Whether at home or abroad, the pattern of ducking difficult arguments and calling it pragmatism is the same

There comes a point in a prime minister’s career when foreign travel offers respite from domestic trouble. Even when relations with the host country are tricky, as Britain’s are with China, the dignifying protocols of statecraft make a beleaguered politician feel valued.

Next comes the phase where missions overseas feel dangerous because plotters can organise more openly against absent leaders.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Why there’s no European Google?

And why it is a good thing!

With some adjustments, this post is mostly a translation of a post I published in French three years ago. In light of the European Commission’s "call for evidence on Open Source," and as a professor of "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, I thought it was a good idea to translate it into English as a public answer to that call.

• Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas de Google européen ? (ploum.net)
• European Commission issues call for evidence on open source (lwn.net)

Google (sorry, Alphabet), Facebook (sorry, Meta), Twitter (sorry, X), Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft. All those giants are part of our daily personal and professional lives. We may even not interact with anything else but them. All are 100% American companies.

China is not totally forgotten, with Alibaba, TikTok, and some services less popular in Europe yet used by billions worldwide.

What about European tech champions? Nearly nothing, to the great sadness of politicians who believe that the success of a society is measured by the number of billionaires it creates.

Despite having few tech-billionaires, Europe is far from ridiculous. In fact, it’s the opposite: Europe is the central place that allowed most of our tech to flourish.

The Internet, the interconnection of most of the computers in the world, has existed since the late sixties. But no protocol existed to actually exploit that network, to explore and search for information. At the time, you needed to know exactly what you wanted and where to find it. That’s why the USA tried to develop a protocol called "Gopher."

At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web! It looks like the Official European Joke! (And, yes, I consider Brits Europeans. They will join us back, we miss them, I promise.)

• The Official European Joke (ploum.net)

Gopher is still used by a few hobbyists (like your servitor), but it never truly became popular, except for a very short time in some parts of America. One of the reasons might have been that Gopher’s creators wanted to keep their rights to it and license any related software, unlike the European Web, which conquered the world because it was offered as a common good instead of seeking short-term profits.

While Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee were busy inventing the World Wide Web in their CERN office, a Swedish-speaking Finnish student started to code an operating system and make it available to everyone under the name "Linux." Today, Linux is probably the most popular operating system in the world. It runs on any Android smartphone, is used in most data centers, in most of your appliances, in satellites, in watches and is the operating system of choice for many of the programmers who write the code you use to run your business. Its creator, the European Linus Torvalds, is not a billionaire. And he’s very happy about it: he never wanted to become one. He continued coding and wrote the "git" software, which is probably used by 100% of the software developers around the world. Like Linux, Git is part of the common good: you can use it freely, you can modify it, you can redistribute it, you can sell it. The only thing you cannot do? Privatize it. This is called "copyleft."

In 2017, a decentralized and ethical alternative to Twitter appeared: Mastodon. Its creator? A German student, born in Russia, who had the goal of allowing social network users to leave monopolies to have humane conversations without being spied on and bombarded with advertising or pushed-by-algorithm fake news. Like Linux, like git, Mastodon is copyleft and now part of the common goods.

Allowing human-scale discussion with privacy and without advertising was also the main motivation behind the Gemini protocol (whose name has since been hijacked by Google AI). Gemini is a stripped-down version of the Web which, by design, is considered definitive. Everybody can write Gemini-related software without having to update it in the future. The goal is not to attract billions of users but to be there for those who need it, even in the distant future. The creator of the Gemini protocol wishes to remain anonymous, but we know that the project started while he was living in Finland.

I could continue with the famous VLC media player, probably the most popular media player in the world. Its creator, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Kempf, refused many offers that would have made him a very rich man. But he wanted to keep VLC a copyleft tool part of the common goods.

Don’t forget LibreOffice, the copyleft office suite maintained by hundreds of contributors around the world under the umbrella of the Document Foundation, a German institution.

We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the "success culture." Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider "winning against the whole society" as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!

We don’t want a European Google Maps! We want our institutions at all levels to contribute to OpenStreetMap (which was created by a British citizen, by the way).

Google, Microsoft, Facebook may disappear tomorrow. It is even very probable that they will not exist in fourty or fifty years. It would even be a good thing. But could you imagine the world without the Web? Without HTML? Without Linux?

Those European endeavours are now a fundamental infrastructure of all humanity. Those technologies are definitely part of our long-term history.

