When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the consequences were far-reaching yet quickly enforced.
The restrictions cut off the ICC chief prosecutor’s access to Microsoft services, including email, followed by a freezing of his personal and institutional bank accounts in affected jurisdictions.
While this was happening, the Dutch government was watching, coming to the bitter realization that access to essential services depended on decisions made in the U.S.
Hence, their response to this is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English.
It is a framework that looks to tackle the government’s digital stack, covering the OS, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT management tools, and AI, with all of it being built around a NixOS foundation.
It is the silver lining to this situation that countries are seeing, finally, the very obvious disadvantage of relying on a single foreign country for many of their critical infrastructure systems and their military. I understand that outsourcing these things can have short term economic benefits, freeing up your money to spend on other things, but short term vision and taking the path of least resistance is a social cancer and we see that the US has become malignant with it.