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Tuesday, February 03, 2026
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"Nous devons trouver le chemin de la souveraineté numérique"
Nicolas Guillou, juge à la Cour pénale internationale, L’impact des sanctions numériques et les risques pour l’État de droit, Vidéo ici.
Jusqu'à l'année dernière, je peux vous dire que je n'aurais absolument jamais imaginé me retrouver dans une conférence sur le numérique. Parce que moi, mon monde professionnel, ce n'est pas du tout le même.
C'est celui de la justice pénale internationale, c'est-à-dire celui des conflits armés, celui des crimes de masse avec des milliers de victimes. En un mot, c'est celui de la barbarie.
Alors certes, le monde du numérique n'est pas étranger à la justice et particulièrement à la justice pénale internationale parce qu'en fait la preuve des crimes s'est numérisée comme le reste de nos vies. Aujourd'hui, les crimes internationaux sont photographiés, sont filmés, parfois diffusés en direct par les témoins des faits, ce qui fait que la preuve nous est facilitée par le numérique et on peut même mener des investigations sur les enquêteurs n'ont pas accès à un pays en guerre. Mais cette évolution augmente le risque de deep fake et donc une instrumentalisation de la justice. Et puis surtout, elle nous met dans une situation de dépendance vis-à-vis des grands acteurs du numérique. Et c'est à cause de cette dépendance que je suis parmi vous aujourd'hui.
Parce que cette dépendance, elle est aujourd'hui transformée en vassalisation dans un contexte de déclin de l'ordre international. On assiste aujourd'hui en effet à une véritable accélération de l'histoire qui remet en cause nos modèles démocratiques. Depuis plus de 30 ans, on vit dans un monde où la démocratie était censée triompher, où les guerres, même si elles n'avaient pas complètement disparu, elles devenaient presque inconcevables pour une partie de la planète et en particulier pour les Européens. Et bien aujourd'hui, ce temps est révolu et on le voit tous les jours, le monde est de plus en plus incertain, de plus en plus dangereux et particulièrement pour les Européens. En fait, ce qui s'est passé, c'est que depuis l'année dernière, l'arme des sanctions que nous avons bâties avec les Américains et bien elle vient d'être retournée contre l'Europe et dans un seul but : nous soumettre.
Alors je vais vous expliquer d'abord comment fonctionne cette tentative de domination et en particulier sur le numérique et comment je la vis au quotidien et puis ensuite j'introduirai la discussion avec quelques pistes pour créer des solutions pour que à la fin de l'histoire nous puissions rester libres.
Alors comme vous le savez peut-être, j'ai été mis sous sanctions par l'administration américaine depuis août dernier. Alors qu'est-ce que c'est que ces sanctions ? Elles se sont développées au départ pour lutter contre le terrorisme, les violations de droits humains, les trafics de stupéfiants. Il y a environ une quinzaine de milliers de personnes qui sont aujourd'hui sous sanctions. Normalement c'est essentiellement des membres d'Al-Qaïda, de Daesh, des groupes mafieux, des dirigeants de régimes dictatoriaux. et puis depuis 2025, il y a 11 magistrats de la Cour Pénale Internationale et ces sanctions elles vont bien au-delà de l'interdiction du territoire américain et du gel des avoirs aux Etats-Unis parce qu'elles interdisent à toute personne physique ou morale américaine y compris les filiales à l'étranger y compris les nationaux étrangers qui sont eux-mêmes agents de ces filiales et bien de fournir des services à une personne sous sanction.
Alors ça veut dire qu'en pratique ces sanctions elles touchent l'ensemble des actes de votre vie quotidienne parce que le numérique américain détient un quasi-monopole sur notre vie quotidienne En pratique vos comptes auprès d'entreprises américaines sont fermés du jour au lendemain. Alors c'est vrai pour Airbnb, pour Amazon, pour Paypal je n'ai pas besoin de vous faire la liste vous n'avez qu'à regarder sur votre téléphone portable vous verrez tout ce qui s'arrête. Alexa d'Amazon que vous reconnaissez tous et bien elle s'arrête de parler elle ne vous répond plus Votre vie numérique s'arrête. Lorsque vous faites appel à certaines entreprises par exemple sur des sites internet de base et bien vos transactions sont annulées. J'ai par exemple eu le cas d'une réservation de chambre d'hôtel que j'ai fait avec Expedia un hôtel en France et bien en quelques heures j'ai reçu un mail qui m'a dit que ma réservation a été annulée parce que j'étais sous sanction. Et puis quand vous essayez de faire du commerce en ligne, même si vous le faites avec une entreprise qui n'est pas américaine, et bien vous avez toujours le risque d'avoir une entreprise postale américaine qui vous fait la delivery des colis. Donc in fine, vous êtes dans l'incapacité de faire du commerce en ligne, même avec des commerçants non-américains.
