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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.
These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.
The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe’s own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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Filing taxes in sweden means going to the tax agencys website, identifying with your phone, and they already have everything pre-calculated so you just sign it digitally, takes 5 minutes. If you ignore it I think it’s the same as accepting it after a certain date.
To elaborate a bit more: the only reason to not just signing directly is if you want to declare things like “I have commuted this distance this year and want a tax cut on my commute” or other special case things you might apply for. Or if you have a small business or something. So for like 75 %, simply just signing the pre-filled tax is enough.
I wish Canada had that system.
Spain has the same - but getting the signature to work on Linux isn’t too easy.
Fixing things like that - demanding that government services are accessible by open and free software - is a major step.