In the media, success is often reduced to the size of a company or the bank account of its founder. Can we just stop equating success with short-term economic growth? What if we used usefulness and longevity? What if we gave more value to the fundamental technological infrastructure instead of the shiny new marketing gimmick used to empty naive wallets? Well, I guess that if we changed how we measure success, Europe would be incredibly successful.

And, as Europeans, we could even be proud of it. Proud of our inventions. Proud of how we contribute to the common good instead of considering ourselves American vassals.

Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?

The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.

• Picture by Frans Snik of a LEGO version of the European Extremely Large Telescope. Yes, LEGO is a European invention too.

Labour must urgently seek new roles and alliances, while also enhancing the UK’s own military capabilities

• Stella Creasy is chair of the Labour Movement for Europe

If the threats of Donald Trump prove anything, it is that the mantra of “shared values” with his administration is as much use as a chocolate teapot. Countries across the world are scrambling to adjust. Canada has announced a trade realignment towards China – and talk grows of counter-sanctions in Europe. If the UK wants to avoid being caught in the crossfire, there really is only one alternative: to finally take the brakes off rebuilding our common future in Europe.

In the past few weeks, Nato has suffered life-changing injuries. This should not be surprising, given the repeated signals from Washington, from the anti-European screed in Trump’s National Security Strategy to the harassment of President Zelenskyy at the White House. When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time and act accordingly.

Stella Creasy is chair of the Labour Movement for Europe and the Labour and Cooperative MP for Walthamstow

More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.

Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013.

The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledge.

At the time of Swartz’s prosecution, vast amounts of research were funded by taxpayers, conducted at public institutions and intended to advance public understanding. But access to that research was, and still is, locked behind expensive paywalls. People are unable to read work they helped fund without paying private journals and research websites.

Swartz considered this hoarding of knowledge to be neither accidental nor inevitable. It was the result of legal, economic and political choices. His actions challenged those choices directly. And for that, the government treated him as a criminal.

Today’s AI arms race involves a far more expansive, profit-driven form of information appropriation. The tech giants ingest vast amounts of copyrighted material: books, journalism, academic papers, art, music and personal writing. This data is scraped at industrial scale, often without consent, compensation or transparency, and then used to train large AI models.

AI companies then sell their proprietary systems, built on public and private knowledge, back to the people who funded it. But this time, the government’s response has been markedly different. There are no criminal prosecutions, no threats of decades-long prison sentences. Lawsuits proceed slowly, enforcement remains uncertain and policymakers signal caution, given AI’s perceived economic and strategic importance. Copyright infringement is reframed as an unfortunate but necessary step toward “innovation.”

Recent developments underscore this imbalance. In 2025, Anthropic reached a settlement with publishers over allegations that its AI systems were trained on copyrighted books without authorization. The agreement reportedly valued infringement at roughly $3,000 per book across an estimated 500,000 works, coming at a cost of over $1.5 billion. Plagiarism disputes between artists and accused infringers routinely settle for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars when prominent works are involved. Scholars estimate Anthropic avoided over $1 trillion in liability costs. For well-capitalized AI firms, such settlements are likely being factored as a predictable cost of doing business.

As AI becomes a larger part of America’s economy, one can see the writing on the wall. Judges will twist themselves into knots to justify an innovative technology premised on literally stealing the works of artists, poets, musicians, all of academia and the internet, and vast expanses of literature. But if Swartz’s actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies?

The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

The stakes extend beyond copyright law or past injustices. They concern who controls the infrastructure of knowledge going forward and what that control means for democratic participation, accountability and public trust.

Systems trained on vast bodies of publicly funded research are increasingly becoming the primary way people learn about science, law, medicine and public policy. As search, synthesis and explanation are mediated through AI models, control over training data and infrastructure translates into control over what questions can be asked, what answers are surfaced, and whose expertise is treated as authoritative. If public knowledge is absorbed into proprietary systems that the public cannot inspect, audit or meaningfully challenge, then access to information is no longer governed by democratic norms but by corporate priorities.

Like the early internet, AI is often described as a democratizing force. But also like the internet, AI’s current trajectory suggests something closer to consolidation. Control over data, models and computational infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a small number of powerful tech companies. They will decide who gets access to knowledge, under what conditions and at what price.

Swartz’s fight was not simply about access, but about whether knowledge should be governed by openness or corporate capture, and who that knowledge is ultimately for. He understood that access to knowledge is a prerequisite for democracy. A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.

