🇨🇦 Early thoughts on digital sovereignty
I’ve been thinking (perhaps too much) about digital sovereignty recently. As a Canadian, the idea that we need to have independent, domestic control over our digital infrastructure, data, and policy has been a widely debated topic with fresh urgency.
As an individual, I think there are three reasons for considering the location of our technology choices:
- Canadians' quite reasonable dislike for Trump and MAGA trolling of our country. This is all intertwined with our trade war and various boycotts.
- Concerns about being vulnerable to having our access revoked to important digital services. This came up in a different context a few months ago, when I worried about my vulnerability to losing my Apple ID.
- Interest in supporting new Canadian providers that could, ultimately, help enhance Canada’s competitive advantages and economy.
The first reason is both totally understandable and the least important in the long run.
Adopting Indie Web principles and good technology practices (like reliable backups) mostly take care of the second reason. I own my own domain name and use it for my blog, social networking, and email. The domain registrar is Hover, a Canadian company based in Toronto. I can readily swap out backend providers for my blog or email without too much trouble. The Micro.Blog service that I’m using does have an option to use EU servers, instead of US ones, but that’s only swapping one foreign government for another (though one of them is much more reliable these days). So, a nice feature to have available that I won’t enable for now.
Given I like tinkering with technology, the third reason has some appeal. I’m trying two specific services for this reason.
I’ve switched to Augure as my AI service. Not only is it Canadian-made, it also has been specifically tuned for Canadian context, which also often makes its answers more useful. Although the iOS app isn’t quite as polished as Claude’s, I’ve found the actual responses to be absolutely suitable to my needs. That said, I don’t use AI for any complex coding, so can’t comment on how well Augure works for this.
I’m dabbling with Gander.Social as a social network. In addition to being Canadian owned and operated, they also have many good ideas about how to do social networking properly that are worth supporting.
These seemed like two good places to start and I’m keen to keep exploring. I’ve found Michael Geist to be a useful resource on the policy side of this topic.