Jons Mostovojs @jonn@social.doma.dev

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Interesting discussion in the EU parliament right now: while @EUCommission and #MEP Andreas #Schwab celebrate the #DigitalMarketsAct as a success, #Google competitor #Ecosia slashes it as "utter failure" and calls for a revision #DMA 2.0 to "step up the game".

Their argument: one year in the law has led to zero change on the market.

You know why we Germans are so pedantic about data protection? Someone around 90 years ago went through all records available, selected people with certain criteria, with the help of IBM, and then killed them all.

We don't want to be on any list.

And now the US Gov and Musk are trying to get access to all data they have about every person and put them into a big fat DB and run AI over it.

I am afraid what they will do with that.

I’m quite confused when I hear my fellow European citizens worry about our dependence on American Big Tech, and that in case America goes full Nazi we have no way of building our future.

American Big Tech is overwhelmingly dependent on free and open-source software that is overwhelmingly built and maintained by volunteers on both sides of the pond.

From the Linux kernel that powers basically all the large servers in the world, to the most popular distros built around that kernel, to the most popular database systems (MariaDB, Postgres, MongoDB…) and messaging systems (Redis, Kafka…), to Elastic (based in Amsterdam), to Blender (also based in Amsterdam), to all the open programming languages that power today’s world (Rust, PHP, Python [also invented by a Dutch developer], Kotlin [developed by JetBrains, founded in Czech Republic and also headquartered in Amsterdam]), to the Web servers that serve most of the content (nginx, Apache…), to the Grafana+Loki+Prometheus+OTEL stack that makes the backbone of observability in most of today’s large companies, to the numpy+pandas libraries that are the backbone of all of today’s AI hype, large American companies could do NOTHING, and I mean literally NOTHING, without open-source software that is built out of collaborations between European and American developers (who are often unpaid, uncredited and on the verge of burnout).

If you want a glimpse of today’s technological avantgarde, you don’t have to go to flashy and hollow events like ESC in Las Vegas, or any Silicon Valley sponsored event. You have to go to FOSDEM in Belgium.

American Big Tech has the ability of putting together these freely available building blocks, building finished products with them, monetizing them aggressively through unethical business models based on addiction, stalking, profiling and digging monopolistic moats, funding them through some of the richest men in the world (because the VC world is still dominated only by rich white men), locking them up as services that run into their private clouds (companies like AWS literally fill up bottles with free tap water and make outrageous amounts of money by renting access to that water), and sucking up generous subsidies from the federal government, while the EU gives literally peanuts to those building this infrastructure - we had to wait for years and beg the commission before getting something like Next Generation Internet up and running, which provides these projects with literally 0.01% of the money that the US has provided to its already deep-pocketed giants through things like the CHIPS act, and we also have to periodically send them letters like this https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI# to make sure that we don’t lose even those peanuts.

Imagine what we could build in Europe if only we had coherent technological programs that just funded the talent that we already have.

Imagine what we could do if instead of a couple of millions of spare change (and Von der Leyen never putting her wallet where her mouth is, because if we had one million every time she said “EU 🩷 open-source” all the EU-based volunteers on Github will be millionaire by now) we had even a fraction of the funding of acts like CHIPS.

Imagine what we could do if European companies firmly grounded in the values of open-source and ethical business models (like Nextcloud or Blender) had enough funding to compete with the American giants, instead of having to hear technologically illiterate megalomaniacs like Draghi and Macron argue for “European champions” that simply mock the unsustainable and unethical business models championed by America, all while products like Nextcloud often get kicked out of public tenders by the bribes and mafia-worth intimidations of deep-pocketed American giants like Microsoft and Google.

Our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic lately are going a bit nuts (like Nazi nuts). It’s time to start decoupling and de-riskifying from them, nurturing our own sustainable open-source ecosystem, and, if they start leveraging their own Big Tech as a weapon against us, pull the drawbridge and cut them out of the European open-source software that runs their servers. We can survive without their products; they can’t survive without our free code.

In a world where code and data are the new oil, access to open-source software means access to the raw materials required to make your industry wealthy. We shouldn’t underestimate that.

The re-naming of the Gulf of Mexico is much deeper than “just a name change”, it’s made clear the power that Google now wields over us. Maps exert authority over our lands and everything in it. When colonisers come, they conquer with more than weapons. Their maps legitimise their imagined places over what was there before. Who gave Google this power? #google #power #maps

Elon Musk says the journalists at CBS 60 Minutes "deserve a long prison sentence".

The reporting that has him so upset includes this line: "The world's richest man had cut off assistance to the world's poorest families."

You can view it in full here (first ~15 minutes):

https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/w_Zoxuc1ZnjigRqeKhYpum3ZFHIf2Rbs/