How we treat knowledge—who may access it, who may profit from it and who is punished for sharing it—has become a test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what those choices say about us.

This essay was written with J. B. Branch, and originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

A note on who I am and what I’m doing: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I coined a word to describe the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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This newsletter is going to cover three crucial subjects today:

1. How Britain’s national security is hopelessly compromised. We’ve sold out our military to a key Trump ally in what I believe is a catastrophically naive and dangerous deal. (If you’re American, this affects you too.)

2. The global war on truth. And why sticking to the facts is now a radical act.

3. How we fight back. In which I post a whole smorgasbord of inspiring videos that I grabbed off social media that you didn’t know you needed.

I’ve never started with a bulleted list before but then I can’t remember a NATO country threatening to invade a NATO country before either. I figured you might need 3) after reading 1) and 2).

1) The UK’s national security is hopelessly compromised

This morning, the BBC ran an interview with Peter Mandelson, the self-described ‘best pal’ of Jeffrey Epstein and until he was sacked, the UK ambassador to Washington.

Mandelson’s firm, Global Counsel, also represents Palantir, the US surveillance defence company founded by Trump ally, Peter Thiel. When Keir Starmer visited Washington, a trip arranged by Mandelson, he had only two meetings: one with Trump and one with Palantir.

If we never heard from Peter Mandelson again, it would be too soon. And yet here he is, all over the national broadcaster refusing to apologise to Epstein’s victims and praising Trump’s “graciousness”.

But this was not all. Because also on the BBC this morning was his client, Louis Mosley, the CEO of Palantir UK and the grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

I’m not linking to either of these videos because they were both absolutely abject failures of journalism. This is the second time Mosley has been invited onto this same Sunday morning show as some sort of legitimate political pundit.

He is no such thing. His company is an integral part of the US defence and homeland security apparatus and the illegal data gathering operation carried out by Elon Musk’s DOGE to say nothing of its involvement in profiling kill targets for the IDF in Gaza. The only circumstance he should be on the BBC is to be subjected to a journalistic grilling, not asked a couple of softball questions on his views on global politics.

The UK Ministry of Defence has just signed a new £240 million contract with Palantir. Actually, it’s not a contract, it’s more than that. The UK government describes it as “a strategic partnership”. A “partnership” entered into without any sort of competitive tender that was announced during Trump’s visit to the UK and which disastrously compromises our entire national security infrastructure.

We have embedded a notorious US military surveillance company whose founder is a close ally of President Trump into the heart of our military at a moment in which the US is threatening to invade our NATO ally, Greenland.

If you’re British and reading this, please send it to your MP. The level of understanding in UK politics and media about Silicon Valley’s alliance with Trump and the geopolitical and security consequences of this appears to be non-existent.

If our national security rests on US technology, we have no national security.

It sounds like writerly hyperbole to describe the UK as a vassal state, but I mean it in its most literal sense. It’s explicitly stated in the ur-text of Trump’s White House’s foreign policy, the National Security Strategy document, that US companies will be used as instruments of state power. There is no hidden agenda here: Trump has set it all out. (For a breakdown of this document and what it all means, see this week’s piece in the Nerve by former British diplomat, Arthur Snell.)

What will it mean to embed American software into the UK military? Well consider, Tesla. You don’t really buy a car when you buy a Tesla, you rent the software that remains the property of Elon Musk industries who can choose to immobilise your car or any feature of it at any time.

Palantir is the most terrifying of the US companies but it’s also just one of a whole raft of compromising, self-sabotaging deals that the UK government has entered into. The UK ‘Sovereign Cloud’ has been contracted out to Oracle, owned by another key Trump ally, Larry Ellison, the man whose son is behind the disastrous buyout of CBS and the upcoming US TikTok takeover. And then there are deals with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon, BlackRock, Nvidia and Scale AI.

And this was the “win”, the brilliant triumph that Keir Starmer pulled from the jaws of defeat in the trade tariff negotiations. It is the opposite of that: it’s surrender, the cost of which won’t just be measured in pounds or dollars. I fear the cost could be much, much higher, paid in blood and pain.

It barely even registered this week that Trump announced he was increasing the US military’s budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

I wrote this in last week’s newsletter, on Saturday morning, hours after the US attacked Venezuela and before America woke up:

“This should precipitate a whole new global crisis. It’s an unprovoked military assault on a sovereign nation in breach of international law. What should worry us more is if it doesn’t…

Trump isn’t just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in.”

