Growing Recognition Out There That Courts Must Abandon Microsoft or Have No Perception of Authority, Autonomy, Independence, Fairness, and More
This will impact many impending and ongoing cases
Today I stumbled upon the headline "Digital Fascism is Still Just Fascism" more than 3 times, having earlier in the week seen Russell Coker (history of terror sympathising and perhaps closeted antisemitism) writing about the same thing. Via Planet Debian (where politics is allowed as long as it conforms to groupthink): "The latest news is that MS is shutting down services for the International Court of Justice after a panel of ICC judges issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is now making politicians realise the issues of email accounts hosted outside their jurisdiction."
We wrote about self-hosting E-mail as recently as last month and about courts adopting Microsoft's control over court processes and platforms earlier this month, even one week ago. We explained that no court should let such a criminal company be in charge of anything (computing, data and so on), more so knowing that Microsoft already misused this control/access in the past.
Russell Coker wrote: "Now it would be very easy for the ICC to host their own mail servers and they probably will do just that in the near future. I’m sure that there are many companies offering to set them up accounts in a hurry to deal with this (probably including some of the Dutch companies I’ve worked for). Let’s imagine for the sake of discussion that the ICC has their own private server, the US government could compel Google and MS to block the IP addresses of that server and then at least 1/3 of the EU population won’t get mail from them. If the ICC used email addresses hosted on someone else’s server then Google and MS could be compelled to block the addresses in question for the same result. The ICC could have changing email addresses to get around block lists and there could be a game of cat and mouse between the ICC and the US government but that would just be annoying for everyone."
Setting up E-mail isn't technically hard. One single person at ICC can get that done and maintain the setup. We did that many times ourselves.
Regarding the above article that says "Digital Fascism is Still Just Fascism", the fine article says:
But the most frightening part of this for the rest of the world is that his email account has been shut down by Microsoft, according to ICC staffers. This may seem like a small thing, especially in the list of other problems he’s facing. In fact, he opened an account with Switzerland-based Proton mail, and presumably got back to emailing people, at least the ones whose email addresses he could remember.
What makes his account suspension so chilling, is what it implies, how it threatens much of the world. His suspension from a Microsoft email account wasn’t court ordered, nor did it legally need to be. Big Tech companies use click-though contracts on everything we use. What they give they can take away at any time, for the benefit of anyone they like, even if who they like is a big angry Cheeto president with tiny, tiny hands.
We are not a political site, so we won't be discussing the political angles here, however it's worth noting that the article is by Quinn Norton, who is known for her relationship with the late Aaron Swartz, who actually spoke about those sorts of issues, transparency in particular. There are many more articles about this, but some are simply not in English [paywall, Danish], though they take different angle with headlines that say Microsoft is blocking international court and this reveals a "new tech weapon" in the fight over Greenland ("Microsoft-blokering af international domstol afslører nyt tech-våben i kampen om Grønland").
The only logical solution here is not to seek assurances from Microsoft but to dump Microsoft. It was likely illegal to outsource to Microsoft in the first place.
Imagine making a complaint about Microsoft to an agency that uses Microsoft, e.g. the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS).█