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ICC doesn't have a country though. Wherever it is based may have to be investigated.

Pragmatically though - yeah after Snowden US is not a good choice.

https://bgp.he.net/dns/icc-cpi.int

They're also using Cloudflare for both DNS and a CDN.

Let's call it lessons learnt

Americans would like the same thing.

Just off the top of my head, accessing the IRS website (taxes) gets tracked by google. Windows keeps trying to pull everything online. Americans don't get separate apple app stores.

It goes on and on.

The US and Europe is tightly integrated, this integration can be used as leveraged. Especially, since we've allowed the US to play the bigger brother in most of these relationships.

But you can only use this in a big way once. And all parties have pretty much assumed the US would never use its leverage as Trump has been doing.

The same way we dare invest in the US stock marked, because we're confident the US won't do a Cuba-style nationalization of private assets.

Obviously, the orange man is gambling EU won't decouple from the US. He might be right, this probably isn't big enough.

Decoupling all systems is expensive, it cheaper to wait 4 years.

That said, the orange man did get EU defense investment -- the investments are just not being made in the US.

Sadly, I don't think anyone will decouple, people still laugh at the idea of using LibreOffice.

Honestly, Microsoft needs to stay the hell away from the US Gov, too.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/microsoft-network-b...

It's also the only way for the EU to jumpstart it's own silicon valley.

Look at how silicon valley was bootstrapped through government expenditure.

EU can't even solve some tracking cookies, how will they/we create an europeran (-alternative to-) google?

> The ICC is incredibly important, incredibly young and global. Shifting this to europe would not solve the problem.

Well it’s incredibly young, but it is neither incredibly important seeing as how the premise of the court is suspect nor global seeing as how substantial portions of the globe have either not signed, not ratified, or withdrew their signature before ratification. I’ll give you “international”.

You’re right though: any possible software vendor is theoretically subject to someone’s sanctions regime. If they want to uphold the independence of their institution, that’s probably more work for an internal IT department.

It's certainly not incredibly important. It is, however, incredibly undemocratic

And I know: remote destruction of various tech, including pagers, laptops, routers, power plants, and experimental nuclear reactors.

Still not enough? A law that mandates backdoors necessary to trigger the above in all exported tech.

Oh, sweet summer child.

There are EU member states where politicians lobby Congress and the Administration to put their rivals on the Magnitsky list. Europe is in no condition to resist the will of the United States.

>And people talked about Huawei…

Still bad.

Dont even try :)

To be fair, the ICC isn’t a European court, at least on paper.

> ally

Keep the chocolate separate from the artificial sweeteners.

Whatever our deal is with the EU and individual European countries, the ICC is emphatically not an EU nor even a European court. They’re hosted in The Hague, it is not of The Hague in the same way the UN is not of New York.

> Just goes to show how short-sighted these political decisions have been. Politics shouldn't be wrapping itself around tech, the US is shrugging off a huge market and ally.

Which political decision? The one to prosecute a US ally, or the one to sanction the ICC?

When someone decries something as "politics," there's often a problem where the analysis conveniently stops when the blame can be placed on the speaker's disfavored group.

The U.S. is harming itself by making technology subject to politics. Only makes them look untrustworthy. Just Trump breaking things that work.

I honestly don't get what HN, or even some commenters, thinks should happen here in the real world.

I understand in the pretend world they want to be able to do $x without ever worrying about being beholden to any other countries laws or politics or whatever else.

They want this for lots of values of $x, and often have fun asserting it will soon be possible.

In the real world however, this has never been possible, since the dawn of recorded history, for lots and lots and lots of values of $x.

Pretty much any time $x becomes valuable or interesting enough, it becomes impossible to have this happen in all and usually most cases.

It often doesn't matter how simple a thing $x is - sailing a ship for example, or buying produce, it usually only matters how valuable or interesting it was.

As long as enough countries exist, and they have laws that have extra-territorial effect, the likelihood this problem will be really solved trends towards zero.

What exactly does someone expect to happen here when it's just people and companies trying to follow the laws they think they are required to follow.

This is actually what should happen, and is happening

The usual response is then that some country or group of countries need to build some untouchable-by-other-countries infrastructure and that will solve having to deal with others politics. This seems to me naive at best. The only cases this will work is for things that can be 100% contained and controlled within a given country/group. That is roughly impossible for most interesting things.

For example - it makes no sense to have a economic-block-specific email provider to work around sanctions, because whoever wanted to sanction them will just ban transiting email to them, and then transiting packets, and then equipment, and then chips to make equipment, and then machines to make chips to make equipment, and then wafers used to make chips, and then raw resources used to make wafers, and then equipment to mine raw resources, and then ....

Let's assume you don't care about this group, but they are still powerful. Great - they'll do this not just directly, but indirectly, by forcing others who do have to care to do the same to you.

Now, it would be different if you are building this thing as a political move or strategy, rather than expecting it to solve your problem directly. But otherwise, it is remarkably rare to be able to work around the politics with technology, and if you do, you won't be able to for very long.

It's much more useful to focus on dealing with the politics, if you want to change it.

Wasting lots of time and energy and money trying to avoid politics seems like a bad plan

If it’s a lawful request, no. They can fight it but it’s a fight under US law, so if the law says they have to do it then that’s the outcome.

Yes. It would then be upon the government to do something about it, which would create some controversy, penalties for MS, and a political debate.

Same for refusing orders. It may change nothing, like in this story:

  > One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in
  > a certain house ... and to blow up the house with them.
  > The sapper refused ... The commander then ordered his
  > men to put the old women in the house and the evil deed
  > was done. 

But people sometimes still do it.

Why? US is not the main threat.

And even this case it's pretty obvious that they are under attack.

If you run your own server, you might not know that you've been compromised.

And at the same time for the sake of balance, issue a warrant against saddam hussain and bin laden.

> the absolute dumbest, most ignorant sycophants destroy things they simply don't understand and don't want to understand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

Usually, I suspect that, behind the behavior of dumb figureheads and dumb pawns, is some party that is smarter (and evil).

our technocrats are destroying the world and bleeding the peasants dry. the peasants are right to revolt against them. they only err in their choice of alternatives.

Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov has written about it many years ago, but it has clearly accelerated. My hope is that's it's the last surges of Christianity/religion in a death spiral.