Microsoft’s recent decision to block access to the email account of International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan is raising urgent questions in the Netherlands about the country’s deep reliance on American technology companies, de Volkskrant reports. The move followed U.S.

Does your government rely on Microsoft etc. to function?

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    22·
    1 day ago

    Holy shit that’s egregious

    Who in their right mind chooses Microsoft for email after this? Baffling they’d completely slaughter the golden goose they have in Outlook/Exchange like that.

    • Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      14·
      1 day ago

      It’s shocking that Europe relies so heavily on MS for critical government infrastructure. How were they this blind to this risk.

      • 9point6@lemmy.world
        16·
        1 day ago

        I assume it’s a symptom of government IT generally not getting the funding it needs.

        For a good while Microsoft was pretty much the only game in town that could give you the whole server OS, distributed identity (AD), email, and end user OS & productivity software as one big procurement and support contract—plus every other IT guy had MCSE certifications anyway so it was what they ended up selecting.

        Once that was all set up in the 90s when governments were going hard on the IT bandwagon, I imagine the cost of migrating all of that to an alternative was seen as an unnecessary expense when governments could consider the US a stable ally.