Donc en pratique, vous vivez un peu comme dans les années 90. Mais là où c'est plus grave que dans les années 90, c'est en matière bancaire. Parce qu'en fait, d'abord, vous pouvez avoir vos avoirs gelés même en dehors des États-Unis parce que la plupart des banques font de l'overcompliance. J'ai plusieurs de mes collègues qui se sont fait fermer leur compte bancaire en quelques heures, y compris dans la zone euro. Et pour ceux qui ont la chance de conserver une banque, ce qui est mon cas, et bien vos moyens de paiement sont supprimés. Pourquoi ? Parce qu'en fait, vous rendez compte que Visa et Mastercard ont un monopole en Europe et ils sont américains. Donc quand on est sous sanction, on n'a plus moyen de paiement et quand on garde un compte, toute transaction avec ce qu'on appelle un US Nexus est impossible. C'est-à-dire avec une entreprise américaine, une de leurs filiales, une transaction en dollars ou une transaction lorsque le dollar est une monnaie qui vaut pour la conversion. Et ce que j'ai découvert avec mon cas, c'est que ça concerne en fait 95% de la planète. Donc en pratique, vous devenez interdit bancaire dans la quasi-totalité de la planète et vos opérations sont extrêmement limitées dans la zone euro.
Ces conséquences des sanctions s'appliquent à vous, mais elles s'appliquent aussi à vos proches. Parce que toute votre famille, vos conjoints, vos enfants sont d'abord interdits d'accès aux Etats-Unis. S'ils ont des visas, ils sont révoqués et ils sont expulsés immédiatement. Et puis si vous aviez conjoints ou enfants qui sont de nationalité américaine, ils risquent des sanctions pénales jusqu'à 20 ans d'emprisonnement s'ils vous fournissent un service, exactement comme les entreprises américaines.
Et en pratique, ça veut dire quoi ? Ça veut dire faire les courses au supermarché. Ces sanctions ne sont pas limitées dans le temps, elles peuvent éventuellement être révoquées un jour s'il y a un changement d'administration, mais elles peuvent aussi être maintenues indéfiniment. Et c'est ça le principe même des sanctions, c'est de vivre dans l'incertitude. C'est vous mettre dans une situation d'inquiétude ou d'impuissance dans le but de vous décourager et dans le but que vous ne fassiez pas votre métier.
Et pour mon cas, qui suis juge international, c'est dans le but que je ne rende plus mes décisions sur les crimes internationaux sur la base du droit et des faits qui sont présentés devant moi. Alors en pratique pour vous, des acteurs du monde numérique, ça veut dire qu'en fait, je suis l'exemple parfait pour vous montrer que du jour au lendemain, on peut être banni du numérique dans son propre pays.
Et ce, même quand les acteurs numériques sont européens. Parce qu'en fait, comme nous n'avons plus accès à des moyens de paiement puisque tous les moyens de paiement sont américains, on ne peut même plus avoir accès à des services qui ne sont même pas américains. Je vais vous donner une autre anecdote, c'est que j'étais dans une gare aux Pays-Bas il y a quelques jours et j'ai vu un petit signe avec quoi on pouvait payer pour acheter son billet de train. Il était dit qu'on ne peut pas payer en espèces et les seules cartes avec lesquelles on pouvait payer c'était des cartes américaines ou chinoises.
Et bien c'est ça l'Europe aujourd'hui. Les sanctions américaines sont en fait un révélateur de notre déficit de souveraineté. Alors c'est le cas en matière bancaire, c'est le cas en matière numérique mais en fait tout cet aspect bancaire et numérique a des conséquences dans votre capacité à vous déplacer, à mener une vie familiale normale, à communiquer. Donc en fait on se rend compte que la plupart des droits fondamentaux qui sont censés être respectés en Europe et qui sont garantis par la Cour européenne des droits de l'homme et bien du jour au lendemain, ils peuvent s'arrêter par la simple volonté du dirigeant d'un Etat non européen. Et je peux vous dire le réveil est brutal.
