This law change died in the "Vernehmlassung" which is early in the process. It's dead with opposition from all sides of the political spectrum. It had no chance.

https://www.inside-it.ch/vupf-revision-faellt-in-der-vernehm...

Even if the revision is 'dead' now, the precedent is set: the Swiss government’s willingness to consider gutting core privacy protections rewrites the risk calculation for every privacy-focused provider headquartered there.

If you architect your infrastructure around non-retention, even a temporarily defeated law signals it’s time to future-proof elsewhere.

Th government will just try and try again with "softer" version of the law until they get what they want even if it is 10-20 years from now. I am not surprise government justify it something along the line of "think of the children".

The law can't bind future lawmakers. That's a common feature of every legal system.

Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".

This is what constitutions are for. When you have the support, you install a constitutional protection that says the government can't do this. Repealing the protection requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to 67%.

Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.

Constitutions can still be ignored, at least temporarily, by incumbent governments, as evidenced most recently by some actions of the current US administration.

Also, the sort of majority needed to enact a constitution change to install a protection in the first place, can be very difficult to attain.

Hah, I was going to say that sounded needlessly heavy handed.

Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.

Even that sounds easy compared to my country. In Australia a constitutional change requires a referendum, with a double majority condition to pass. Specifically it requires the vote in over half the states to be in favour, in addition to the overall national vote in favour.

That described Dutch system also sounds relatively easy compared to the US model, which requires 2/3 votes in each chamber of Congress (meaning the people-based one and the land-based one), *then* 3/4 of the states (so another land-based check) have to ratify it.

Functionally this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen with no hope of amendment really ever again.

Please reboot your government for the changes to take effect.

I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to the existing referendum system.

After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.

The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to rally against and convince people that the ends of stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil. The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support within the population for temporary periods of time, so you need a system that can prevent it even in that environment. This typically means that violations of fundamental rights should require significantly more than 51% popular support or require changes in public sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US Senate being up for election every two years).

> After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.

I generally hate ballot propositions within the context of California (or American States really, but I put my energy towards the State I actually live in and care the most about), but that's an interesting way to do it. Have there been any significant downsides to this specific clause[1] in Switzerland?

[1] Let me emphasize: "this specific clause" being the one I quoted. I'm not looking for a general discussion on all forms of ballot propositions whether pro or anti.

Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.

Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.

Further additions to your comment. Expanding on your downside: Big reforms like giving women the right to vote only took effect in 1971 on the federal level. On a cantonal level, Appenzell-Innerhoden had to be forced into it in the 90s by the Tribunal Federal, but well.

I'd add some advantages to the upside as well: some changes require a referendum, such as changes to the constitution. But there's more: a popular initiative can be launched and if you collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months, you can force a vote on your own law. This is most commonly done by political parties and adjacent organisations, so it is at least feasible that a privacy-conscious organisation could launch an initiative to make it illegal to store any kind of user-identifying data. It is even possible private citizens could do it. There would likely be a "contre-projet" arguing why this isn't a good idea, but there is often a for/against for any initiative or referendum and they get to present their views in detail (in paper booklets, the vote swiss app, and on the federal chancellery website).

Further upsides: unlike US/British/some other countries, nobody has a 50% voting block in the Swiss parliament and it has remained a coalition since the modern iteration of the country (since 1848).

Basically Swiss politics is extremely deliberative. I honestly think "we will quit Switzerland if they do this!" is a bit of a hyperbolic reaction.

Ah, so the referendum isn’t then scheduled for a date in short order if the requisite signatures are collected but held at the next regularly scheduled election? Fair enough.

I like the sound of the upside a lot though.

Yes, except that the "votations" happen 4x per year. Here are all the next ones: https://www.bk.admin.ch/ch/f/pore/va/vab_1_3_3_1.html

Each will have 1-4 issues (approx) scheduled. Elections for politicians happen every 5 years, but no need to wait for those. What takes time (for votations) is the process: you have to verify the signatures once they're handed in at the federal chancellery and then decide when to schedule it.

Or if there was a law clarifying not to tread on privacy if that’s what the population has latest indicated, this kind of effort wouldn’t always need yo be wasted.

Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.

Democracy is fundamentally about putting in free labour. That’s just how it works, from the lowliest municipal elections up to federal. It’s a lot of unpaid labour.