Trump’s actions should provoke a global crisis, I said. And it should worry us more if it doesn’t. A week later, the news is in: prepare to be more worried.

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2) The global war on truth..and what it means when your own PM joins it

I’m posting this interview between Gary Gibbons of Channel 4 News and Keir Starmer on Monday because it feels like a crucial moment that we should footnote and mark.

Starmer, an international human rights lawyer, is unable to say the attack on Venezuela was in breach of international law. This is the leader of a G7 nation, unable to confirm that black is black and white is white.

All week, pundits in the UK media have wanged on about how Starmer couldn’t have his “Hugh Grant moment” - a reference to the scene in Love Actually in which he Prime Minister Grant stands up to President Billy Bob Thornton (after seeing him making moves on his lady crush) and missed the far bigger point.

It’s the same pundits and journalists who applauded Starmer’s actions in sucking up to Trump, laying on a state visit, a royal banquet, the full works and celebrating the “win”, a deal that didn’t land Britain with a disastrous trade tariff.

But what they failed to point out is that Starmer paid Trump’s ransom - the disastrous, self-sabotaging tech deals detailed above. It’s not that Starmer risks “offending” Trump or is “caught in a bind” or “is in a tricky position” or any of the other phrases I’ve read and heard all week, it’s that he - and we - have been captured.

These deals represent the corporate capture of the UK state including, our cloud capacity, National Health Service, and now our military establishment. And the blindness, ignorance and ongoing denial is the most dangerous thing about this moment.

Starmer’s inability to speak the truth is not diplomacy. It’s evidence.

We are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump fascist project. We’ve sold out everyone in America who’s trying to fight back against it. Worst of all, we can’t even see it yet.

I’m not using the f-word lightly or facetiously. I’ve avoided it for a year. But what is so dangerous right now is the assault on truth, on facts, on the evidence of our own eyes. What is happening right now in America is fascism. And we, the UK, are now up to our necks in it too.

3) How to fight back

Congratulations! You’ve got through the depressing bit of the newsletter. This last section is a compendium of clips and images that I’ve seen this week that is the evidence you need that nothing is hopeless.

This is Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis. He’s using the f-word too.

A masked paramilitary gunman murdered a Minneapolis citizen in cold blood, and this is what the city’s mayor told ICE at his press conference. “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

It’s a painful contrast to Keir Starmer and a necessary corrective. What Trump is doing is meant to scare us. And not being scared, speaking the facts, taking the piss and recording it all on your phone are all radical acts. All week, I’ve been collecting individual responses to hard power ranging from the courageous to the creative to the comedic.

I loved this footage of an Uber driver that embodies all three of these qualities. Watch him taking on US border guards who asked to see his ID. Why, he asks them? You have an accent, one of them says. “You’re going by accents now?” he says incredulously. “You guys need psychiatric checkups,” he tells them when they ask where he was born. He satirically taunts them until they eventually give up.

This was how London greeted the news of the Venezuela strike. A “nonce” is Britspeak for “paedophile”.

I also loved and admired this woman’s response to ICE agents who stopped to threaten and intimidate her for following their vehicle. I don’t want you to make a bad decision, the ICE agent tells her. “That’s funny coming from you!” she says smiling away at him.

And this is another brilliant official, Rochelle Bilal, the sheriff of Philadelphia, pointing out all the ways that the actions of the ICE agent who shot Renee Nicole Good were in violation of both “legal law” and “moral law”. ICE, she said, was “made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement”.

I know, I know, this is probably too much content. But consider this a public service, I’m saving you from the algorithmic scroll which threw up this for me: Canadian comedian Trent McClellan dressed up as a NICE agent to terrorise tourists in Halifax. His weapons are Canadian-levels of courtesy and free candy. It’s from two months ago but I only just clocked it and I think it’s a really useful reminder that none of this is normal. This is normal:

Finally, it’s been extraordinary to witness what’s happening on the streets of Iran. You’ll have seen the incredible rivers of protestors flooding the streets of cities all across the country. That’s what people power looks like. Is it finally the revolution that Iranians have been longing for? The world is holding its breath.

I’m not sure who this woman is but this week’s newsletter is dedicated to her and the people of Iran and, especially, the incredible, gutsy, powerful women who have simply had enough.

Thank you to everyone who’s reading this. It’s one of my own personal rays of hope. If you like it, please share it with your friends and family and tell me in the comments whether I’m right, wrong, too doomery, not doomery enough, whether you like the vids and anything else that strikes you.