Alors comment est-ce qu'il faut répondre face à ces menaces de domination ? Parce que oui c'est bien de domination dont il faut parler. D'abord pour des gens comme moi, c'est-à-dire pour les juges, il faut tenir. Parce que nous on est les derniers remparts de l'état de droit. Et on le voit bien d'ailleurs aux Etats-Unis, quand on voit que les juges sont nommés sur des critères politiques, on voit que ce n'est pas forcément sur eux qu'on va pouvoir compter. Et même nous quand on est sous sanction, on ne doit pas modifier notre pratique juridictionnelle dans un sens ou dans un autre. On doit appliquer nos principes déontologiques, on doit garantir l'égal accès et dignité de tous devant la justice dans le respect du droit. Parce que sans cela, il n'y a pas de projet de justice pénale internationale qui est viable à long terme et j'irais même plus loin, il ne peut pas y avoir de justice.
Alors pour défendre cet état de droit, pour défendre la justice et tout ce qui va avec, nous devons changer de paradigme en Europe et nous devons créer un véritable droit de la souveraineté européenne. Il faut sortir du dogme du consommateur roi qui est le paradigme du droit de la concurrence et du droit de la consommation et il faut imposer par le droit l'existence d'alternatives européennes pour toutes les activités critiques.
Et le numérique est une activité critique. Il faut que nous identifiions toutes nos vulnérabilités et nous ne pouvons plus dépendre de monopoles ou de duopoles étrangers pour des activités économiques dont l'utilisation est fondamentale pour le fonctionnement de la démocratie. Ça veut pas dire qu'il faut une souveraineté fermée, mais ça veut dire qu'il faut une souveraineté ouverte où on ne dépend pas d'autres ensembles géo-économiques.
J'ai un peu envie de dire mais combien de crises il va falloir pour s'en rendre compte. On a découvert pendant le Covid qu'on était une colonie sanitaire de l'Inde et de la Chine. On a découvert avec la guerre en Ukraine qu'on était une colonie gazière de la Russie. Aujourd'hui, on découvre qu'on est une colonie bancaire des Etats-Unis. On découvre d'ailleurs qu'on va probablement se faire coloniser physiquement au Groenland. Combien de crises il faut encore que nous subissions pour qu'on prenne conscience de nos propres faiblesses ? Parce que oui, c'est à nous, Européens, de répondre.
Alors, cette faiblesse est particulièrement grave en matière numérique et on va en parler aujourd'hui. Et il faut, par le droit et par la technologie, se sortir de cette servitude. Et je dis par le droit et par la technologie parce que je suis tout à fait d'accord avec ce qu'a dit David Chavalarias, il faut que nos mondes se rencontrent. Il faut par exemple inventer un principe de pluralité interconnectée des acteurs numériques. Il faut probablement une portabilité de notre personnalité numérique entre les plateformes. Et puis surtout il ne faut pas être enfermé dans des écosystèmes numériques parce que ces écosystèmes fermés seront les prisons du 21e siècle.
Alors pour créer cette souveraineté numérique, nous avons besoin de vous tous. Il faut des solutions technologiques crédibles et innovantes. Il faut probablement un marché de capitaux suffisamment puissant au niveau européen pour les financer. Et puis, je terminerai par là, il faut offrir ce que les écosystèmes numériques américains ou chinois n'offrent pas et qui doivent être la marque de fabrique de l'Union européenne. Il faut des systèmes qui ne soient pas utilisés pour inciter à la violence. Il faut des systèmes qui respectent la vie privée. Et puis il faut des systèmes qui soient pas utilisés pour influencer les élections, soit en déformant ou en grossissant le réel, soit au pire en l'inventant. Et pour ça, il faut une volonté politique. Il faut être prêt à changer nos habitudes. Et puis, il ne faut pas accepter d'être dans cette soumission que nous avons aujourd'hui.
Alors, ayant perdu personnellement la quasi-totalité de mes services numériques, je suis très intéressé par votre conférence d'aujourd'hui parce que vous allez certainement trouver et proposer des solutions. D'ailleurs, si vous en avez pour remplacer les services américains, n'hésitez pas à les donner à M. Chavalarias qui me les transmettra. Je me ferai un plaisir de les utiliser et d'en faire la promotion. Mais en tout cas, il faut continuer vers ce chemin et alerter encore et encore le grand public. Nous devons trouver le chemin de la souveraineté numérique. C'est aujourd'hui une condition de l'État de droit au niveau national et au niveau international. Merci.
