Comment by aleksei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleksei | Hacker News Reader

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This would be a big misstep for Finland. At the moment, the old forest industry & export is dying off, with no replacement in sight. A viable candidate would be datacenters, which would benefit from the existing factory halls and cooling, climate, and possible future green tech solutions. Along with no domestic mass surveillance, no secret courts and no NSLs, this could be a great "pivot" for the existing infrastructure.

If this change were to pass, however, there will be little internet related tech locating to Finland, which is what the government is actually hoping to happen.

Also of interest are the reasons behind the proposed change. There has been little to none "national security" issues in Finland, so it's somewhat odd to see it pushed as the main reason.

The director of the surveillance police has actually stated in the past that they rely a lot on information passed to them from other surveillance agencies, and that they don't really have anything to give back. I think this is more about amassing data for exchanges between agencies, rather than an any actual threat.

It is not realistic that data centers would be able to replace even a fraction of the jobs and revenues of the forest industry.

For example, the Google data center in Hamina directly employs about 125 people. The taxes are limited to salaries, power, etc. I'm pretty sure (although didn't check) that the data center is not turning a profit, even though it probably does generate a tremendous amount of money for Google.

> This would be a big misstep for Finland. At the moment, the old forest industry & export is dying off, with no replacement in sight. A viable candidate would be datacenters

Yes, this vision has been thrown about, but they thing is, even if the wildest predictions were to come through, the employment generated by these large-scale datacenters is a small fraction of the jobs lost in other industries. And most of these jobs are relatively low-paying ones such as perimeter security, replacing faulty servers etc. A far cry from, say, the hordes of engineers employed by the telecom sector during the boom years.

Sure, they may indirectly generate a lot of jobs, but you don't need to live next to (or even in the same country as) an Amazon, Google, or whomever's, gigantic datacenter in order to use it.

Well yes, my wording may have been off: the factory workers will remain unemployed no matter what.

But converting factories to data centres would be a way to avoid demolition, and create a demand for specialised tech knowledge and make Finland somewhat relevant to the internet, which is what the government is after.

Regarding government's desire for internet relevancy, it would make a lot more sense to first gain the companies' trust and commitment to Finnish datacenters. And only then change the laws (or even more sensibly, just perform surveillance illegally).

I don't really disagree with your notion. However, as someone noted above, Sweden already has these laws in place, all the data from Finland currently (before the sea cable to Germany is ready) goes through Sweden, and their laws didn't prevent Facebook from building a huge datacenter in Luleå. But yeah, they probably would have _some_ effect.

They do have a certain neighbour who is generally aggressive, has attacked them only 75 years ago, and is currently attacking its other neighbours. So easy to understand that they need to be very vigilant, especially with terrorist and separatist threats

Speaking as a Finn, the sort of hybrid/proxy warfare techniques Russia has employed against Ukraine and Georgia would not work in case of Finland. The closest thing we have to a separatist movement is probably some Ålanders who wouldn't mind if the island belonged to Sweden instead.

Yeah there's no Russian populace wondering wait why am I in a different country now (I think)

Or rather, it is too small to have a very significant impact. About 1.3 % of population is Russian-speaking. It'll overcome the second language Swedish (5 %) in a few decades, but on the other hand, Arabic will probably overcome it by that time too.

That's only half the story. If you dig deeper most of Russian dealings involve Nato pushing their own thing against Russia, breaking agreement, and them responding. Doesn't mean its right, but it's nowhere as black and white as it's made to be.

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