European shift in tech reliance

Europe shifts reliance on big tech away from non-European and proprietary companies. (This is not directly transgender related, though indirectly there is some relevance. But many members of the BCTS community are tech savvy, and there have been many related discussions here before.)

The licensing practices of Microsoft have caused severe friction with public or governmental institutions in Germany for over 20 years. I remember an incident in the early 2000s where Microsoft sued the city of Munich, because it lost an open bid for PC-user licenses to OpenSuSE. The main reason for losing was the very short support life-span. In the end Microsoft agreed to provide five years of support and security updates, instead of the new standard of only two years, in order to renew the existing contract.

In the last ten years or so, almost all the big tech and social media companies have been embroiled in serious digital privacy violation investigations and hit with fines or penalties into the hundreds of millions of Euros. And in the last two years more and more digital privacy watchdog organization have ruled that cloud-based services from the likes of Microsoft and Google violate the strict privacy laws in Europe. With formal recommendations (that I know of) in France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria, to migrate away from technology companies based in the United States of America.

Recently the House of El YouTube channel published an analysis titled Germany DUMPS Microsoft Completely - Europe DETOXIFIES From USA After Email Weaponisation. She present an interesting point-of-view on the German, and western European, mentality and legislation, as an outsider looking in.