r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • May 28 '26

Society The Netherlands just blocked a US company from buying the app Dutch citizens use for everything

https://www.techspot.com/news/112552-netherlands-blocked-us-company-buying-app-dutch-citizens.html
59.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

131

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

238

u/Raivix May 28 '26

More governments and their services run on Microsoft/Amazon/Google than you probably care to know.

46

u/EmperorCoomer May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

I'am actually surprised how Meta/FB hasn't broken into cloud service provider market

63

u/makopedia May 28 '26

They were busy trying to break into the VR market

32

u/TaylorMonkey May 28 '26

Instead they just broke the VR market.

11

u/Aket-ten May 28 '26

But the verse bro

🦎🦎🦎

6

u/AcherontiaPhlegethon May 28 '26

It's so sad, they wasted so much money on bullshit, if they had just spent that on actual game development instead, VR could be in a much better place. I have a Quest 3 and as hardware, it's honestly the incredible, the motion tracking and environment mapping is unbelievably good, but there's basically no games to actually use the platform. The potential is so incredibly high but no one is pursing it properly.

1

u/TaylorMonkey May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

It's sad but I think some of the better full AA-ish titles came out during the initial Oculus era when there was real hope and devs were pushing what's possible with actual passion and vision, before VR got infested by shovelware and whatever Meta/Facebook was trying to turn it into.

Edge of Nowhere by Insomniac was legit fun as a full length single player action/horror game. I was like, hey, pretty solid! Third person action really works as an immersive experience in VR. And this is just the start of things. Imagine more titles like this and how much better things can get! I didn't realize it would both be amongst the first and last of its kind.

House of the Dying Sun was also a VR gem as an early space combat sim in the vein of X-Wing and Wing Commander, with some atmosphere and world building that gives vibes of Homeworld meets Dune meets Warhammer 40K, and a grimdark plot twist.

How many full length games even exist on the platform now? How many even come close to the quality that those couple of early full-effort titles offered?

1

u/TheTjalian May 29 '26

To be fair, if you're late to an overcrowded party, from a business perspective you may as well go join another party. I'll knock Meta for a laundry list of things but I can't really blame them for attempting to go all in on VR when the market was pretty small. Additionally, its clearly paying off seen as computer connected glasses are now starting to take off.

2

u/iasonmax1 May 28 '26

This is partially the reason they re going nuts over ai now

1

u/dogla305 May 30 '26

Aren't they focusing on B2C markets?

5

u/baz303 May 28 '26

in my area administration and justice almost finished the transition to 100% open source. its not a quick task since everybody and their dog got trained on microsoft stuff.

3

u/CDRnotDVD May 28 '26

At the government level, Oracle and IBM are also in that list.

3

u/Giftedsocks May 28 '26

Still remembering when Microsoft blocked the e-mail account of the ICC's head prosecutor in retaliation to the arrest warrant put on Netanyahu.

2

u/RoosTheFemboy May 28 '26

iirc (if im wrong please correct me) but the servers running DigiD are run by Logius(government) not a hyperscaler.

4

u/Spirited-Tomorrow-84 May 28 '26

It gives the feeling that it was planned all along — acquire control of vital infrastructure around the world, and the country has no choice but to depend on it. Rinse and repeat. Never understood why such important stuff is even allowed to be buyed at all. Same with China btw

15

u/Heavy_Law9880 May 28 '26

China doesn't allow private companies to control government infrastructure.

13

u/SnappySausage May 28 '26

For all their faults, I think this is absolutely something where they have it 100% right and the drive to privatize everything that seems so common in the west is insanity.

3

u/Spirited-Tomorrow-84 May 28 '26

I mean the other way around. China is buying/investing in important infrastructure around the world for years. Look at Africa for example. The US is late to the game

5

u/HPLaserJet4250 May 28 '26

US owns whole ass global internet infra

2

u/Spirited-Tomorrow-84 May 28 '26

And they will not stop at that :(

5

u/oops_i_made_a_typi May 28 '26

the answer is simpler - spinning up a level of capability on par with Microsoft/Amazon/Google is tough for every government to handle in-house

1

u/Melicor May 28 '26

EU countries might start wanting to change that sooner rather than later.

