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

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.

Image ≠ reality :)