The International Criminal Court wants to become independent of USA technology

> It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.

I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"?

Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).

My company avoids most of the "cloud" hype. We've found it more cost effective to self-host our internal services, plus it gives us more control over our configurations and data. We don't need 24/7 guaranteed up-time; we have occasional hiccups and resolve them in minutes or hours.

But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.

That depends on your scale. The big email providers cannot afford to block large organizations. However a "little guy" they can ignore.

The US isn't part of the ICC, but there are plenty of other governments who are and take this seriously. At least one will make a big deal about the ICC being blocked and governments have more power than even large companies.

Been using self hosted mailinabox on a cheap racknerd vps for last 4 years. Zero hiccups.

The trick is to send an email, have it whitelisted a bunch of times. Then it just works.

Once I massmailed by mistake. Google rightly spammed the emails. Had to unspam them and was back within a few days.

Outlook was worst but even that worked.

Its 100% doable

Seems absolutely harebrained to have done so. What was the upside of such pettiness? Just to suck off the government?

The responsible executive should be jailed for many years for massive fraud. Even if such a court decision in another country won't be enforced by the US against their citizens, it will likely mean that the responsible executive won't be able to enter quite a list of countries anymore.

Passed in August 2002, how very Patriot Act of them.

Because they’ve already entered into treaties making the offenses involved matters of universal jutisdiction which any state can prosecute their citizens for, and as a State Party to the Rome Statute, they would have more influence over the fairness and process of the ICC than they would over any national system outside of their own.

Also, because they are tired of the diplomatic cost and expense of working with other countries to set up ad hoc tribunals for particular conflicts and want to get the job done once and properly. (That's actually why the US was one of the leaders of the effort that produced the ICC, even though it did a U-turn against it at the last minute.)

Why would any state enter into a treaty with a state that doesn't recognize them? Diplomacy requires it so it has been in the USA Constitution since the beginning:

Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Because borders aren't hermetically sealed?

Same reason individuals tend to want to live in a society and the rules that come with it.

It’s like any international treaty, you agree to it because there’s something in it for you in return for signing it.

In this case, there’s a straightforward benefit to it in that it could be used to prosecute crimes against the US and US citizens, and soft benefits e.g. of the US being seen a a paragon of lawfulness and trust. There’s likely more, these are just what I could think of immediately.

Same reason most people prefer living in a society with laws: you are subject to laws, but so is everyone else, and provided the laws are beneficial ("just") you are overall better off.

On a national level I agree not to steal, and in return nobody else is allowed to steal from me. On the ICC level my country agrees not to genocide anyone, and in return others aren't allowed to genocide either

> If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do.

Its not “service members” that are the usual defendants at the ICC.

Why have an ICC at all then?

If US soldiers are (once again) committing war crimes, will the US do anything? What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes? Should there not be one?

> Why would the US choose to cede authority to the ICC here?

For the same reason as any other treaty - the corresponding benefits.

> If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do.

That's not what the ICC is for. The ICC is for when a country won't do so when they should be.

> Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.

The US has a very long history of telling other foreign entities what they can and cannot do.

Well they also don't want their own citizens to have any say. So whose interests in the end does our military actually answer to?

Seems like the US is very involved in others' business for such an "independent" spirit.

E.g. Switzerland (a country I'd argue as having a far more genuine independent spirit) was labeled as a currency manipulator by the US [0], despite the designation being fairly arbitrary, and you know, her being her own country (and so surely subject to her own laws).

What you're describing as "independence" looks a lot more like "rules for thee are not rules for me", which the US just happens to have the privelage of preaching due to its preeminent position in the world.

[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/switzerland-branded-as...

yes we independently decide to invade other countries for no good reason and independently decide to extrajudicially murder people the president doesn't like, I'm so very glad

The US happily enforces its rules on other nations on a regular basis.

The reason has nothing to do with "independence". It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.

At least that was the reason I was given in the US military. YMMV

No man is an island, and no country is either. You live in an international community, whether you like it or not. You can choose to be a rogue state, but it doesn't reflect well on you.

In this case it was official sanctions enacted on a whim against a person, the ICC prosecutor.

If your concern is genuinely sovereignty, you should be appalled that the US is attempting to take away sovereignty from ICC member states.

I don't think profit is the core problem here. It's control. A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization.

Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.

No man is an island. There must always be a dependency on the outside world. But you can reduce risk by using commodified products.

There's also the problem that "non-profit" is a weird, inconsistent designation that a lot of people get very rich on.

I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of.

Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement?

edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)

Neither of these seem viable to me. You definitely can’t run an organization without doing business with for-profit companies. Probably the most feasible solution is diversifying dependencies so you can’t be extorted by any one country.

EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?

Only if you’re constantly trying to zero the budget after it’s built.

I disagree with this as well to some extent. I see how much big corporations spend on "maintenance" and all the bureaucracy involved. It's easy money for them and their employees. Too easy.

The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.