US tech firms share Dutch regulator officials' names with Senate
dutchnews.nl121 points by zqna 3 hours ago
121 points by zqna 3 hours ago
> However, stopping working with Microsoft and other US tech companies is not an option in the short term, he told the magazine.
> Van der Burg is currently grappling with the issue of Solvinity, a Dutch cloud service provider which is widely used by government departments including the Digid identity system, and which is on the verge of being sold to a US company.
> The Dutch tax office is also currently switching to Microsoft systems, despite MPs’ concerns.
They all talk about the importance of European digital sovereignty and then continue to do the exact opposite behind the scenes.
They all talk about the importance of European digital sovereignty and then continue to do the exact opposite behind the scenes.
To be honest and I say this as a Dutch person, this is typical Dutch (government). Basically two rules in Dutch politics: (1) always choose the option that pleases the US the most; (2) always postpone solving issues to the latest possible moment (US dependence, nitrogen deposition, childcare benefits scandal, gas-induced earthquakes).
France, Germany, etc. are much better examples when it comes to sovereignty.
As an aside the parliament wants to stop the Solvinity acquisition or stop renewing the contract with Solvinity. But the VVD (one of the parties in government) is always going to choose what is best for big business (the party is one big revolving door) or the US.
It's not only Dutch. Instead of building sovereignity, the EU thought they could regulate their way and force everyone to bend the knee because of their share as a trading partner. This started 20 years ago. However what has happened is that the EU's soft power is crumbling, but the politicians have hard to grasp with the reality they could somehow dictate things globally. AI will only further accelerate this.
Only way to have control is to have domestic actors you can push around.
Europeans (and not just the EU) think they still have the influence on the world they had in the 1980s when their economies were a much larger proportion of the global economy. Europeans have no idea what the world looks like from Asia which contains most of the world's population and generates a third of global GDP.
Americans (and not just the US) think they still have the influence on the world they had in the 1980s when their economies were a much larger proportion of the global economy. Americans have no idea what the world looks like from Asia which contains most of the world's population and generates a third of global GDP.
It is a general western problem to some extent, but the US has a a faster growing economy than any of the big European economies. It is still a super-power.
The "faster growing economy" is basically 100% AI speculation now. If that gamble pays of the US is still in trouble (as is the rest of the world), as there doesn't appear to be even a hint of a plan of what a post-AI society looks like for anybody but the top 0.1%.
I don't think the top 0.1% has a plan, either. From my personal interactions with them, they are mostly just excited they can talk to a chatbot on their phone all day, and then make questionable decisions from that - to use a recent example, deciding to be their own general contractor and make a house remodel cost an extra million and take an extra year to do.
Well, Musk for one is promising not universal basic income, but universal high income. In a country where a lot of people don't even have health insurance. Let's see how that will work out, I'll believe it when I see it...
The other year the US was beaten by a starved little country on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula, and recently by a somewhat large country by the Persian Gulf. Currently their only real ally is getting beaten by FPV drones handled by a guerilla force.
The US has very little influence today compared to a decade or more ago. To the extent that the world at large cares about the US it's because they are committing genocide and destroying global trade logistics. All of their former allies are trying to substitute them out, or at least hedge with other international relations.
As far as I can tell, outside certain parts of the Occident, no one cares about new US movies or television series anymore. The Oscars gather some interest because some people want to know if any entertainment industry people will go against the regime and say something negative about mass murder of children, but that's about it. Future generations will be shaped more by chinese and indian movies than usian ones.
When apartheid South Africa was about to crumble it also initiated nasty military campaigns and faked political and military supremacy for a while, as did Idi Amin's Uganda. I'd bet something similar is going on in the US.
Some people are still stuck in the late Cold War, notably EU politicians like von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, as well as most swedish top politicians. They cannot imagine a world where the US is not calling the shots and will drag Europe further into global irrelevancy by idiotically paying tribute and kneeling for the US. Pretty much the rest of the world is disgusted and horrified by the bumbling nastiness of contemporary US empire.
They also came to realize building, operating and maintaining a military force is extremely expensive. Free healthcare, 7 weeks of vacation, 36 hr work weeks, unemployment benefits, subsidized housing, etc etc is all great when you don’t have the financial burden of protecting your home.
USA has said they will not support Europe in a military conflict so now you can slash your military and fire all those soldiers and have free health care etc. No? Sounds like ”protecting” Europe wasn’t what stood in the way of free healthcare, vacation, etc.
Nearly half (about 47%) of healthcare in the U.S. is government-paid, although via a variety of different programs. The USA also has quite lavish benefits in a variety of other ways.
Of course, that is mostly paid for via massive amounts of debt, not from savings of military spending. But government spending on healthcare is more than twice (2.5 to 3 times) that of military spending. So slashing military spending to zero would just mean the amount of government-provided healthcare spending could go from 47% to 56% or so. (Not taking into account that a lot of "military spending" is actually healthcare spending!)
Total EU defense spending is around $450M USD. The US defense budget, prior to 2027, is about $950M USD. Are you saying the US could have all those social policies for $500M USD?
The US could have those benefits for free.
Single payer would be drastically cheaper than the current system.
The other benefits are just policies that slightly reduce GDP per capita based on a first order analysis.
We are able to afford so many other subsidies, so unclear why housing would be different.
The US could simply give away $1 M per resident, removing the need for social policies and it would still come out cheaper.
You aren’t counting the VA in your spending. That’s another 450 billion.
> However what has happened is that the EU's soft power is crumbling
Uh, no. The US soft power is turning to dust whilst the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin.
What has happened the past ±30 years is that most EU countries cut spending on their militaries to the bone, because big brother USA would take care of it anyway. Now that we are returning to a multi-polar world, suddenly the EU is left scrambling for hard power that it doesn't have. That's why they can't play hardball when the US does a new ridiculous thing, because they simply lack the hard power to back up Ukraine.
