How hard can it be?

No really, how hard is it

Since 2022 I’ve been working at BIT. Which also means that for a few years now I’ve been involved in something BIT has actually been doing for thirty years already: digital autonomy.

All of BIT’s services run entirely within the Netherlands. Our data centres are ours, the hardware is ours, the cables, the racks, the systems: owned and operated by us, on our own soil, under our own responsibility. And wherever possible, we use open-source solutions.

For a long time it felt as if we were just screaming into the void about digital autonomy. We warned about dependence on foreign providers, about vendor lock-in, while most of the market was really only looking at short-term convenience. Our message is finally starting to land, including with the Dutch government. All of a sudden, digital autonomy is no longer a niche concern but a serious political issue.

“But that’s scary”

And yet, in personal conversations and in the comments on LinkedIn, I keep hearing and reading the same objections. Yes, but then we all have to switch to things we don’t know. And that’s scary. And surely that’s not possible, because we’re used to Office and Outlook and that feels comfortable. I say: give me a break. Aren’t we making a huge fuss about something we’ve actually been through dozens of times already?

Let me tell a story. When I got my first smartphone, the thing was completely different from what I was used to. Buttons were in different places, functions that didn’t work the way I expected, and I had big opionions about all of it. Later I swiched to another brand and the whole story started again. More grumbling, more swearing, more of that feeling that the old one was better. And yet now I use that phone without thinking about it.

Different buttons

And that’s exactly what happens when you switch to different digital systems. For an end user, the core of the work hardly changes. You still send emails, create documents, video-call, share and store files. Whether you do that with MS Teams, Nextcloud Talk, Zoom or Jitsi; with OneDrive, Google Drive or the BIT NL Cloud: functionally, it makes very little difference. The goal remains the same: communicating and collaborating online. The only thing that really changes is the form. The buttons are in slightly different places, some features have different names, the interface looks just a bit different. That’s not a technical problem, it’s human discomfort.

And those alternatives to the big players have been around for a long time already. European and Dutch solutions have been running at scale for years. Nextcloud didn’t appear yesterday, and Jitsi isn’t experimental software. Dutch cloud providers run stable environments that, for end users, are just as reliable as the major platforms. The idea that “we’re not there yet” is simply nonsense.

Digital autonomy isn’t exciting (but it is important)

For the people working behind the scenes, this has never really been the biggest issue. They’ve been working with Linux and open-source solutions for years and know how to find their way around. As far as I’m concerned, the discussion isn’t really about technical feasibility at all, but about how much “inconvenience” we’re willing to accept in exchange for more control, more transparency, and less dependence.

Digital autonomy doesn’t ask heroic feats from end users. Just change, and acknowledgement that change exists. That was true with my first (and second, and third) smartphone, and switching software is no different.

So how hard is it, really? Not that hard. It takes a bit of getting used to, a bit of searching, and maybe some grumbling and swearing. And then it works. Just like all those other things we once dreaded, but which turned out to be perfectly manageable in the end.

By: Els de Jong