Fear and Loathing in the App Stores: when FLOSS principles collide with the Gatekeeper interests
Marc Prud'hommeaux – FOSDEM26, 1 February 2026
(Personal transcription, prepared with care and affection; but please cross-check against the delivery)
Thank you for coming. I might surprise you based on my technical difficulties I've just had right now. But yeah, I've been developing software since I was a little kid, and I've been developing apps for the iPhone and for Android since 2008, basically since the beginning of when you could do that. And I developed the very first e-book reader for the iPhone. That was known as Stanza. That went on for a while. And then since then, I've done dozens of other apps. More recently, I created a open source tool called skip.dev that helps you develop apps for both iPhone and Android from a single code base. I'm also the founder of the nonprofit App Fair Project, which helps promote and distribute apps universally for both platforms. And I'm also a board member of the F-Droid Project as of last year. So nearly everyone in the world has a little computer in their pocket. There's over 6 billion smartphones around the world. The vast majority of human beings have one. And these devices, they know just about everything about us. They know where we are. They know who we are. They know where we're going. They know what we're interested in, what we like, our media, our movies, and so on. And the question is, who really owns this device? Is this yours? You bought it. It's your property. But do you actually own it in the sense that you have complete control over it, that you have agency?
So how does software get onto a computer? When I first started developing software back in 1982, I had a little Radio Shack TRS-80 that had no persistent storage. So I subscribed to a magazine called the Rainbow Magazine, and they'd send you an issue every month. And in it, they would have printed pages of source code. And so I would sit there and I'd tediously transcribe that source code from my computer, from the pages of the magazine onto the computer, and then hope that you didn't make any typos, because debugging was quite a primitive operation back then. And then you would run it. And this would be little games or graphics demos or things like that. So that was how I really got started in software development. Since then, from that point on, I got a cassette tape peripheral that would let you save and load your program so that it wouldn't disappear when your sister … your computer. And from then on, you moved on to floppy disks, and hard disks, and CD-ROMs, and so on. As we all know, that's all gone. You don't have really physical media ever. Every once in a while, a CD, but it's pretty much gone the way of pretty much everything else from the last millennium.
And the result is that we distribute software over the internet now. And app stores have been the result of that phenomena, where a single organization will collect a number of applications and potentially curate them, and then list them for download and allow you to download them directly to your advice. On mobile platforms, this is far and away the most predominant form of software distribution. In an app store, when you run it on your phone, it's really just an app that installs apps. It's not really doing anything fancy. It's essentially a Gussie Puck downloader. It has some features like search. You might be able to review applications. You might be able to categorize them and browse them. But really all it is, it's an app that installs apps.
As of around the launch of the modern generation of smartphones, you really had two players that rose right around the same time. Apple's iOS, which runs on their iPhone and then subsequent devices like the iPad, and then Google's Android. iOS is exclusive to Apple devices, and Android runs on not only Google's own devices that they did not start out by manufacturing, but on a variety of other manufacturers that they license out the operating system to. Generally speaking, worldwide, Android has about a 75% market share, and iOS more or less takes up the rest. And then you have a very long tail of very small representation of other devices. But for the most part, BlackBerry is gone. Windows Phone is gone. You're left with really two players in this market.
When apps started getting first developed for these devices, when they were first released, there were no app stores. The very first app store was actually just like Cydia, which was developed by Jay Freeman, also known as Sorak, back in 2008. And this was a really nifty little app store. People were blown away. The iPhone came out and it only had a few built-in applications-- a web browser, a calculator, a contacts list, and things like that. But for the first time, this was something that allowed you to browse and download and potentially purchase applications from a variety of sources, from a variety of developers. And it was wildly popular. It had started out with a small catalogue with hundreds of apps, maybe even thousands. It had millions of developers, and it was pretty neat.
It didn't last long, though, because in iOS 2.0, when that came out, Apple introduced their own App Store. And they said that this was going to be the exclusive way of developing and distributing software for their devices. At the same time, they changed the operating system to break all the mechanisms that Cydia was currently using to be able to install their applications. And they essentially froze out that platform. Cydia continued on for a few more years, finding workarounds to be able to continue operating and continue serving their users. But ultimately, if you are fighting against the platform, as you may have heard from the previous talk, you're always going to wind up losing. And the platform vendor is absolutely dedicated to crushing you.
Android, on the other hand, took a different track. They started out by providing APIs for other developers to be able to develop and distribute their own apps. And that actually wound up starting a fairly open ecosystem, a vibrant ecosystem, of a number of different app stores. There were a number of commercial app stores. A couple of the big ones in the West were the Amazon app store, the Samsung Galaxy store worldwide. And there were also some non-commercial ones, F-Droid being a notable one, which I'll describe in a little bit. But it was never really a level playing field. The vast majority of Android devices are Android certified, and that certification process comes with various requirements. One of those requirements was that the Google Play Store be the most prominent, only pre-installed device and prominently displayed on any handset that was Android certified. And that was problematic for competition in that space.