The US is sorely going to regret their antics though. Long term, the EU is going to switch to their own stacks, both for military but also things like cloud and other tech. It's trillions of $ the US economy will be missing out on. And voting in a Democratic president, senate and house is not gonna change a thing about it, because the US has proven itself to be a fundamentally unreliable, if not outright hostile partner.
The US alone spends 1.5x as much on consumer goods (yes, adjusted for PPP) and nearly 2x as much on R&D as the entire EU. It’s very sweet that the EU is trying to decouple itself from the US economy, but I highly doubt its ability to become “leader of the free trade world” when it has so little money to throw around.
"the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin"
At its usual pace ... do you know when the negotiations with Mercosur started? Year 2000. Only now we have an agreement. Still, better than not doing anything at all. But I wonder how many of the original negotiators are still alive.
It also yet remains to be seen what happens if China puts a real pressure on us. Our list of allies is now somewhat thin and we have to cozy up to India, which indirectly funds the Russian war against Ukraine by importing Russian weapons and Russian oil/gas, the latter in huge quantities. Still, better than cozying up to China, because the possibility that Beijing teaches Brussels some cool tricks to keep the population under perfect surveillance scares me.
>Still, better than not doing anything at all
How is Mercosur better for the EU citizens?
German car companies get new countries in which to see themselves destroyed by China?
>whilst the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin.
Being an international pushover with no teeth that folds like a deck chair to the demands of the rest of the world at negotiations, isn't "building the new free [trade] world,", or at least not one that benefits the EU. Absolute free trade isn't always a benefit for your own citizens and industries. Do you want to import low quality agriculture made by slave labor that will undercut your own farmers and put them out of business? Do you want to import unlimited people without assurance the government has enough housing, childcare and medical staff already in place for said new people? There's a reason borders and goods have some restrictions, because sudden heavy imbalances lead to destabilization of society and democracy.
The recent free trade agreements the EU has been desperately signing lately (mercosur, etc) are just short term gain for long term pain down the road, since everyone has the EU by the balls right now so other countries are squeezing as much as they can from the EU now while they're busy with Russia, expensive energy and losing China as an export market for their expensive cars.
EU capitulating to foreign trade pressures, is not gonna create a superpower like dreamers think, it's gonna create new dependencies with other (less democratic) countries, which is gonna backfire just like their dependency to US tech and Russian and China market did, in the future when those countries will have a strong grip over EU critical sectors, they will then demand concessions from the EU, and the EU will again fold like a deckchair because the EU is never in a position to bully others or retaliate to preserve its own interest let alone impose them around the world, further losing power internationally and remaining a pushover where its citizens lose, while the core issues plaguing the EU(demographics, debt, government speeding on welfare, lack of innovation and manufacturing in key sectors, no VC funding) will remain and continue to grow.
Signing deals to import more people and cheap food and stuff from Latam, India or wherever to depress wages and prices, doesn't fix any of that not make the EU a superpower, it just kicks the can down the road.
>Uh, no. The US soft power is turning to dust whilst the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin.
To quote when harry met sally - I'll have what she's having.
He's having a dish called "Watching Trump from a distance", you should definitely try it.
It is amusing what he inflicts on USA and I thoroughly enoy it ... But the idea that EU is taking leadership in this chaos is somewhere between laughable and delusional.
Actually EU is getting fucked on every possible turn. We are the ones that pay trough the nose for all his follies. We are weaker than ever and we have delusional commission in charge.
It is difficult to think of an economic region that is more opposed to free trade than Europe (that isn't a comedy country). Possibly some countries in South America?
Trade within Europe has massive restrictions. I have no idea why, given the stated aims of Europe...we are posting this on a post about the Netherlands trying to protect office software ffs, people think this isn't the case. One of the reasons why the EU created a trade bloc, and the same reasons why you see the same attempts in areas of the world like South America, was to limit the impact of free trade. This should be completely obvious given that the EU is not competitive in areas where they lack the ability to limit competition.
Also, I will point out: US policy is for the EU to do exactly the thing that you are suggesting. This has been the consistent position of Trump since 2016. The main blockers for this have been politicians in the EU. I am not sure how you equate being unreliable with subsidising EU defence spending to the tune of multiple trillions so that EU countries can spend on welfare either.
The EU self-image is totally bizarre, it is so out of touch with reality. Hostile to all forms of change and innovation: actually one of the greatest free traders there has ever been. Xenophobic and hostile to certain countries: possibly one of the greatest allies to these countries ever. Never gets any support on Ukraine, would be a leader if the US weren't such bastards: spent multiple decades fuelling Putin's state.
The only people that think global free trade is a good thing are the top .001% net worth individuals which use it to wield power.
Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.
I'm not sure what "Trade within Europe has massive restrictions." means without context. Compared to some Randian capitalist utopia where there are no rules and no governments? Or compared to before the creation of the European single market?
> I'm not sure what "Trade within Europe has massive restrictions." means without context.
We actually do have a good amount of issues regarding internal trades, according to https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7792....
“The International Monetary Fund estimates that the persistent barriers to the EU single market still represented the equivalent of a 110 % tariff on services.”
There is a good amount of work to be done to complete the single market, what we currently have is way too fragmented
That is politically impossible. Everyone knows it is impossible because if you open up some countries to free services trade then the political basis for the EU and the traditional governing countries would collapse.
The limitations on trade within Europe are intentional design. The attempts to stop the economy from collapsing with these massive government spending packages are the death throes.
I mean, it is extremely difficult, but the whole union was seen as impossible the last century. With strategic developments over decades I don’t think it’s impossible