Militaristic “national security” arguments have very little traction in Europe

It’s good to know that there’s a part of the world where those arguments don’t gain traction! Here in Canada, a lot of what’s in the air supply tends to be what was in the US 10-15 years beforehand, I fully expect to see at least some arguments made using it eventually.

I don’t disagree! I think it’s worth mentioning separately if only to show the mechanics of how it would play out, each step is too distant from any other step otherwise.

Fair point! Counterpoint: Western countries tend to use national security to push back against effective competition (see also: EVs), so I don’t think it’s strictly a technical or knowledge issue, and that while eventually there will be competition, whether or not we can legally buy it might matter more.

(Whether security concerns are valid is a separate point outside the scope of my comment: on one hand, Wi-Fi cameras you buy are basically botnet members, on the other hand the allegations against (IIRC) supermicro were never (haven’t checked in a while, could have changed but I’d probably have heard already) substantiated so the whole “embedded surveillance hardware” theory is still a theory, meaning we should expect the quality of the firmware to be inconsistent. Not exactly something new: consumer BIOS/EFI tends to be buggy, manufacturers focus on the enterprise versions)

I’ll add ( C ): drive the price of general-purpose and performant hardware to the moon so everyone outside of the upper-class doesn’t have a choice about whether to use cloud vs self-hosted anything, which is just another way of describing who has control over your experience and what you can do with the hardware you bought. I mean, Apple already makes it difficult to run whatever you want on your own system (and blocking certain things entirely), even before getting to the whole app store walled garden thing, so how long before Microsoft pulls the trigger on making TPM enablement mandatory for OEMs, with a very short list of allowed certificates? At that point, you’ll have to choose between “good-ish hardware, but app store apps only” and “meh hardware, full control, but no access to anything useful because everything requires hardware attestation of some kind”.