And over the years, these two different gatekeepers, all their policies started to converge and align. You wind up having a system where the Apple App Store and the Play Store have more or less the same sequence of operations you need to go through in order to get your phone onto end devices. Developers need to identify themselves and register centrally. They charge developer fees, some of them annual, some of them one time. There are lengthy terms and conditions that you need to agree to. And these terms and conditions are obviously non-negotiable. And furthermore, they're always changing. They're always changing out from under you. They can come up tomorrow with a new set of terms and conditions. If you don't agree to it right away, you're out of the store. So it's very much a short lease that developers are kept on. Every app that you want to distribute has to be uploaded to their portal. It has to be reviewed by humans, potentially, or some degree of automation or a combination. And then if it's approved, once it's distributed, that same process, you need to go through, again, for every single update that you distribute.
The benefit is that you can reach billions of potential customers. And the entire world is your oyster if you distribute through these stores. The cost is that they take a 30% cut off of the top of any digital sale that goes through any of these applications. And that 30% cut leads to extraordinary profit margins for these business divisions. The Google Play Store, as it came out in the Epic trial last year, makes around 70% profit margin. The Apple App Store makes around 80%. And that is unprecedented in the history of technology. In comparison, AWS makes around 20% to 30% profit margin.
So what's the problem, though? Be thankful for what you have. Feel lucky that you're able to reach these gigantic user spaces, these margins. We here love free software, but we often don't examine why. We don't often say, what is about free software? What problems does it solve? Why do we prefer this over other ways of developing, distributing software? So one hazard that has arisen, especially in recent years, has been that these large profit margins have led to developers seeking alternative monetization routes for their apps. Rather than paying an exorbitant 30% cut to Apple or Google for your app store app, you can seek alternate means of monetization. And that is often through advertisement. An advertisement can provide a direct stream of revenue for the developer, but as a side effect and as additional revenue stream for the people that are providing this ad tech, they provide a stream of data collection from your devices to centralized data brokers that then package them up, resell them throughout the world. This data collection is massive in scale. It can get all sorts of information from all sorts of parts of your devices. If you trust it with your contacts, with your calendar, with your location, with your media libraries, your photos, your camera, it can assemble these gigantic dossiers of people that are extremely valuable to resell.
What does your phone know about you? It has all these sensors. It tracks not only where you are, but where you're going, what your habits are, what your interests are. And it can drive all sorts of secondary information, not just your interests, your religious affiliation, your political allegiances, and so on.
So how do you identify the good apps and the bad apps? Almost all of these are marked as free, not in the sense of free software, but in the sense of it costs your own money to download. How do we identify the good from the bad? And the problem is that you really can't. You have these opaque bundles of binaries that get sent down to your device, and you can't look inside. They are, at the very least, obfuscated. And at the very worst, especially in the case of Apple devices, they are encrypted. And if you are in pretty much any Western country, the law will be adhering to the principles of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which means a felony to break open these applications and look inside and examine what exactly they're doing. Not everyone has the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but more or less every Western country has equivalent laws on the books that have followed the precedent.
So free software to the rescue, obviously, right? You can publish the source code and you can publish the app and you can tell people, okay, line these two things up. And you can see we're not doing anything nefarious. We're not sneaking off your information. But can you work with that on a personal basis? Can you just say, as a principle, I'm only ever going to download these applications from these commercial app stores that are sourced from places where they build the software in the open? And you could, in theory, you would have to manually manage that curation yourself, but you would be hard-pressed to actually prove it. Someone can say, “here's the source code that goes into my app,” but how do you actually prove that these opaque blobs match the code that was published online? It’s trivially easy to slip in a little extra thing right before you submit a build that might add in an ad network, a data broker, all sorts of data collection, surreptitiously tracking your personal information. And your claims would be false, but it would not be provable.
That's where F-Droid comes in. How many people here have heard of F-Droid? Oh. I probably don't need to give you all that much background. It started in 2010. It's one of the oldest app stores out there, over 15 years old as of last year, and it's exclusively free and open source software, and it is verified. Either the project itself will build the binaries and distribute them to end users, or it allows the developer to build the binaries themselves and distribute the binary, and then the F-Droid project will validate that by performing a reproducible build of that and checking bit by bit that they're the same. It's essentially impossible to hide anything when it's distributed through F-Droid.
So that's for Android. You might say that we've got Android covered in that respect. So let's hop over to the other side of the duopoly. There's nothing like that for iOS. As I mentioned, all iOS apps are encrypted. There's no open app store APIs. You only have one route to doing it, and you have no means of verifying it. However, the Digital Markets Act popped up fairly recently. It was proposed in 2020. It passed in 2022, and it came into enforcement in March 2024. And that mandates that the digital gatekeepers of online intermediation services, in other words, Apple and Google and their app stores, be able to provide the ability to have competition in the market and open up their APIs to allow alternative app marketplaces. That is what came into effect, and a lot of people thought, “great, we are going to have F-Droid for Apple now, and we can have a single universal source of applications across both sides.”
