Pluralistic: If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it) (26 Feb 2026)

[Karellen]

@doctorow

Trump is using tech companies to attack his geopolitical rivals, ordering Microsoft to shut down both the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian high court in retaliation for their pursuit of the criminal dictators Benjamin Netanyahu and Jair Bolsonaro. This means that Trump has violated the quid pro quo deal for keeping anticircumvention law on your statute books, and he has made the case for killing anticircumvention as quickly as possible in order to escape American tech platforms before they are weaponized against you:

@doctorow

But there’s one objection that keeps coming up: “What if this makes Trump mad?” Or, more specifically, "What if this makes Trump more mad, so instead of hitting us with a 10% tariff, it’s a 1,000% tariff?

I think the big question is, what if this makes Trump more mad, so instead of hitting us with a 10% tariff, he blocks everyone in our government, civil service, and local governments from being able to access any US-hosted cloud services like Microsoft email accounts, Microsoft Office 365 services, Gmail, or Google Docs - before the transition to home-grown sovereign services is complete?

Sure, it might speed up the transition - if the government keeps functioning long enough to get there.