⁇ Secret infrastructures, open wounds
On August 6, NRC published an article that reads like a dystopian paragraph from 1984: Israel appears to be systematically eavesdropping on Palestinian phone calls and storing that data... Dutch data centres. Anyone who thought this cloud was a neutral, technocratic place is now brutally awakened. Our infrastructure is no longer infrastructure. It's a geopolitical weapon.
You can't claim sovereignty on a server that you don't understand, let alone manage.
⁇ Big Tech earns more than the Netherlands – literally
Amazon Web Services is now running more profit than the Netherlands tax collects. Microsoft's cloud division would already earn a spot in the G20 on its own. Do you really think that such companies are awake to a parliamentary question or a motion in the Senate? They laugh at our democracy. They only listen to the only language they understand: turnover. Our last printing medium is customer-being. If we give up that relationship, their power will collapse. But as long as we continue to decline, they continue to determine. And we follow. In the Netherlands, everything is being talked about under the guise of ‘compliance’, while we have long forfeited our digital sovereignty for an API key and an uptime SLA.
The rule of law ends where the Terms of Service begin.
Technology is political, and it's for sale
The cloud is no longer an IT decision. It is a form of surrender. By placing our infrastructure with foreign tech giants, we make ourselves strategically dependent. Israel is buying computing capacity in the Netherlands to conduct surveillance in Gaza, and we are nodding and billing. Politicians talk about ethics, but in practice we just provide storage and bandwidth.
We provide the computational capacity, they do the repression. Everybody's happy.
⁇ Welcome to the Digital Middle Ages
We are approaching a point where Big Tech acts as landlord and we behave digitally as serfs. You pay to join. You can't change anything. You don't own anything. It feels modern, but it's medieval. The difference? Then you knew who the gentleman was. Now it's called Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, and it's hiding behind a non-liability clause.
The cloud is the new castle. And you're not the owner, you're the serf.
⁇ Time to get angry
For years, we thought technology was neutral. That cloud services were only useful tools. But anyone reading this NRC article will see how deeply Big Tech has become entangled in oppression, surveillance and geopolitical manipulation. It's time we called that beast by its name. More than 16,000 people responded to this LinkedIn Post Digital Sovereignty. The subject is alive. But there is a world of difference between ‘liked’ and actual action. You want to break their power? Stop being a customer. Avoid their platforms. Choose self-hosted solutions. Choose transparency. Every dollar you don't spend on Big Tech is a slap in the face to their feudal power structure.
If you still think that digital sovereignty is just an IT choice, then you are complicit in the system that holds us all hostage.
⁇ Also read the NRC article that fuels this blog: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/08/06/israel-luistert-massaal-telefoongesprekken-tussen-palestijnen-af-en-slaan-die-op-in-datacenters-in-nederland-a4902313
⁇ And previous blogs on digital autonomy: https://www.data-pro.nu/blog/
English (UK)