The International Criminal Court Wants to Become Independent of USA Technology

I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of.

Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement?

edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)

EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?

Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.

You are right. We need to make an effort, start small and tackle this issue step by step. I do support this effort and I think these are great news.

I stand by the comment of this being dependent on a commitment to higher values than "cheapest ok solution" which is all too common in the private sector.

If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan."

So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.

The tariffs in your second link are not sanctions, and in fact the President levying tariffs as a normal course of business is illegal and unconstitutional in the United States. But it's a good example of the lawlessness of the current President, and his grabs at more power in an attempt to become a tyrant.

> But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump."

Yes, it absolutely was closed at the request of Trump, via sanctions. That's the entire point. The President of the United States can and will target anybody he does not like for whatever minor reason crosses his mind on a random afternoon. That makes it risky to engage in any sort of long-term transaction with a US company.

I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"?

Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).

The US isn't part of the ICC, but there are plenty of other governments who are and take this seriously. At least one will make a big deal about the ICC being blocked and governments have more power than even large companies.

The trick is to send an email, have it whitelisted a bunch of times. Then it just works.

Once I massmailed by mistake. Google rightly spammed the emails. Had to unspam them and was back within a few days.

Outlook was worst but even that worked.

Its 100% doable

But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.

The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.

On a national level I agree not to steal, and in return nobody else is allowed to steal from me. On the ICC level my country agrees not to genocide anyone, and in return others aren't allowed to genocide either

In this case, there’s a straightforward benefit to it in that it could be used to prosecute crimes against the US and US citizens, and soft benefits e.g. of the US being seen a a paragon of lawfulness and trust. There’s likely more, these are just what I could think of immediately.

Also, because they are tired of the diplomatic cost and expense of working with other countries to set up ad hoc tribunals for particular conflicts and want to get the job done once and properly. (That's actually why the US was one of the leaders of the effort that produced the ICC, even though it did a U-turn against it at the last minute.)

Same reason individuals tend to want to live in a society and the rules that come with it.

Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

If US soldiers are (once again) committing war crimes, will the US do anything? What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes? Should there not be one?

Its not “service members” that are the usual defendants at the ICC.

For the same reason as any other treaty - the corresponding benefits.

> If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do.

That's not what the ICC is for. The ICC is for when a country won't do so when they should be.

> Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.

The US has a very long history of telling other foreign entities what they can and cannot do.