The problem, as many people know, is that the actual claimed compliance on the side of iOS was the implementation of the alternative app marketplaces. It establishes a lot of rules for the marketplaces themselves. You need to get approval from Apple. You need to be based in the EU. You need to provide a 1 million euro standard business letter of credit. And then you have core technology fees, basically junk fees that are layered on top of it that are applied on a per download basis, even for free applications. For developers, you might think that you could just submit your app directly to these alternative app marketplaces like you can do on Android. No, you still have to do exactly the same thing as if you're distributing your app through the Apple App Store. You need to get approval, you need to pay your fees, you need to agree to the terms and conditions, upload the app, and then wait and hope for approval. And only then is the app processed by Apple and bounced over to the Alternative App Marketplace, which then is permitted to redistribute it to the users of these marketplaces.
The biggest problem is that the exact same restrictions on the closed source marketplace apply to the alternative app marketplaces, which is that the apps are wrapped up in a DRM bundle. They are encrypted. And this not only means that the end user can't see inside the app, it also means that the alternative app marketplace is also unable to look inside the app, which makes it essentially impossible to comply with Apple's own contractual rules for these alternative app marketplaces, which is that they guarantee that any apps they distribute are free of malware. They have that requirement, but they do not offer any possibility that anyone can legally verify these apps, not only by scanning the binaries, but by lining them up with the underlying source code.
So OK, at least we still have Android, though, right? So maybe iOS is a lost cause. Maybe the rules are not going to be enforced for them. But we still have Android. And we did, up until the end of last year. At the end of last year, a lot of you probably heard that Google announced their Google Developer Registration Mandate, which requires that anyone who wants to distribute applications anywhere in the world on an Android-certified device, regardless of what storefront it goes through or whether you're just you know, providing it for direct download from your website, must register centrally with Google. And the rules might sound familiar to you. You have to register centrally, you have to agree to ever-changing terms and conditions, you have to pay a fee, and you have to register each of your applications with Google and in an ongoing way, any new applications, you need to go through them. And this is a gigantic problem for world of free software. All of a sudden, these two marketplaces are starting to really close in and align on all of their policies.
And this is a critical problem for F-Droid, because we can't really require our developers register with Google, especially if we're just reproducing their builds. Many will not. So, it's really an existential crisis for marketplaces like ours that really rely on the freedom and independence of the app developers to be able to distribute their applications
But it's not just about what apps are available, it's also about what applications are not available. The centralization of control should be concerning for everyone, not just free software developers, because you have a lot of perils that come from centralization. You have a lot of examples of how any centralized control can lead to abuse. You saw this in Hong Kong in 2019. You saw this in, you saw this in Russia in 2021, with the fair voting application that got pulled, and you saw it in the US in 2025, when applications that were designed to help people protect themselves from police brutality were unilaterally and extra legally pulled from these app marketplaces at the pressure of the administration. In each of these cases, these were extra legal requirements that gatekeepers wound up complying with, and this had worldwide consequences. And there was no review. There was no accountability. And it's definitely going to continue happening again and again.
So what can we do about this? How can we actually change this? What hope is there? As you probably know, I'm from the United States, so the likelihood of there being meaningful regulation any time in the next few years is extraordinarily unlikely. But policy makers in Europe are actually very receptive to feedback, to communication. I've talked with many of them myself. I frequently consult with Digital Markets Act regulators on how to go about things.
You need to make your voice heard to your policy makers. You need to point out that the only real path to digital sovereignty is through the total disintermediation of centralized control. You really need to be able to make it so that you can get directly to end users without going through one single centralized group.
I started a website called Keep Android Open that focuses on pushing back against the Android developer verification mandate. I encourage people to take a look at that to see points of contact. For developers, I think everyone should consider the promotion of these alternative app marketplaces by developing for them first. If you're an Android developer, consider shipping your app on F-Droid before anything else. And then there's nothing stopping you from also going to a Google Play Store. If you're on iOS, sign up for AllStore and try distributing your application there. These app marketplaces are growing and thriving, but they need more high-quality software, and software developers are the ones that we really need to provide that.
And for everyone, developer, user, policymaker, use these marketplaces. If you do not have them installed on your phone, download F-Droid for your Android phone, download AltStore if you're in the EU or Japan. And use them, see what they have, and who knows, eventually they might be your one and only exclusive source of applications. So my time's up. Thank you very much for coming.
