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Interesting. Apparently they are planning to spend €2 million a year just to keep manual backups of critical data in case the US cuts off access.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/dutch-tax-office-moves-emai...

The Swedish tax authorities went all in on Azure. Insane. And screw solidarity with the Danes. We rent our digital infra, and now the Don extractive rents. He also threatens us if we want to have our own laws or, god forbid, support our own digital infra.

Ok… that’s odd. Wouldn’t expect anything like this from the Dutch government, since they have a very progressive digital image in Europe.

For the past 15 years being progressive meant moving everything to the (US-owned) cloud

Image ≠ reality :)

Netherlands is generally very sensitive to price, so if the US cloud (plus the 2 millions for the backup) was cheaper than the alternatives they gladly took it. Also, I would expect Microsoft offered them a big discount...

Even the infrastructure for .nl domain registration moved to the US (AWS IIRC).

There’s some Dutch governments organisations which are quite progressive, but others continue digging themselves deeps into MS/AWS.