I see a lot of posts on mastodon about getting out from under the US tech giants - they're a reminder of how relatively lucky we are here in France. We have a similar-but-better - and generally cheaper - alternative to Amazon - Cdiscount - and if you pay by Carte Bancaire rather than Visa, etc, your payment is processed entirely in France by French banks. We have the government's own mapping service - CartesIGN - which is again superior to GoogleMaps in almost every respect (except that it only covers France). The general movement of French public services over to Linux, and onto Mastodon in the case of cultural services, has been well documented here - but in fact France has always been inclined this way, surprising me when I first moved here 15 years ago by the use of the open document format in the kids' schools, rather than .docs. And of course France's military has always been more independent, its nuclear weapons never integrated into NATO - with negotiations now underway to extend this 'nuclear umbrella' across Europe. Would it take much to extend the rest of the French tech and fintech infrastructure across Europe ? - at least to the Benelux countries, to entirely free the ICC of US corruption ?