cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6270906
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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.
These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.
The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe’s own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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I don’t know much about Sweden, but the government released a report including options for digital collaboration platform technologies for the public sector in 2021 (available in English and Swedish, both a s pdf).
At least the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning has chosen Nextcloud in 2022.