Canada should build public cloud infrastructure rather than relying on U.S. tech giants
Canada should build public cloud infrastructure rather than relying on U.S. tech giants
During the 2025 election campaign, prime minister Mark Carney made a striking admission about Canada’s dependence on U.S. tech companies. The Canadian government was in the process of choosing a partner for a 25-year cloud computing contract for the federal government. The contract’s length should h...
Is NextCloud the only solution out there that will free me from the clutches of US tech giants? I really want to cancel my Google Ones subscription but I don't know if I have the necessary skills to run my own instance...
I think we should stop relying on cloud completely. The cloud is just someone else's computer. More should learn about self hosting and not depending on some other corporation to hold all your files and data. I already self host many things myself so as to depend less on other companies and being more independent.
There is a world of difference between self-hosting your personal life and, for example, the department of motor vehicles needing servers that benefit from economies of scale.
I self host a lot of things to but I still have a cloud provider (sync.com as it is Canadian) and a Canadian web host service (hosthero.ca) for my web site and now my email. I have broken my home lab (made up of raspberry pi’s) to many times to trust running anything for my password manager so I have 1Password, another Canadian company. I stopped using google services (minus youtube) long ago so I found another authenticator app; I should maybe move all that stuff to 1Password as well, but I do like having separate apps for that stuff. I stopped paying for youtube premium and started using Unwatched so that I am not paying for ads. I have cancelled all of my US streaming services and moved to the high C’s for those things, and host them out of my home. Maybe if my Mac Pro still could connect to the internet, no idea what is wrong with it, I would use that to host more of my stuff.
I found out that my ISP has moved to an exchange server, and I cancelled most of my Apple services so hide my email is no longer available to so now I am in the process of moving everything to their own email address from my old email addresses. I already got very little spam and for the first time in months I got some spam today.
I mean that's good and all and I am sure those companies are way better than those big American tech companies but my point was about not having to depend on another company. Because you have to trust them with your information and just because it's Canadian doesn't mean they are good automatically. Another advantage of self hosting is if for any reason you lose internet access you still have access to your local network and all your files and passwords when you need them. This is also why it's important to not create a dependence on any online services. Like if this site were to shut down I wouldn't lose much, I would just lose my posts which to me aren't that important as people have read them already.
Please build it somewhere cold in Canada so you don’t have to waste energy cooling the place.
Also, is anywhere in Canada a potentially good source of geothermal energy?
I present to you: Chibougamau, Quebec. There's a higher education institution not too far away to train technicians. It's north enough that it's fucking cold. It's also pretty close (comparatively) to the massive hydro electric dams that powder the entire province to make significant savings in transmission losses, and the transmission network reaches all the way to major cities to easily piggyback fiber deployments!
Every government should have a public competitive corporation in every aspect of infrastructure. Cloud, water, etc. If they're going to free market it, they need to stoke competition.
100,000x this
We are fucked over a barrel right now.
Most of my web services I have moved away from the US things, and have replaced them with Canadian things. I also use a pair of piholes to block ads many of which are sold by google and other US companies. I wish there was a real alternative to YouTube as I could move to that rather than using Unwatched to block ads.
There's https://freetubeapp.io/ for the desktop and https://newpipe.net/ for Android phones.
Somehow I just can't see this happening with Carney in power.
Would it be his copious investments in american tech giants? Or his vanishing backbone regarding US relations now that he's in power?
Yes
and news media majority, and native social media, and...
Yeah we're sucking their media and storage teat hardcore. A lot of things really. Dependent in general.
Bring back Nexopia!
I cancelled all of my US streaming services and started paying for CBC gem if I so want to watch the news.
I stopped using Facebook proper long before the boycott, and only used messenger but have not used it for a long time. A group I belong to uses discord I tried to get them to move off of that but the group as a whole would find it difficult to move to whatever else I found (do not remember what it was). I try to avoid using using Reddit and have replaced it with lemmy.ca to use lemmy. The only reason I have a Bluesky account is because one of the creators I follow posts on there when he is going live.
I'm thinking the opposite...we need to go back to analog and unplug ourselves from this globalist digital dystopia they are creating. They aren't going to be happy until our brains are plugged into the Matrix and our DNA is tortured into a shape that pleases them.