On Monday, the US Supreme Court decided in Trump v. Slaughter that the US Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) may not be independent anymore. Since 2000, the EU has relied on the “independent” FTC as the enforcer of EU-US deals on personal data. According to EU treaty law, such oversight must be independent. In the current EU-US deal, the European Commission relies on the independent FTC 259 (!) times.
Please stop calling seflhosting “digital sovereignty”. It’s just a marketing buzzword, but basically there is nothing there except “I will host it myself”.
I thought the idea of digital sovereignty means you host services in the same legal domain or country, not that you literally “self host” things. For example, nobody is calling that the EU organization should self-host anything, only that they would use European cloud services.
Or does “host it myself” actually mean that someone else would host it for you? I don’t believe that’s the common way to understand it.
US-based software does have hosting physically in EU, which makes it in the same legal domain, but US has the CLOUD Act, where US can force their companies, even if abroad, to pull data to US. So, being simply in the same legal domain or country does not make it sovereign. You actually need your own hardware and the full software stack where there is no foregin ownership to actually be sovereign.
And if you just scale up from individual persons to nations/blocks, whats the difference between “I will not use Google Drive, I will selfhost Nextcloud” and “EU will not use Google Drive, it will selfhost Nextcloud”.
Me in this case is just not a person, but a country/political entity. EU is selfhosting instead of using US-provided hosting.
I prefer calling it “digital anarchy”, especially if you’re going so far as setting up your own Meshtastic node.