That system works and has worked for a long time.

I think that’s an oversimplification. You can’t take the “free labor of performing democracy” and put it to equally good use doing anything else I can think of.

I guess you could work in soup kitchens, but that’s horribly inefficient welfare compared to just electing competent leadership, if the ultimate aim is to benefit The People.

Agreed on oversimplification

It’s more putting the burden on the people

By free labor I meant the bureaucrats who are paid in the otherwise to make the laws

In Switzerland you can change the constitution with popular votes. That only requires for 50% of the voters to agree and half of the cantons.

Then get half the voters to agree to make it two thirds. After you put the other protections in, naturally.

You’re arguing for massive changes to a very unique country with the oldest democracy in Europe. Unless you’re Swiss, or have credentials related to Swiss law, I don’t think you’re arguing anything realistic.

Countries can be as unique as they want to be, but they still need a system for preventing authoritarianism. The existing system is fine if it's effective and not fine if it isn't.

Switzerland has been preventing authoritarianism since before it was cool. Like, for 700 years. (With a brief interruption when they were invaded and overthrown by Napoleon.) So their system for the first 600 of those 700 years was the best system for preventing authoritarianism; a lot of it survives today.

This would be a wrong argument even if your premise about Switzetland was factually true (it's not).

It's like praising Danish architecture for its earthquake-resistance since no Danish building ever collapsed in an earthquake. It fails to account for the fact that Denmark never gets any significant earthquakes.

You can't tell how good a system is at resisting descent into authoritarian rule unless wannabe-autocrats have tried several times, amassed some support to achieve their goals, and the democratic institutions held against them. This never happened in Switzerland, not even in the 1930s: the ability of the Swiss constitution to precent authoritarian backsliding is untested.

(But as a side note, what you're saying is not factually correct. The Swiss constitution is from 1848, and before Napoleon only Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden would be considered nonauthorian. Many cantons, like Bern, were ruled by birthright autocratic families, and had no popular vote whatsoever.)

Switzerland also has amassed hundreds of constitutional amendments over that time. So perhaps the ability to frequently pass amendments has been instrumental to their success, and they should be on the lookout for new opportunities to bolster their democracy, such as constitutional safeguards against certain forms of state surveillance.

Requiring 50% in a referendum is different from and safer than requiring 50% in a parliament vote. A parliament can go against the people that elected them.

It's an additional check. That's good, but it isn't always sufficient, because sometimes you can convince 51% of people to do something wrong.

If you can convince 51% of the population to do something wrong than you're already screwed and have much bigger issues to worry about.

Brexit?

Countries that don't regularly have popular votes face the challenge that any vote is considered as a vote of confidence in their current government. It basically only reflects the popularity of the government and people do not evaluate the face value, the core of the issue. Having a real democracy takes a lot of training and effort.

Exactly this. In Switzerland, you generally have 3-4 vote periods per year with 0-8 different subjects). This is needed to make sure that people vote on the subject.

Brexit was 52% of voters voting to leave, but that was only 37% of the electorate. [1] It wasn't >50% of the electorate, let alone >50% of the population.

[1] https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-referendum-electorate-lea...

...I'll argue that those that didn't participate in that vote elected to opt out. I.e. Don't cry if you didn't care to participate and then don't get what you wanted.

This is a referendum that changes the fundamental rules of the game, not a pizza order. The onus isn't on the population to waste their time vetoing your bad or mediocre ideas, it's on you to come up with good ideas. And disgusting your constituents enough that they abstain entirely should very much not be a viable strategy. If you want to change the constitution, you gotta convince people that you're doing something good, including those who are hard to convince. That's literally the entire point. If you're not managing that, clearly your change isn't good enough to make.

Anyway, I wasn't even trying to argue in favor of this position, or against it. I was merely replying to the parent comment that Brexit did not meet the threshold that their parent comment had suggested.

People got lazy lately after a long peace time. Saying “it can’t get worse than that” with 5-10% unemployment. Yes this is not good, but it can get way worse than that. Also “my vote doesn’t count, and everyone is bad”. Enemies of democracy have pushed this a lot lately, internet make it trivially cheap and easy to spread. Nations like UK are in the find out phase.

It sounds so easy to do

And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead. And might as well make sure there are only two major political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing their pockets with foreign donations.

