The Dutch government relies on American technology companies for virtually all of its digital services. All Dutch municipalities use Microsoft products such as Office 365, Teams, and Azure for their daily operations. This dependence is so deep that only 9% of the municipalities consider a switch to other suppliers feasible, writes Binnenlands Bestuur. The use of Microsoft cloud services in particular is widespread - from email to storage of sensitive documents. The recent police hack, made possible by weak security in Microsoft Outlook, shows how vulnerable this dependence makes us. In this hack, the data of 65,000 police officers was stolen. The lack of in-house IT expertise within the government makes it difficult to develop alternatives. Furthermore, there are few SaaS solutions that support ‘bring your own cloud’, which limits adoption by (semi-)government organizations. This situation did not arise through a conscious choice, but through years of lack of investment in digital infrastructure, according to Tweakers magazine.

When America has dominated much of the world’s IT infrastructure but is now led by an orange fascist butt plug - this is what happens.