Saturday, January 31, 2026
The Bundeskartellamt's vision for our future: really?
A. Mundt, here.
"Key priorities include:
1. a significant reduction in regulatory and bureaucratic burdens in the EU, including targeted rules for digital markets;
2. addressing high energy prices
3. completing the EU internal market, including capital markets, banking and telecoms;
4. reducing strategic dependencies in energy, digital infrastructure, AI, pharmaceuticals and raw materials."
My humble take:
Next year...
Friday, January 30, 2026
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
"Penisvergrößerung" und die DMA, LG Frankfurt
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| Dezent... |
Hier.
Schnelle 2 cents:
Das LG übersieht mMn dass „eigenes Produkt“ im Kontext von generativer Suche funktional verstanden werden sollte. Ein AI Overview ist nicht nur „ein anderes Format“ von Ergebnisliste, sondern eine eigenständige Leistung: Auswahl, Synthese, Priorisierung und Präsentation als autoritative Antwort. Diese Leistung konkurriert um dieselbe knappe Ressource wie Drittanbieter (d.h. Aufmerksamkeit) und erfüllt häufig denselben Nutzerzweck wie die verlinkten Informationsdienste. Wenn der Gatekeeper diese eigene Antwortschicht systematisch über Drittquellen platziert, liegt eine Präferenz nahe, auch ohne dass ein separater „Google Medical Service“ verlinkt wird. Das Gericht setzt demgegenüber eine zu enge Produktvorstellung voraus, die an der Existenz eines klar abgegrenzten, extern benennbaren Dienstes hängt 🙈Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Monday, January 26, 2026
Sunday, January 25, 2026
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Friday, January 16, 2026
Saturday, January 10, 2026
Friday, January 09, 2026
Tracking Regulator Responses to the Grok 'Undressing' Controversy
TechPolicyPress, here.
Good job, but I wouldn't call it controversy TBH.
Macron calls for deepening EU's digital rules in face of US pushback
Euractiv, here.
While some influential US/EU academics want us to largely forget the DMA and go back to a revised 102 😔.
Thursday, January 08, 2026
Monopolization in Europe: Understanding Dominance as an Ability
R. Podszun, F. Scott Morton, here.
I agree that more should be done in trying to make102 somewhat functional, but we aren't done with the DMA at all - as (current and past) Big Tech consultants would like you to believe and see us doing ("all that money spent on Trump and lobbyists/consultants should finally produce results, rein in pesky EU regulators, let's set an example for the world here, look at what US oil companies got!"). It's just the beginning, actually.
Tuesday, January 06, 2026
Monday, January 05, 2026
Reviewing European Antitrust Activity in 2025 and What It All Means for 2026
M. Kirkwood, here.
[If teaching at an Italian University counts as European Antitrust Activity, activity, 2025 was the first year I really struggled teaching traditional competition law - perceived mostly as a colossal waste of time for my Students and I, a bit like teaching International Law in 2026 I guess]
DRCF Thematic Innovation Hub: Agentic AI webinar
Video here.
Good format? Unsure! They allocated most of the available time to a presentation delivered by a US company (dialogue with 'industry,' they call it).
Supporting economic growth! Societal benefits spreading across the economy!
US tech lobbying warning "EU lawmakers against efforts to decouple too sharply from US technology, as this would risk provoking countermeasures"
Euractiv, here.
[Example of "gloves": it's all about innovation!
Even US brain-washed and financed, hard-liners among EU academics will come to realize it in 2026 - perhaps].
The Future of Enforcement and Compliance? How Computational Antitrust is Used
Our Curious Amalgam, here.
Sunday, January 04, 2026
Monday, December 22, 2025
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Sunday, December 21, 2025
Friday, December 19, 2025
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Meanwhile, in Japan: App Store Gets Alternative Marketplaces, Third-Party Payments and More
MacRumors, here.
Financially and technologically viable? Hardly, according Tim Sweeney: Fortnite will not return to iOS in Japan in 2025.Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Anti-American(s) Antitrust: Trump Antitrust
Just for a laugh: Anti-American Antitrust: How Foreign Governments Target U.S. Businesses | House Judiciary Committee Republicans.
Portuese's portrait of the DMA should haunt him for a while...
Monday, December 15, 2025
Is iRobot's demise a sign that competition and innovation in the market for robot vacuum cleaners *are indeed working*? #Discuss
Who's innovating here? What about data protection? The whole dilemma...
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Lina Khan on Warner Brothers
Comments are all ❤️❤️❤️ for her, nice to see! A class apart as antitrust enforcer.
Friday, December 12, 2025
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Europe's Tech Dependency
Bruegel, here.
