[halffullbrain]

Dane here.

A lot of debate at the moment about digital sovereignty, with a very trusted ally threatening to annex Greenland while perhaps shifting its internal power structure (courts vs executive powers) while also continuing a trend of increased executive power over private companies (NSL etc.)

Meanwhile, EU is apparently way behind both China and US in high-tech industry and digital infrastructure in general and AI technology in particular.

So it's a welcome discourse - we really should go through the threat scenarios, in light of the changed parameters. My observations:

* Consider: Could the society function if major cloud services (say, Microsoft 365 or Azure's IaaS services) - were suddenly nullrouted from Denmark? (Keep in mind that Denmark is heavily digitalized in both the private and public sectors)

* While that not a likely scenario, it's no longer an unthinkable scenario, which it seemed to be in 2024. If it's not unthinkable, it could quickly become a credible threat. "Surrender Greenland, or else..."

* Public sector Denmark is very much a "Microsoft first" country, 99.9% of desktops, office networks and productivity. On back-ends, MS is maybe not so big at the state-level systems, but quite dominant at regional and municipal levels.

* Due to GDPR (and various related side quests), public Denmark has been slow-ish in moving to cloud infrastructure, but e.g. Microsoft 365 is gaining marketshare over locally or semi centralized hosted Exchange servers. So the blast radius is unclear.

* At the same time, Microsoft is taking home quite substantial license fees. The minister's reaction could also play into that.

However, the thing to note is that the Ministry of Digital Affairs is a small ministry. While they control some key infrastructure components (few of which run on Windows, AFAIK), they are not at all responsible for choosing other administrative bodies' choice of office suite or the bargaining with Microsoft. In practice, that power is held by the Ministry of Finance, as is so much else. They might be seeing things differently.

Interesting times indeed. And certainly long overdue to consider alternatives realistically and reduce vendor lock-in where feasible.