Cutting Bureaucracy

This award is in the “What makes me really angry” category.

Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy sucks!
Bureaucracy – what an imposition on us intelligent, freedom-loving, enterprising and up to here gentle people!
But as soon as we want to engage in something, bureaucracy gets in our way. It puts its whole arsenal of obstacles before us: forms, paragraphs we have never heard of, cumbersome wordings, smallprint, deadlines.

Everyone is against bureaucracy. Each and every one of us has stories to tell. There is hardly anything that will get you an easier round of applause than the hatred of bureaucracy.

But we are not here to make it easy for ourselves, are we? No, this BigBrotherAward does not go to bureaucracy. The BigBrotherAward in the “What makes me really angry” category goes to

“Cutting bureaucracy”

as a pretext for something quite different.

Yes, everyone thinks that “cutting bureaucracy” is great. Which is why “cutting bureaucracy” can be found in the manifesto of just about any political party. And the most active protagonists in the fight against bureaucracy are businesses. And also their advance organisations, lobbyists like the German “Initiative ‘New Social Market Economy’” (Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft).¹ They can hardly contain their zeal. At least while we are talking about state bureaucracy.

But, is bureaucracy only and genuinely a state phenomenon? Well, why don’t you go ahead and try reaching someone from a large corporation on the phone.

As soon as it is about a problem, if you need a service, have a question, want to lodge a complaint, cancel a subscription, want a repair or a refund, any sensible kind of contact is wilfully made difficult and you are sent through a carefully orchestrated fatigue circuit.

To cancel Amazon Prime or Facebook, you have to click your way through complex navigation menus. Where there are call centres, their agents are often explicitly forbidden to pass us through to the right case handler.² Google has carefully refrained from offering any contact for many of its services.

What makes me really angry: The hypocrisy! Because what is this, other than bureaucracy?

When business representatives call for “cutting bureaucracy”, they don’t normally mean that things should be made easier for citizens, but for their companies. They themselves want to act without inhibition from regulations and laws. “Cutting bureaucracy” is only a pretext – mostly they are after “deregulation”, the dismantling of rules.

“Deregulation”, in plain words, means this: Let’s do away with consumer rights, privacy laws, protection of the environment, worker’s rights, press freedom, fair competition laws and other tedious stuff. Big Tech wants freedoms only for itself. And that is where the EU really gets on their nerves, because if you want to do business in Europe, there are rules that apply to everyone. Such as: the European General Data Protection Regulation, Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, AI Act, and Data Act.

This narrative of cutting bureaucracy is not new. What is new, though, is the global political situation in which deregulation is to be pushed through. In particular we can now follow in real time how a coup is unfolding in the United States: The law is being trampled underfoot, Congress is disenfranchised, competent people in government departments are replaced by unscrupulous opportunists. Favouritism, open corruption, completely unashamed – the installation of a mafia state. It is breathtaking how quickly the Silicon Valley bosses have sucked up to the US president in anticipatory obedience, and how they endear themselves to him. This way the whole world can see: Big Tech is now relying on the power of its godfather in the White House.

This alliance between Big Tech and a mafia-like president is highly dangerous to us, too! It is building an empire³ with access to software, platforms and information flows worldwide – combined with chaos, arbitrariness and blackmail. This is a threat to our lifeline.

Just to remind ourselves: Most companies and governments in Germany are still using Microsoft, Google, Amazon and any number of digital services from the US. That, first, exposes them to surveillance from US intelligence agencies – because every US company must hand over data from non‑US citizens to the agencies at any time: FISA Act, Cloud Act and Patriot Act compel them to do this. And, second, they risk that their technological dependency will be ruthlessly exploited as political leverage. (“Wouldn’t it be sad if your Microsoft server were to fail or if something were to happen to your data in the Amazon cloud?”). Denmark no longer dares to protest against transgressions like US agents in Greenland or the arbitrary closure of a Danish company’s wind farm project in the USA. This is because Denmark’s government is fully digitalised using US software – and in Copenhagen, everything now seems to be imaginable.⁴

Of course: If, like Big Tech, you have built your business model on advertising, manipulation and surveillance, you will see privacy rules as a hindrance. If you are a social media platform that earns its money through spreading hatred, lies and disinformation, because these are the things that gain you the most attention and therefore advertising revenue, you will be against the Digital Services Act, because this act will facilitate transparency on the algorithms. If you want to maintain and exploit a monopoly, you will hate the Digital Markets Act, because this law supports competition and free markets.⁵ These laws are far from perfect, but they create a legal basis and protect consumers and European businesses from arbitrariness and from the rule of the strongest. In the eyes of Big Tech, that is exactly the problem.

