Link: https://itsfoss.com/news/netherlands-dawo-initiative/

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.

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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.

The damage done by this president is literally irrepairable.

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”.

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.

Ah yes, only perfection counts.

The Dutch are vindicated.

Good point. Better keep using Windows until we can build 100% of the components in our own living rooms.

We can only hope...

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.

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.

"I want to improve society somewhat"

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

Some innocent people live there.

Not many

sure, similarly in Russia and Israel but that's not really the point.

Australia is alas too stupid to have learned this lesson.

As one of those people that live in the US, I think our superpower status has really enabled our harm, I dont really want us to keep it...

Sometimes people get really carried away with hating the US and it spills over into hating everyone here and wanting us to suffer, but I kinda DO hope the damage is irrepairable.

I don't think its good for a country to have as much power as the US has had. And we have weilded that power to harm basically everyone else for our own gain. I'd really like that to never happen again, frankly, and for so long as we can, I expect we will

Power corrupts, and we have spent too long holding WAY too much of it. (Plus foundational issues with the US, those do exist too, they just aren't what I'm talking about now)

The US really pissed away any strategic advantage it may have had with that little stunt

You've described almost everything Mr Trump has done, thus far, in his attempts to divert from Epstein and child molestation.

Canada, checking in. We're also in the shallow end of the pool.

There's got to be some guy in the Netherlands who's spent a chunk of his career watching telemetry head back over the wire to MS. I'll bet he's laughing his ass off.

I cannot imagine the joy being told to solve a computer problem, and oh by the way you're not allowed to use anything Microsoft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML

If poked they're probably the best company on earth to go their own way with hardware.

There is innocent people in my country too. That doesn't mean we are somehow owed the same privileged position that the US has held for decades.

it's crazy how much Americans like pedophelia

If you're not doing 101% of what you could and then some, why even bother in the first place?

As a European (British) I hope Europe can become as autonomous as possible.

We can trade with foreign entities when they're being reasonable, but at the moment a few of them are being unreasonable.

You argument is exactly what someone would say, if they want to prevent the other side from blunting that sanctioning tool by taking counter measures.

Most certainly. It still doesn't mean that every European country should be 100% attached by the balls to their predatory tech system.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Trump single handedly removed like 30% of US soft power. Iran deal? Fucked.UN where they have permanent veto? Fucked. USAID? Fucked. American image abroad? Fucked. Ukraine assistance because of Europe allies? Fucked. American tech hegemony? Fucked. American military export to Europe? Fucked. Interceptor missiles stockpile reserve where you want to be on the good side to buy? Fucked (just gone). American energy transition for cheaper exports? Fucked. US Canada relations? Fucked. Trustworthyness? Fucked.

There might be some other stuff I don't remember from the top of my head but this together makes staying on US good side just not that appealing because the benefits are largely gone.

Don't forget Catholics in general

Honestly, there's no reason not to use 15 year old CPUs, if not for better efficiency. But the difference will not be as big with current-gen ones.

I just wish there was a snowman's chance in hell of the UK getting rid of Microsoft. They're a strategic risk and their software makes me welcome the merciful geomagnetic storm or nuclear EMP that'll erase it all.

I could take the end of the world as long as Redmond got nuked a few minutes before me and I could enjoy a few glorious Microsoft-free moments.

As a European (British)

Still feels weird seeing that sentence.

30% ? You're optimistic. I'd say it's way more than that.

The US really pissed away any strategic advantage it may have had with that little stunt sanctioning a few justices and prosecutors.

You don't understand the fascist perspective. They think international cooperation and consensus is not a strategic advantage BUT a hindrance. They only think hard power is the only power.

But paradoxically, truth be told, there has never been an international order or law to follow. Joe Biden himself affirmed that US will invade the International Criminal Court if an American citizen is arrested. Trump and co. simply took the mask off.

I would argue that Microsoft are better than they used to be (I quite like TypeScript, and WSL) but perhaps only marginally. I'm lucky that I don't have to use Windows. I just use Linux these days.

In terms of sovereignty, I think Europe should try to find alternatives to Microsoft for critical things, even if the only reason for that is because Microsoft is American. As the OP article shows, the US government can make it painful for Europe to rely on American companies like Microsoft, regardless of what Microsoft themselves choose to do.

Canada is learning its lesson. It's just so entangled with the US that it's taking a while to implement alternatives. Alberta is deliberately clinging onto the US as well.

Until I see more of those innocent people standing up and risking life and liberty to drag the orange one kicking and screaming from behind his desk to the noose...

They are not innocent. Sorry not sorry. Time for pleasantries and looking the other way is over.

