I understand the move but I also see bears on the road.
When the politicians control their communication apps then it is sooner or later also very convenient for politicians to ask the operators to disappear conversations that shouldn't have taken place or conversations that somehow are political liabilities.
Governments want to move away from “platforms over which we have no control,” says Dutch minister.
Sure, that is fair enough. But why is EU not setting up their own servers for whisper or activity pub or whatever OSS protocols and just make that their only official and approved communication channel?
The problem isn't setting up the servers, they already exist for the most part. It is getting anyone to use them.
I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change.
If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?
Maybe I'm just too American to understand, but it still baffles me that WhatsApp is used for business purposes. It makes a lot more sense for regular personal messaging, but it seems incredibly unprofessional to me. I would think it bizarre and a bit invasive if my boss tried to text or iMessage me. Are they at least using different accounts for work messaging?
Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
At my workplace we only use WhatsApp for personal comms. Like chatting about which restaurant we go for lunch, who's at the office tomorrow, when is everyone's birthday, what did we do this weekend, that kinda stuff.
For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.
Question, with so many major orgs using it, are there no plans for manual status? The one thing I miss vis-a-vis teams is the ability to manually set myself away, appear offline, busy etc.
Matrix shows me as active (green dot) when I have the client open but there's no way to override that. At least none that I found. I'm a bit surprised all these big governmental clients didn't ask for such a feature :)
Aren't they about to handle DigiD to the U.S? You know, the tool we use for absolutely any sort of identification when interacting with the government?
They're setting up matrix servers. Nato uses matrix.
Too bad the UX is dogshit and the end users lose their keys every 90 days. Even though they're explicitly warned, loudly and clearly, to not lose the keys.
Matrix software stack isn't idiot proof; Signal is.
The key is only necessary as a backup these days. You can share the key from one client to another which works well. As long as the user has a laptop and phone it should be ok unless they lose both.
But yeah it would be nice if the key could be escrowed somewhere for big organisations.
You'd think right? But most of south american and southeast asia political scandals were cause by political figures using whatsapp and messages "leaking" thanks to a "hacker".
Yeah. But then the EU lost the plot a very long time ago. There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one. It's ASML.
From 2008 to today, in USD and inflation adjusted, the eurozone saw no growth. While both the US and China skyrocketed.
There's been this little thing lately that kinda took off: it's called AI. Where's the EU? How much of a leader was the EU in this AI revolution?
Explain how the EU is not long gone?
The EU is not even sinking at this point: it sank years ago. And it's busy making sure it's turning into the third-world.
I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening.
Economically the EU might not keep pace, but the built infrastructure to live an enjoyable life is there.
I certainly had a delightful time visiting the winter markets across Europe, and it seemed like there were a fair number of people living well.
While the Eurozone might not be a great place to start a new business it is still a going concern, enough that those top 50 companies all have a European presence.
What's frightening to me is that even in the EU people seem to think that unchecked consolidation of services is a good thing. I don't think it is a good thing at all that there exist companies with a budget larger than an average country.
> “Everyone in Europe is getting more and more awake on sovereignty ... For us it’s data sovereignty.”
If Julian Assange wasn't the wakeup call necessary to put this into action then I don't think the whims of a few government ministers amount to a hill of beans.
The problem with these efforts is always the same: organizations make their own messenger, and the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it. And that's ignoring that you can bet your firstborn they cut corners developing these messengers, so they're not pleasant to use to boot. In 2026 you still hear complaints of government employees that they only have 200 mb of mailbox space ... sigh
People "don't trust" in the very abstract sense, Mark Zuckerberg. But in a very real sense they don't trust their manager at all, and they know their own manager can see their messages on the "sovereign" messenger. Zuckerberg wants to sell them stuff they don't want on occasion. Their manager ... well they're cheating their manager.
