And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.
Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.
That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.
EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.
Moving to a different mail server and office suite keeps the ICC working, but does not really protect people at the ICC from US sanctions. Their lives can be made very difficult: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...
I think this bit of the article is a critical problem:
>By outsourcing the management of IT systems, these educational institutions are losing technical knowledge and control. As a result, they are becoming increasingly dependent on big tech, putting academic freedom and independence at risk.
All of this is fixable but its expensive to fix. No one is motivated enough to spend the money.
Until you have companies trying to intervene.
If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?
I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.
WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing
https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.
For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.
But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.