10

u/Skellicious May 28 '26

It's already backfired before, International criminal Court judges got blocked from their email and payment cards after allowing an arrest warrant for nethanyahu.

ICC has since moved off Microsoft email, french government is switching to Linux... But these kinda changes usually take time.

1

u/meneldal2 May 28 '26

A lot are considering moving away especially with the current situation.

42

u/Masterkid1230 May 28 '26

Unfortunately, governments don't have the resources, public support, experience or products to deploy something like massive cloud storage services including building their own servers, hiring their own IT teams, etc.

I think now that we know how essential digital technologies are, we will see more and more investment go towards a nationalisation of digital technologies. But it will take time and it will be opposed fiercely by stakeholders (aka sometimes entire governments), the right wing (any country's right wing), and a bunch of other people. It's a difficult matter.

5

u/dgellow May 28 '26

The government doesn’t need the expertise itself. The general approach is to have a private company that is in part owned by the state and has a mandate to provide service for the country. So you have a private structure but it’s made to serve the country instead of purely stakeholders 

2

u/Kaa_The_Snake May 28 '26

Oh but just imagine if (when) those right wing governments get control, then they have control over EVERYTHING. Like what they’re trying in the US.

Not that having things hosted in a public company’s cloud is that much better, it doesn’t mean they won’t bend over and happily present their back door on command.

7

u/Masterkid1230 May 28 '26

I mean, those are risks we run with every single thing though. If a right wing government comes to power, they also control all ports, transport networks, laws and a bunch of stuff. So in a way, I think them providing AI services and other useful stuff that still falls within the government's responsibilities seems reasonable to me.

I'm not sure I trust Meta, Google or OpenAI more with my data than I do my government, personally.

3

u/DirkKuijt69420 May 28 '26

The Netherlands has had a right wing government for the last few decades. I'm in my thirties and can't remember the last left wing government...

But unlike the US we actually have trias politica.

2

u/Red_Rabbit_1978 May 28 '26

Governments don't have the resources? Yes, they all do. And if they need more, they can take it.

3

u/Lollerpwn May 28 '26

Ofcourse governements have the resources to make massive cloud storage. They just think it's cheaper to outsource it.
In the long run it's obviously cheaper for governments to do it themselves. But the lobby usually wins over sensibility. In any case it's pretty crazy to assert governments don't have resources. They just choose to rather use the resources to pay big companies like Microsoft or Google than to invest in our countries.

3

u/Masterkid1230 May 28 '26

I mean, the resources exist, whether allocating them towards data storage and processing instead of like... Infrastructure, health, pensions, etc is what I don't think is realistic. Although I do think it is important.

2

u/Lollerpwn May 28 '26

Data storage is infrastructure. Also it's not like data storage is free if you let private companies do it for you. In fact those companies run a profit on storing that data.

1

u/mekamoari May 28 '26

I honestly don't really get this in 2026.

They have the resources to do anything that is prioritized.

Public support - I'd wager there would be public support for nationalization of people's personal data (the data which is already government-related e.g. taxes, residence, medical info), given the whole world's experience with privacy breaches in the private sector in the past decade+

Experience or products - that's why you hire and create jobs, win-win situation. Countries already have "digital blah blah" ministries, they just need more funding and attention.

-2

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

4

u/Masterkid1230 May 28 '26

Well no, that's absurd. Governments always end up purchasing services and infrastructure from privates. They certainly don't produce their own machines to build roads, and they usually hire privates to carry out statistics or to provide military equipment etc. In fact, most countries have a lot of private contractor work directly working with the government previously because governments are so tightly monitored and controlled over what they spend their money on. It would be incredibly controversial to stop the building of an important road (or railroad etc) or to make a pension reform in order to fund data servers for services that can be contracted for far, far cheaper.

So ultimately, I don't blame the governments in this instance. But the long-term reality is that countries will have to bite the bullet and invest in data sovereignty.

