Jedes Rechenzentrum ist eine US-Militärbasis | Verstehen, wie die USA ihre Technologieunternehmen nutzen, um ihrem Imperium zu dienen – und wie Kanada reagieren sollte

Some issues of concern:

>Over the past couple of years we saw a concerted campaign by Canadian tech executives, aligned with the right-wing politics their counterparts in Silicon Valley adopted, begin to push a political program in their interests, often paired with explicit support for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada.
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>However, since Mark Carney replaced Justin Trudeau at the helm of the Liberal party, they’ve embraced the central-banker-in-chief. He’s committed to attracting investment above all else, and that means he’s much more open to their policy demands.
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>As a result, we’ve seen a rapid erosion in the government’s efforts to rein in U.S. tech companies. Shortly after Carney became prime minister, planned AI regulations were put on ice, along with the online harms bill that sought to address harmful behaviour in online spaces. That was in spite of concretely seeing how those platforms are used by bad actors to sow division within society as wildfires spread across the country again last summer. In parts of the country, local politicians had to directly respond to disinformation spreading online that people desperate for updates were falling for.
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>It can be easy to believe that all this pressure is a product of the way Trump’s return to office emboldened U.S. tech companies, but it’s simply brought a long-standing process out into the open. The U.S. government has long recognized how much it benefits from ensuring other countries are dependent on products and services made by companies in its jurisdiction. For years, it used trade negotiations to insert clauses in agreements that limit foreign governments’ ability to regulate its tech companies and has used its diplomats to apply pressure in other ways.
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>For example, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement contains measures that constrain the authority of the Canadian government to regulate the tech industry. The agreement limits the ability to regulate cross-border data flows, to force companies to reveal their source code, to discriminate between foreign and domestic tech firms or to expect them to store data on Canadians within our borders.
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>There is one thing we can say for Trump’s attacks on Canada: they have finally given us the space to speak openly and honestly about many of the ways the U.S.-Canada relationship has not been working for us for a very long time — and the digital dimension of our lopsided economic integration is a massive part of that.
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>If Canada is to regain greater autonomy over its affairs and build a better society, we must get serious about reclaiming our digital sovereignty.
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>Since Trump’s return to office, governments have been ramping up defence spending to ensure they can defend themselves in a world where the United States is no longer a security guarantor and is possibly even a security threat. That same seriousness should be given to digital technology.
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>As our European allies have found first-hand, our dependence on U.S. companies for cloud services creates a severe vulnerability, where the U.S. government can request whatever data it wants or can even shut off our access at a moment’s notice.
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>During the federal election campaign, Carney said he would be reassessing public cloud contracts going to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle. More recently, when he announced the first batch of nation-building projects, the prime minister called out the need for a sovereign cloud. He is taking steps in the right direction, but the devil will be in the details.
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>Our ambition cannot stop there, though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools and other public institutions — not to mention private businesses — are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest.
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>European state, local and even departments of national governments are already taking the initiative to move in that direction. There are ample open-source tools already out there that could be adapted to those institutional use cases, with a mandate to work in close collaboration with public institutions to ensure their new suite of digital services properly meets their unique needs. Governments could even think about bringing tech development closer to communities, building on a model not dissimilar to public libraries.
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>But we must also be aware of the pitfalls ahead. Some Canadian tech executives who, until recently, were pushing for a Conservative government are embracing a program of digital sovereignty as well, but it is explicitly not one that centres the public good.
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>Instead, they’re pushing the government to continue pulling back on regulations, while deploying billions through public procurement, incentives and subsidies to flood into their businesses. They want to hold on to the Silicon Valley model and the harms it has created, but better cash in on it for themselves. They want to join the digital colonizers rather than bring them down.

These are some useful things to consider as we move forward with building sovereign data infrastructure: relying on private companies to build and operate this infrastructure, even if they aren’t eventually consolidated into larger monopolies, are only as good as the corporate governance in those companies. For there to be truly sovereign infrastructure, it will need to be built and owned and operated publicly. Ideally this would include grassroots approaches at the local level paired with larger national-scale backbone infrastructure.