What's more, the laws that block reverse-engineering are also used to block repair, forcing everyone from train operators to hospitals to drivers to everyday individuals to pay a high premium and endure long waits to get their equipment serviced by the manufacturer's authorized representatives:

pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/rec…

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These US-forced IP laws come at a high price. They allow American companies to pick your nation's pockets and steal its data. They interfere with repair and undermine resiliency. They also threaten security researchers who audit critical technologies and identify their dangerous defects:

pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/lif…

28/

On top of that, they expose your country to a range of devastating geopolitical attacks by the Trump administration, who have made it clear that they will order American tech companies to brick whole governments as punishment for failing to capitulate to US demands. And of course, all of these remote killswitches can be operated by anyone who can hack or trick the manufacturer, including the Chinese state:

pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/for…

29/

Speaking of China, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we were warned would happen if we allowed Chinese technology into western telecommunications systems? The Chinese state would spy on us, and, in times of extremis, could shut down our critical infrastructure with a keystroke.

This is exactly what America is doing now (and has been doing for some time, as Snowden demonstrated).

30/

But it's actually pretty reasonable to assume that a regime as competent and ambitious (and ruthless) as Xi Jinping's might make use of this digital power if doing so serves its geopolitical goals.

And there is a hell of a lot of cloud-connected digital infrastructure that Xi does (or could) control, including the solar inverters and batteries that are swiftly replacing fossil fuel in the EU:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our…

31/

Don't get me wrong: there are also advantages to decentralized (or even better, distributed) interconnections in the world's data infrastructure. A more dispersed network topology is more resilient against a variety of risks, from political interference to war to meteor strikes.

But connecting every country to every other country is a very expensive proposition. Our planet has 205 sovereign nations, and separately connecting each of them to the rest will require 20,910 links.

5/

And if you're worried about China shutting down your solar energy, you should also worry about America's hold on the embedded processors in your country's critical systems.

Take tractors. Remember when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of tractors from Ukraine and spirited them away to Chechnya? The John Deere company sent a kill command to those tractors and bricked them, rendering them permanently inoperable:

pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/abo…

32/

Sure, there's a certain cyberpunk frisson in this tale of a digital comeuppance for Russian aggressors. But think about this for ten seconds and you'll realize that it means that John Deere can shut down *any* tractor in the world - including all the tractors in your country, if Donald Trump forces them to:

pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/pos…

33/

The national security case for digital sovereignty includes people worried about American aggression. It includes people worried about Chinese aggression. It includes people worried about other countries that might infiltrate and make use of these remote kill switches. And it includes people worried about criminals doing the same.

34/

True digital sovereignty requires more than building Eurostack data-centers and the software to run on them. It requires more than repealing the IP laws that block cloud customers from migrating their data to those Eurostack servers. It requires the replacement of the cloud software and embedded code that power our infrastructure and administrative tools.

35/

This is a gigantic task. Ripping out all the proprietary code that powers our cloud software and devices and replacing it with robust, auditable, user-modifiable free/open source software is a *massive* project.

It's also a project that's long overdue. And crises precipitate change. Putin's invasion of Ukraine vaporized every barrier to Europe's solar conversion, rocketing the bloc from ten years behind schedule to fifteen years *ahead* of schedule in just a few years.

36/

The fact that changing out all the proprietary, opaque, vulnerable code in our world and replacing it with open, free, reliable code is *hard* has no bearing on whether it's *necessary*.

It's necessary. What's more, replacing all the code isn't like replacing dollars, or replacing fiber. It isn't hamstrung by the O(n^2) problem.

Because if the Eurostack code is open and free, it can also be the Canadian stack, the Mexican stack, the Ghanaian stack, and the Vietnamese stack.

37/

It can be a commons, core tech that everyone studies for vulnerabilities and improves, everyone adds features to, everyone localizes and administers and bears the costs for.

It is a novel and curious form of "international nationalism," a technology that is more like a science. In the same way that the Allies and the Axis both used the same radio technologies to communicate, a common, open digital infrastructure is one that everyone - even adversaries - can rely upon.

38/

This is a move that's long overdue. It's a move that's in the power of every government, because it merely involves changing your own domestic laws to enable adversarial interoperability. Its success doesn't depend on a foreign state forcing Apple or Google or Microsoft or Oracle to do something they don't want to do:

pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/red…

39/

The opportunity and challenge of building the post-American internet is part of the package of global de-Americanization, which includes running new fiber and de-dollarization. But the post-American internet is unique in that it is the only part of this project that can be solved everywhere, all at once, and that gets cheaper and easier as more nations join in.

40/

I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #Toronto (TOMORROW!), #SanDiego and #Seattle!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

eof/

I'm sure it's no real surprise to you, but can I interest you in my take on why this "distributed vs. decentralized" distinction is something of a layering problem in disguise?

interpeer.org/blog/2025/03/on-…

TL;DR It comes down to the network theory definition of "betweenness"; how many communications flows is a node (at any abstraction layer) "between" two others, and can shape what is communicated and how.

On (De-)Centralized Communications: Part 4

#Layer 8 Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 were technical in nature, examining communications networks. However, we also have to consider the so-called...

^{Jens Finkhaeuser (Interpeer gUG)}