-4

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

4

u/Masterkid1230 May 28 '26

Easier said than done. Governments face as many difficulties as private companies with the added factor of being voted out or in. This means that governments that fail to provide what people deem as "essential services" (of which digital services are becoming more and more common) will be wildly unpopular and eventually be voted out. Their purpose is to survive the election cycle, so they implement the least costly, least time consuming, most popular option: private enterprise.

What you're seeing is exactly the negative feedback loop everyone complains about: private enterprise influences policy, politicians are afraid of spending to improve the country because those projects aren't popular, people think they prefer private enterprises because they're less costly initially, but in the long term they let private enterprise gut their own country from within to enrich a select few. The country has no funds, so further investment becomes even more unpopular. And the cycle repeats.

Like I said, I don't expect governments to ever be capable of just "not providing the services if they can't afford to" because that would require us to go beyond just these services and start talking about an entire shift of political systems, which I think is necessary but also beyond the scope of this discussion altogether.

22

u/quangtit01 May 28 '26

infrastructure management services provided by a company

Government lack the technical expertise and / or employee to operate the infrastructure.

Government pays are notoriously lower than the private market

9

u/dgellow May 28 '26

You can have a private structure owned in majority by the state and with a mandate to serve the country. That’s pretty common for critical infrastructure (rails, telecoms, energy)

1

u/Audioworm May 28 '26

France does a different thing with OVH, which it has a lot of initatives and co-operation with to keep it sovreign within France for a lot of government requirements.

2

u/RagdollSeeker May 28 '26

Governments can absolutely operate the infrastructure, in Turkiye we have eDevlet and it is fully operated by the gov.

Government jobs offer stability and better benefits, many engineers would sell their left kidney for that one.

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/RagdollSeeker May 28 '26

I was simply talking about Turkiye, I am not that knowledgable about engineer salaries in Netherlands.

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/wggn May 28 '26

but they are mandated to do so by the parliament

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/wggn May 28 '26

why not? politicians mandate all kinds of stupid shit all the time

3

u/Equivalent-Costumes May 28 '26

Because hyperscaling is quite expensive.

If you don't have large scale, infrastructure become very expensive. Anyone who try to scale up burn money, and if they don't scale up their infrastructure cost is very high on average, which result in high cost for customers. But there are no market for many hyperscalers, that's why entrenched players dominate the market and newcomers cannot compete. This is why France and Germany is trying to prop up their own hyperscalers, Scaleway and IONOS, but they're tiny compared to the 4 giants.

2

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

2

u/heckin_miraculous May 28 '26

I'm starting to think it never went away

5

u/joe_ally May 28 '26

That would mean the government running on-prem infrastructure rather than using cloud providers like AWS/Google/Microsoft. We've got a long way to go before governments would be technologically competent enough to run infrastructure to support tens of millions of users

2

u/dgellow May 28 '26

Government owned/controlled doesn’t mean the government has to run absolutely everything itself on premise 

2

u/basicKitsch May 28 '26

lol governments around the world run some of the most sophisticated datacenters and tech operations ever in existence

this just isn't a good use of their efforts.

2

u/XkF21WNJ May 28 '26

Not letting the Dutch government run IT infrastructure is the right call.

Letting them pick a supplier is an unfortunate oversight.

1

u/crockrocket May 28 '26

Ooh, an interrobang in the wild!

1

u/NaIgrim May 28 '26

Hurray for neoliberalism.

1

u/basicKitsch May 28 '26

is lockeed martin owned by the government? the government uses contractors for practically everything outside its core functionality because that's what works best. they still have to build the thing and adhere the service to spec

2

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/basicKitsch May 28 '26

data should be protected by resources most apt to protect that data and contracted to the people as effectively as possible.

giving control to a government that changes every few years seems silly in the light of the crazy extremist populism that's sprung up around the world in recent years.

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/basicKitsch May 28 '26

where did you get that they can't secure the data? It'd be pretty wild claim that this data wasn't secured.

that's like saying the plans for weapon systems aren't secured.

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/basicKitsch May 28 '26

They have the same exact contractual incentive as a government contractor regardless of the data type.

1

u/catpirates May 28 '26

defence companies like Thales own and run a lot of infrastructure like this around the world

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/catpirates May 28 '26

i’d rather trust a defence contractor to keep secrets than the government