I will translate it like this: US companies are like: “Let’s have all your personal data! Thou shalt have no other platforms before me. All your data, life expressions and creative works, wherever we can find them, are unclaimed flotsam and now belong to us. Resistance is futile. Data protection is theft of company property.”

That is robbery!⁶

And if courts or the EU want to step in, as they did with a fine for Google, the godfather from the White House immediately springs into action and threatens new punitive tariffs. That is (attempted) blackmail.

What is one to do when faced with blackmail?

The expert advice from the police, chambers of commerce and detective agencies to victims of blackmail is clear:

1. Say no. Never pay. If you give in to blackmail, you will keep being blackmailed ever more.

2. Make the object of the blackmail harmless. Take the leverage away from the blackmailer.

What does this mean for the EU?

1. Enforce digital legislation! Do not make exceptions for US corporations.

2. Get out of the dependency, make digital sovereignty in Europe a reality, stop using services from Google, Amazon, Microsoft & Co. as soon as possible.

“Digital sovereignty” has been announced as a political objective for years. But nothing is happening! That really pisses me off!

We need a “digital turning point”⁷, writes IT security expert Manuel Atug, founder of the working group on critical infrastructure (AG kritische Infrastruktur, AG Kritis). Quote: “We have to assume about the authoritarian United States that they are out to actively harm us. (…) The experience of the last weeks tells us to assume the worst. (…) The technological and informational dependency on the US used to be only a theoretical security risk. It has now become a reality.”

Has this realisation now also reached the German government? I have doubts. The digital summit, organised by the government, seems to have been cancelled this year. At the conference “Smart Country Convention”, which is organised by the German industry federation Bitkom⁸, there was a talk titled “Germany’s digital turning point”. Sounds promising, doesn’t it? But guess who held this talk? Someone who works for Microsoft! Guys, that is not how this independence thing works!

Mafia godfathers demand submission. Which is why their minions have to keep repeating the ridiculous lies of the US president. Everyone knows that these are lies. Those that repeat them know that they are becoming complicit. If you sell your soul, you also lose your spine.

What makes me really angry: The EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, German chancellor Merz and others become complicit if they suck up to the mafia in the White House. At a confidential meeting in Paris, US vice president Vance called on the Commission to place European digital legislation on hold for US companies. Whether they will comply is not clear, despite all the claims to the contrary. We do understand that the EU Commission and the German government are in a difficult situation. We do not assume bad faith. But we see the threat that they are losing sight of what they are about to do and what damage they would cause. Perhaps they believe that through deregulation, meaning the suspension of digital legislation, they will be able to able buy themselves a reprieve from punitive tariffs. They can’t. Because the only thing we can rely on from the US is arbitrariness – any agreement can be broken at any time.

Other voices, not normally part of our crowd, have got the message – across all political sides: The media minister in the German state of North Rhine–Westphalia has strongly rejected making European digital legislation a bargaining chip. He says: “We must not quarrel about sand moulds in Germany while the Big Tech platforms are taking away the entire sandbox with their bulldozers.” The German start-up business association warns of the consequences for innovative European companies if the Digital Markets Act is not going to be enforced. The German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche writes: “For Europe it will be worthwhile to stand firm. Big Tech needs Europe. Many times, US digital corporations have threatened they were not going to bring certain features to Europe – only to backpedal because this market is too important. The EU should use this in their negotiations with Trump.”

In fact, Europe could act with much more confidence, because Europe has something substantial on offer: 450 million people and about 23 million companies – a huge market that neither the Tech companies nor the US as a whole want to miss out on.
And those wanting to do business in this market must stick to our rules. That’s it. And that equally applies to everyone, no matter where the company is based.⁹

We have to finally get serious with digital sovereignty! Federal government departments and all important institutions, schools, universities, municipal utilities, associations, companies have to get away from Microsoft, Google, Amazon et al. as quickly as possible. Transitioning all the infrastructure will cause a few hiccups, but hey: We can do this! For a long time we have had usable alternatives based on Free Software. Give the developers public commissions so that the software can be developed further and serve the common good! We already have companies and cooperatives offering independent platforms and services. Give them contracts making it worthwhile to invest further. We have research, we have creative talents and innovative small enterprises, who dare to do things. And we prefer the rule of law to arbitrariness and the law of the jungle.

Congratulations on the BigBrotherAward, dear “cutting of bureaucracy”: From today, your time as a pretext for deregulation has passed.