(Talking about lobbying: Alexandra and Robin should perhaps ask...Who's financing Bruegel, BTW?)
Google adding more links in AI Mode, testing AI features for Google News
9To5Mac, here.
The usual playbook, AI edition!
Interview: Meet the competition lawyer taking Microsoft to task over its cloud licensing tactics
ComputerWeekly, here (Isa, again!).
Full transcript: POLITICO's interview with Donald Trump
Here.
[I watched it all, pretty weird - the journalist was amazing]
Tuesday, December 09, 2025
EU Probes Google Over Use of Online Content to Power AI
WSJ, here.
Laid-back piece by Edith. Exercise in gauging in which way the breeze (gale?) is blowing?
The DMA Lab #1: DMA Review | DMA & Geopolitics | Goals, Cases: with René Repasi & Niklas Brüggemann
Here.
We've been playing ourselves with the idea of a DMA Lab for more than a year...Competition!
[We didn't hear about Panelists/Hosts' conflicts of interest - no professional involvement, such as representing clients, at all?]
Commission opens investigation into possible anticompetitive conduct by Google in the use of online content for AI purposes
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EC, here.
[NotebookLM's own DeepDive here, just for fun]
In our Article 19 Report we discussed this and how it could eventually translate into a DMA obligation here.
I'd add another aspect, if I may 😉: downstream products like NotebookLM having exclusive access to YouTube videos to produce content? Perhaps not a copyright infringement (derivative?) but what about competition in downstream markets for AI-related products?
AI Antitrust Amnesty in the US - What about in the EU?
In the US, here.
I posed the question this morning and received an answer within 30 minutes. That was efficient, thank you!
Monday, December 08, 2025
Sunday, December 07, 2025
On extracting yourself from the extractors
The great Elettra, here. Don't miss her!
Elettra gave a much appreciated guest lecture to us in Trento 4 (? must check) years ago - in our (comparitively) age of innocence...
Saturday, December 06, 2025
The Protocol-Institution Continuity, and other "Chicche"
From R. Berjon's Guest Lecture, Trento University, 5th Dec.
Friday, December 05, 2025
Thursday, December 04, 2025
"Computers were not intended to make judgement decisions"
BBC, 1970 [same year as the Hesse legislation] here.
We were on a very promising path, what happened since?
Meta to face competition probe over AI use in WhatsApp, Ribera confirms
Euractiv, here.
How are they going to coordinate with the Italian proceeding? Looking forward to interim measures!
Of course, also the DMA should already be updated - at least by delegated act (pity they didn't open any proceeding yet - as we discussed at our A19 Conference).
From a 2024 (time flies) article "it appears quite probable that some form of platform integration, potentially through the blending of AI or virtual worlds technologies in WhatsApp, may occur." No crystal ball required!
IPFS at Eurosky Live Berlin: Highlights From A Bright Future
R. Berjon, here.
And tomorrow (virtually) at Trento University.
Review of the EU Merger Guidelines – Stakeholder Workshop of 4th December 2025 and "Trento Choice" of relevant questions
Today in our Trento classroom the discussion turns to merger control. The timing is well suited, as Brussels today is holding a workshop on how the system might be reshaped. This creates a practical dilemma for anyone teaching the subject: it is not obvious what to present with confidence when the current framework is not performing especially well.
Still, the workshop offers a coherent set of questions that helps to structure the debate and clarifies what is worth addressing. Here is the Trento selection of questions we consider most relevant/intriguing:
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Wednesday, December 03, 2025
The economics of copyright and AI
C. Peukert, here.
Whenever I see a "model" applied to policy, as a PhD economist I ask myself: do we really need it? What's the model obfuscating which would instead matter to policymakers?
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
Study on the next data frontier: generative AI, regulatory compliance and international dimensions
Final Report, for the EC, here.
Where you read: "Public initiatives such as Common European Data Spaces and GAIA-X are widely anticipated to improve data accessibility, but awareness and participation remain limited, especially among SMEs." - GAIA-X, seriously? How much did the EC pay for this Report?
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Marc Prud'hommeaux – FOSDEM26, 1 February 2026 (Personal transcription, prepared with care and affection; but please cross-check agai... -
Dezent... Hier . Schnelle 2 cents: Das LG übersieht mMn dass „eigenes Produkt“ im Kontext von generativer Suche funktional verstanden werd... -
With Konstantina!, here.
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Nicolas Guillou, juge à la Cour pénale internationale, L’impact des sanctions numériques et les risques pour l’État de droit, Vidéo ici . ... -
CPI, here. Complaint here.
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L. Martins, M. Kirkwood, here .
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TechPolicy, here . The decision, here.