In a way maybe it is weird. Anyway, whether the UK rejoins the EU in the coming years or not, I hope the UK cooperates with the EU where it makes sense. The UK and the EU both have an interest in a prosperous Europe which doesn't need to rely on unreliable or unfriendly states (US, China, Russia).

It's also weird that those three countries, Russia, China and USA, are becoming so frequently talked about in the same light. The speed that the US has joined the other two in being referred to as both unreliable and unfriendly is incredible, and kinda scary really. I know it will take time to repair the damage but I hope they turn it around soon.

I guess the American people need to decide whether they want to be friends with Europe again. Trump got 49.8% of the popular vote in 2024, so not a majority, but still a lot of people. So they need to choose between continuing isolation in 2028 (e.g. Vance) or a leader who is a bit more sensible (e.g. Gavin Newsom).

Nobody should have trusted us anyway.

Microsoft is a disease. My biggest problem with them is that they make every single product with the sole intention of putting it behind a pay-per-use meter while misleading people into believing that their up-front costs cover all usage

They nickel and dime you to death, say that its free and then start charging you later on.

Trying to look cleanly across the costs is impossible. They will give you isolated dashboards for individual services, but never anything usefully comprehensive. They will gaslight you into believing that you just don't know how to use their monitoring tools and you should know better. It should be easy, but it isn't.

They are just a giant leech on all companies that use their shit. They only sell to exec leadership because none of those old farts understand how any of this stuff works. They don't talk to tech people because they will ask three good questions and see the bullshit. If their products were any good, they wouldn't need to sell this way. They're not good. Azure is a clusterfuck. Entra is shit. Defender is incompetent. Sentinel is worthless and horribly expensive. Desktop os is a joke.

They can just make Microsoft office, that's all they were ever good at. The rest is overpriced slop.

And all those CPUs are built in the first place using licensed Dutch photolithography tech. Funny how it all comes full circle, and also, I think the Dutch government already knows about this stuff.

It is the silver lining to this situation that countries are seeing, finally, the very obvious disadvantage of relying on a single foreign country for many of their critical infrastructure systems and their military. I understand that outsourcing these things can have short term economic benefits, freeing up your money to spend on other things, but short term vision and taking the path of least resistance is a social cancer and we see that the US has become malignant with it.

Always was thought of in those terms, particularly the Cold War, but a superpower was nice to have on side at least on paper. The difference is in the inability to depend even short term on some sort of framework. He changes his mind several times a day.

It's very hard to estimate the number. US still has the US Dollar, AI, most tech companies and entertainment industry as well as a lot of what I listed above still even though it's been reduced. Texas is becoming a green energy hub and California is still continuing the transition

Trump is working hard on the USD though by attacking the reserve and running an insane deficit and you can see treasury yields climbing. I would estimate that the USD dollar and military exports are more than 20% each. The leverage that US has on countries just by deciding who to sell and not to sell army stuff to is massive. Also having the global reserve currency and being able to largely cut countries off from foreign currency and banking is huge as well.

In all likelihood, the vote was compromised. And anyway, the majority of the people of the U.S. do want to be friends with Europe. The problem is, once a fascist gets into power with a vote, it is very unlikely for them to leave power until they are dead. History shows us this much.

Many experts in the US have said that US votes are reliable though, right? Trump kept casting doubt on US votes, saying that Biden could only have won in 2020 due to manipulation, and experts were saying that actually the US voting system is reliable.

I definitely believe that many Americans want to be friends with Europe, yes. I also think there are quite a few Americans who love Trump and dislike Europe for whatever reasons. I hope America will elect somebody more sensible than Trump in 2028, but I don't think it's yet clear what will happen.

It's already been established that it's definitely possible, but we haven't had any vote audits, so if it did happen, we wouldn't necessarily even know. Alao, with all the crap that Elon was pulling in the last election, I find it really difficult to believe that there was no manipulation, and at this point going forward, it's out in the open entirely.

We have cases of Republicans stealing voting machine, hard drives prior to the presidential election too.

https://electiontruthalliance.org/ has enough convincing content for me.

Am I cynical? Sure, but the nationwide and widespread efforts at voter disenfranchisement are enough for me to be satisfied that my doubt is valid. If this is what they're doing right in front of their faces, then why wouldn't they also be taking actions that we don't know about?

I definitely think Musk wants to rig elections as much as he can, but he probably tries to do it just about within the law, so he can sell himself as a moral fighter for whatever crap he thinks he's fighting for (enriching himself, of course).

I guess my general point was that lots of Americans did seem to vote for Trump in 2024, even if many of those now seem to regret their vote, given Trump's current approval ratings. I hope that a better US president will be elected in 2028. But I think Europe should aim for as much autonomy as possible, regardless of how 2028 turns out, so that friendship with the US becomes a choice rather than an obligation.