions.
While this was happening, the Dutch government was watching, coming to the bitter realization that access to essential services depended on decisions made in the U.S.
Hence, their response to this is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English.
It is a framework that looks to tackle the government’s digital stack, covering the OS, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT management tools, and AI, with all of it being built around a NixOS foundation.
The Dutch are vindicated.
The US really pissed away any strategic advantage it may have had with that little stunt sanctioning a few justices and prosecutors.
It made it plainly obvious to anyone paying attention that American software cannot be trusted, and caused a bunch of countries to start preparing their exit strategy for building down their dependence on American software.
And for what?.. So that they could be an annoyance to some people prosecuting the war criminal, and friend of the US government, Benjamin Netanyahu? That sounds like such a small win, if it causes you to lose the leverage completely.
Edit: Not that I mind. It’s a good thing that it’s this plainly obvious that we cannot trust a reliance on anything American.
It makes it cost a whole lot less political capital in order to get governments to move away from these dependencies.By acting like sovereign nations themselves they are teaching other nations that they need self sovereign tech, and once governments start building it, it is there for other users.
Good, good.
The one potential upside to all of this is that countries now have a lot less need to adhere to the US mandated copyright protections established in the DCMA. Cory Doctorow has written much about this, and how the US used threats of trade sanctions to ensure other countries fell into line. Now that the US has deployed those sanctions against many countries and shredded any remaining trust and good will, countries have less motivation to adhere to those agreements and could abandon them. Doing so would potentially make it legal to push back against increasingly unhinged copyright protections, and allow citizens to do amazing things like fix your phone without risking a felony conviction. Doctorow says it all much better, he’s well worth reading on this and many other subjects.
The damage done by this president is literally irrepairable.
We can only hope…
Some innocent people live there.
Unless they’re using Chinese microprocessors like LoongArm, their CPUs were partly designed in Israel, and may well have backdoors for Mossad to use in the direst emergencies. Running a sovereign Linux (or OpenBSD or 9front or TempleOS for that matter) doesn’t mitigate these.
If they are running Chinese CPUs, replace “Mossad” with “PLA”.
Other realities also exist.
Just geoblock outbound network traffic to locations you don’t want to reach.
This will also protect you from US tech being taken over by other malware and calling C2C in “bad places”*
*good people also live in those locations
“I want to improve society somewhat”
Hardware sovereignty is another whole chapter that takes a lot more time and preparation to tackle. Modern semiconductor production capabilities cannot be created by a bunch of coders like adapting NixOS - you need to plan and construct high-tech facilities, and those are dependent on an actual nightmare of logistic problems that have only been solved a number of times all over the world - for the latest silicon using EUV that number is one.
There is a push to create the capability for Europe to be sovereign in this space too, but this will probably take decades to finish regardless of how many ressources you throw at it.
But making sure that the US cannot turn off your administration by remote switch is a lot easier to accomplish, and very much needed.
Good point. Better keep using Windows until we can build 100% of the components in our own living rooms.
Ah yes, only perfection counts.