Oh and it doesn't even buy extra security: the platform owners can spy directly through hardware backdoors, they can "update" any app on the phone, and they have the root keys to the secure element, and so it isn't secure to them. And if you look under the covers ... the backend is on AWS? No? Must be on Azure then.
So annoying lots of people, reducing functionality, for no actual security.
Sure sounds like EU governments are behind this ...
That doesn’t really apply in the EU, because your manager or even your org don’t have any right to read your messages, that would constitute a crime actually.
I suspect the reason would be far simpler - people use what they are used to, and WhatsApp is the de-facto standard Messenger app all over Europe.
For private discussions, you do that on your private device, with a private messenger.
I would say that the digital sovereignty is more about "Entity X doesn't want the US to have access to all of their internal communications". Typically a non-US company or a non-US government should care about that.
> the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it.
Not sure what you mean here; I happily use whatever work email and messenger systems are provided for work. Most people do. I don't actually mind that IT services have access; they are in any case covered by GDPR.
> organizations make their own messenger, and the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it
Legally mandate its use for official communications.
So the managers also demand their employees don't use it you mean? Because then it can be used against them in court? (cfr. email "retention policies" legal departments demand these days?)
"We shall trust 27 different sets of 3 to 10 guys in garages and ensure they never become large enough to blackmail a large percentage of the world's governments safe in the knowledge we can in fact arrest them for illegal bs" does have an appeal however.
It's more trusting something you can audit and control (e.g. open source) vs trusting something you cannot audit and control (e.g. proprietary service by BigTech).
Europe has been irrelevant since 2008. Basically 0 growth and pensions larger than paychecks. Even if young Europeans had the skills or the desire, which they don't, they wouldn't have the capital.
The US is preparing to siphon most of the EUs wealth with this AI bubble. This title is just one in a long line of smoke and mirrors meant to distract Europeans from the fact that trillions are being spent to build datacenters in the US.
And really I'm super glad I don't live in the US with the nightmare regime there. Money isn't everything. Things cost a lot less here too. I don't need to have two jobs to pay for rent and healthcare, when I get fired I'm getting welfare. I don't get shot by random civilians carrying guns or even the ICE Gestapo.
European civil servants are also usually banned from using AI — perhaps with the exception of Microsoft copilot. They live in a bubble where they just don’t know. This goes for most academics as well.
The European Commission actually has an internal AI chat platform with a selection of different models, and recommendations on which to use based on the classification level of the information that will be shared with the AI model.
Some are hosted internally (LLAMA models), other are sourced from commercial providers (Mistral, OpenAI).
I don't know of any software or services that would be banned at my university. People use all sorts of LLMs extensively.
At least in Finland also civil servants are free to use what AI services they want, given they don't put in sensitive information. Just like they can use any search engine they want.
Ah yes. "It's so bad that people in government agencies cannot give sensitive info to US companies or blindly rely on LLMs for their decisions since nothing has ever happened when people in governments blindly trusted black boxes"
I understand the move but I also see bears on the road. When the politicians control their communication apps then it is sooner or later also very convenient for politicians to ask the operators to disappear conversations that shouldn't have taken place or conversations that somehow are political liabilities.
Governments want to move away from “platforms over which we have no control,” says Dutch minister.
Sure, that is fair enough. But why is EU not setting up their own servers for whisper or activity pub or whatever OSS protocols and just make that their only official and approved communication channel?
Actually European Commission has been on its own Mastodon server for a couple years:
https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/public/local
They do, actually.
For example the French government has its own Matrix platform https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/ and its own Mastodon instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/.
The problem isn't setting up the servers, they already exist for the most part. It is getting anyone to use them.
I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change.
If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?
Maybe I'm just too American to understand, but it still baffles me that WhatsApp is used for business purposes. It makes a lot more sense for regular personal messaging, but it seems incredibly unprofessional to me. I would think it bizarre and a bit invasive if my boss tried to text or iMessage me. Are they at least using different accounts for work messaging?
Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
most of the world is using WA for biz. US is an outlier
Most biz dont have the kind of money to hand over to Goog workspace or M$. therefore, you get what its free, and thats WA biz
At my workplace we only use WhatsApp for personal comms. Like chatting about which restaurant we go for lunch, who's at the office tomorrow, when is everyone's birthday, what did we do this weekend, that kinda stuff.
For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.
It is my understanding that a lot of EU governments are setting up their own matrix servers.
This is true. We just published a map of it: https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe
Question, with so many major orgs using it, are there no plans for manual status? The one thing I miss vis-a-vis teams is the ability to manually set myself away, appear offline, busy etc.
Matrix shows me as active (green dot) when I have the client open but there's no way to override that. At least none that I found. I'm a bit surprised all these big governmental clients didn't ask for such a feature :)
I'd really want to see more examples of https://social.bund.de
This is the Mastodon server of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). Embrace decentralization.
Here is one of the French government: https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/
Aren't they about to handle DigiD to the U.S? You know, the tool we use for absolutely any sort of identification when interacting with the government?
They're setting up matrix servers. Nato uses matrix.
Too bad the UX is dogshit and the end users lose their keys every 90 days. Even though they're explicitly warned, loudly and clearly, to not lose the keys.
Matrix software stack isn't idiot proof; Signal is.
The key is only necessary as a backup these days. You can share the key from one client to another which works well. As long as the user has a laptop and phone it should be ok unless they lose both.
But yeah it would be nice if the key could be escrowed somewhere for big organisations.
It’s just common sense.
You'd think right? But most of south american and southeast asia political scandals were cause by political figures using whatsapp and messages "leaking" thanks to a "hacker".
Good. The US is gone.
Digital sovereignty would always have been a good idea, regardless of the present insanity.
> Good. The US is gone.
Yeah. But then the EU lost the plot a very long time ago. There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one. It's ASML.
From 2008 to today, in USD and inflation adjusted, the eurozone saw no growth. While both the US and China skyrocketed.
There's been this little thing lately that kinda took off: it's called AI. Where's the EU? How much of a leader was the EU in this AI revolution?
Explain how the EU is not long gone?
The EU is not even sinking at this point: it sank years ago. And it's busy making sure it's turning into the third-world.
I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening.
Economically the EU might not keep pace, but the built infrastructure to live an enjoyable life is there.
I certainly had a delightful time visiting the winter markets across Europe, and it seemed like there were a fair number of people living well.
While the Eurozone might not be a great place to start a new business it is still a going concern, enough that those top 50 companies all have a European presence.
What's frightening to me is that even in the EU people seem to think that unchecked consolidation of services is a good thing. I don't think it is a good thing at all that there exist companies with a budget larger than an average country.
> “Everyone in Europe is getting more and more awake on sovereignty ... For us it’s data sovereignty.”
If Julian Assange wasn't the wakeup call necessary to put this into action then I don't think the whims of a few government ministers amount to a hill of beans.
Good luck.
The problem with these efforts is always the same: organizations make their own messenger, and the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it. And that's ignoring that you can bet your firstborn they cut corners developing these messengers, so they're not pleasant to use to boot. In 2026 you still hear complaints of government employees that they only have 200 mb of mailbox space ... sigh
People "don't trust" in the very abstract sense, Mark Zuckerberg. But in a very real sense they don't trust their manager at all, and they know their own manager can see their messages on the "sovereign" messenger. Zuckerberg wants to sell them stuff they don't want on occasion. Their manager ... well they're cheating their manager.
Oh and it doesn't even buy extra security: the platform owners can spy directly through hardware backdoors, they can "update" any app on the phone, and they have the root keys to the secure element, and so it isn't secure to them. And if you look under the covers ... the backend is on AWS? No? Must be on Azure then.
So annoying lots of people, reducing functionality, for no actual security.
Sure sounds like EU governments are behind this ...
That doesn’t really apply in the EU, because your manager or even your org don’t have any right to read your messages, that would constitute a crime actually.
I suspect the reason would be far simpler - people use what they are used to, and WhatsApp is the de-facto standard Messenger app all over Europe.
Well, on the work messenger, you talk about work.
For private discussions, you do that on your private device, with a private messenger.
I would say that the digital sovereignty is more about "Entity X doesn't want the US to have access to all of their internal communications". Typically a non-US company or a non-US government should care about that.
> the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it.
Not sure what you mean here; I happily use whatever work email and messenger systems are provided for work. Most people do. I don't actually mind that IT services have access; they are in any case covered by GDPR.
In some cases there has been a legal crackdown on back channels: https://www.ft.com/content/68c26cf6-52d5-11e3-a73e-00144feab...
The Boris Johnson problem remains, but it can at least be made against the rules for normal work purposes.
(Remember not to type crimes into a computer, people)
https://youtu.be/9Klj0H6YMLQ?si=L7DrQgF0pI07zLE9
“Videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we ever had!”
> (Remember not to type crimes into a computer, people)
Please ignore that. It’s daft talk. Definitely record your abuses of power.
> organizations make their own messenger, and the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it
Legally mandate its use for official communications.
And they'll keep doing what Boris Johnson was doing when in power: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-covid...
They'll do it anyway.
This is helpful because it makes the criminality stand out.
Because, yes, in democracies we have public records laws.
So the managers also demand their employees don't use it you mean? Because then it can be used against them in court? (cfr. email "retention policies" legal departments demand these days?)
In most European countries we don't have this extensive discovery thing that the US has. It's not really a problem.
I've always found it ironic that people who distrust software from Mark Zuckerberg instead trust software from... 3 guys in a garage.
"Those 3 guys in a garage would never sell us out! They are paragons of virtue!"
"We shall trust 27 different sets of 3 to 10 guys in garages and ensure they never become large enough to blackmail a large percentage of the world's governments safe in the knowledge we can in fact arrest them for illegal bs" does have an appeal however.
It's more trusting something you can audit and control (e.g. open source) vs trusting something you cannot audit and control (e.g. proprietary service by BigTech).
Europe has been irrelevant since 2008. Basically 0 growth and pensions larger than paychecks. Even if young Europeans had the skills or the desire, which they don't, they wouldn't have the capital.
The US is preparing to siphon most of the EUs wealth with this AI bubble. This title is just one in a long line of smoke and mirrors meant to distract Europeans from the fact that trillions are being spent to build datacenters in the US.
Trillions of made-up money.
And really I'm super glad I don't live in the US with the nightmare regime there. Money isn't everything. Things cost a lot less here too. I don't need to have two jobs to pay for rent and healthcare, when I get fired I'm getting welfare. I don't get shot by random civilians carrying guns or even the ICE Gestapo.
Those things really matter too.
I hope most people have a broader definition of "relevance".
European civil servants are also usually banned from using AI — perhaps with the exception of Microsoft copilot. They live in a bubble where they just don’t know. This goes for most academics as well.
What do you mean by most academics? In Europe? That's just blatently untrue.
The European Commission actually has an internal AI chat platform with a selection of different models, and recommendations on which to use based on the classification level of the information that will be shared with the AI model.
Some are hosted internally (LLAMA models), other are sourced from commercial providers (Mistral, OpenAI).
Maybe that's a good thing. I want people running my country to actually know how to do things.
No idea why this is down voted. Ai makes people dumber and kills problem solving skills over a long timespan.
What are you on about?
I don't know of any software or services that would be banned at my university. People use all sorts of LLMs extensively.
At least in Finland also civil servants are free to use what AI services they want, given they don't put in sensitive information. Just like they can use any search engine they want.
Ah yes. "It's so bad that people in government agencies cannot give sensitive info to US companies or blindly rely on LLMs for their decisions since nothing has ever happened when people in governments blindly trusted black boxes"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...