These are independent problems.

To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.

The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.

"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.

Approval voting is also worth considering, where you put a checkmark in the box for any candidate you’d be okay with. Advantage over ranked choice is that communicating the scoring to citizens is simple: “$CANDIDATE received the most checkmarks.” Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.

Approval voting would result in “the okay-est” candidate winning rather than anyone towards an extreme winning in the primaries. Works well when there are a lot of fairly similar milquetoast candidates that split votes, like the Republican primaries of 2015.

> Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.

Not ranked voting, ranked voting is still very broken. Rated voting. Approval voting is a rated voting system.

Score voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10.

Approval voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1.

Score voting (or STAR) is generally better and the argument that people are going to be confused by "that thing they use at the Olympics" is nonsense, but approval voting is fine if you want to silence the complainers while still using something that basically works.

That's how you ossify.

If preventing the government from abusing the population is ossification then the government should be made entirely out of bones.

Constitutions are amended all the time. The French even have a proces for reboots of the Republic.

These are goods things.

The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic structure" of the constitution.

It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.

Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.

No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic. They are the framework that gives the government power and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too much or too often is bad.

Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.

Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.

France disagrees. They iterated 5 times on it and it fixed big flaws each time.

What keeps a country in check is not a constitution but a politically informed and active population. The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.

Constitutions that are easy to amend are basically universally a piece of toilet paper.

This is not true in practice. Inertia and international law / agreements bind future lawmakers. If one government joins the EU, the next still has to follow EU law even if EU law changes.

In the USA we have amendments to the constitution, which take considerable political effort to change. These amendments can restrict the types of laws that may be passed.

This system works because the changes are not just recorded in the paper of some lawbook, but in the minds of the people.

This was my understanding, which is why I was so surprised to read of Trump's edict preventing state-level AI laws for ten years.

An existing law can be different to change, than where non exists and its greenfield for something half baked to roll in.

That prevention is called the Constitution. It regulates what kinds of law can or cannot be made.

Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.

every law is temporal, until it gets re-written or killed outright

> It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.

People don't have a lot of money and a revolving door with the government, like the lobby industry has. As long as corruption is legalized, in the form of lobby, regular people will find it very hard to influence the government.

Proton didn't just market 'Swiss privacy,' they built real engineering around non-retention—no logs, no trackers, nothing to subpoena. If Switzerland erodes that, the only defensible move for actual privacy builders is to exit and redeploy somewhere the law aligns with technical reality. Anything else is security theater.

If law passes, if Proton leaves, what matters most isn't their press release—it's the engineers voting with their code and hardware locales.

Techradar popped up a full screen something with "you may also want to read..." when i hit the browser back button.

Entshittification continues...

I hold Proton CEO to his word. I will also terminate my paid account with Proton if they dont leave (to give weight to his word). And Swiss will be on my ban list as well for ANY online services.

Who sponsored this??

Best I could find as a non Swiss:

> Threema and Proton In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision. Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".

(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)

Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?

Seems like the translation failed to translate the job title properly...

This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling" division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.

Small logical question - How can proton deliver mail to you if it does not save anything ?

The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from reading the article).

They might log access in some circumstances, according to their privacy policy (https://proton.me/legal/privacy)

> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.

See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."

To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of communication if only one side of the conversation is secure, given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?

This is a valid point, but emails between Proton users (or other users of PGP) will not be accessible. And, presumably, it will be harder to see your email if you use Proton, than if you used Google/Outlook if your adversary had to look through everyone else's email to find who corresponded with you.

proton account to proton account.

> how can e-mail ever be a secure medium

Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.

I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.

> I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.

Google has an email service so that it can ingest all your communication and use it to better target ads. If Google didn't have access to the content of your emails, there wouldn't be much point to Gmail.

Microsoft mostly cares about enterprises, and enterprises generally don't want E2EE email; they have legal requirements to retain e-mail of employees, and have their own reasons to want to be able to access employee emails sometimes.

Apple... I don't know where they stand on this.

What they would tout as their USP then? Ex-Swiss Privacy?

And they will go where? To the Netherlands or Sweden? EU regulation applies there. They would have to go to Seychelles or Panama, but their servers would obviously still have to be elsewhere.

Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.

Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/a-dangero...

It was also Swedish EU commissioner who wants to ban end-to-end encrypted chats and brought various proposals to the EU for this.

> Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy

Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.

I wouldnt trust their state, the one that argued for infecting their entire population with covid to achieve herd immunity, the one that bent the knee to the US when they wanted a sex scandal to arrest Assange, the one who wont release information they have about blown up gas pipelines in their back yard. I shouldnt pick on Sweden, all countries are like this now.

I think Sweden was one of the best countries how it handle Covid. Assange is a farce on the other hand.

Once you lose privacy, you can never get it back.

The population may trust the government now, but totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go straight into building or offshoring their gulags.

yeah, what if? :P

What does social democracy have to do with hating privacy?

The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.

I guess the human temptation to want to know what people are saying behind your back goes beyond political/economic systems.

"Crony capitalist", it's not actual capitalism when the government has its fingers and regulatioms in everyone's finances.

Social democracy is also capitalism.

I’d rather word that differently. High-trust societies with little expectation of privacy and valuing community tend to do well with social democracy. Otherwise people end up abusing the system and it’s hard to catch them if privacy trumps community needs.

Here in ex-USSR country people are very pro privacy and individualist. At the same time we try to copy a lot of Nordic stuff from our neighbors. It’s a shitshow how those cultures mesh. A lot of welfare abuse, hiding beyond muh privacy to avoid scrutinity.

If privacy service providers have to keep logs anywhere, they lose all technical credibility—doesn't matter if you're registered in Panama, the Netherlands, or Mars. Perhaps, we should design systems where compliance is impossible and data simply doesn’t exist by default.

> "This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia," said Yen.

They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal

The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine" in a "please think of the children"-moment.

That seems to be a contradiction. If the courts (the body tasked with deciding what is and isn't illegal) agree with the government than by definition its not illegal.

That's outrageous. Would you have a source for this?

There was a whole special interest group set up to handle the law suites: https://ulovliglogning.dk/ all the law suites are on their page, but in Danish. One of the previous ministers of justice flat said he didn't care, as long as it help catch "the bad guys". This a guy who was the leader of the Conservatives. A party that brands itself as the party of law and justice, except when they don't like the verdicts apparently.

You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in 2017 (again in Danish): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom. The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish Engineers Union.

There's a Wikipedia page on what is being logged and retained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#Denmark

It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected data, but the end result is that every single person in Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they go completely offline.

Thanks so much!

Should be noted that Denmark is not the only country that weasels its way around bans on mass surveillance like that.

Take Belgium, which took the "mass surveillance by default is illegal" and introduced a law that forced mass surveillance in areas that exceeded a certain legal threshold, designed specifically to include every single town in Belgium except for some tiny town where almost nobody lives.

Other European countries have applied similar workarounds. They're all pretty much dead the moment they hit the courts, but as long as the public doesn't know and nobody bothers to start a lawsuit, the mass surveillance continues.

"Data retention", as the industry calls it, is still active far and wide across Europe. Some countries retain said data for days at most, others for years.

What happened to the ideas of offshore data centers and seasteading and pirate radio? Is it time to bring those back (again)?

It was always stupid, because that is not how laws work.

only musk can save datacenters from reaches of earths governments.

by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.

> Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?

Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.

How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture.

The anti-satellite side has a budget hundreds to thousands of times cheaper, based on average ball bearings to satellite density in orbit, with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.

> How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture

Approximately as much as a finished satellite or block or gold of similar mass. The bulk of the cost is in launch and aiming.

Imagine you're standing on a simplified earth that's a perfect sphere, with no air resistance, and have a gun that has a muzzle velocity of orbital speed.

There are 40,000 SUVs randomly located on the planet.

You fire randomly in the horizontal plane.

What's the probability of you hitting an SUV, and not yourself in the back 84 minutes later?

The earth is big. The probability isn't zero, but for any given orbits period it is low. And both the ball bearings and the satelites will re-enter after a while.

Is not changing BGP route cheaper than taking down a satanlite ? Sorry, satellite.

Norway has also been a popular destination for these types of services.

As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.

Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.

The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...

Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.

Denmark is a little under 6 million people, there are currently 12 parties eligible for election. That not really uncommon, the Netherlands also have a fairly large number of parties.

It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four parties can represent 80 million or more people. The truth is that many of the parties in countries like Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in countries like the US, would be considered implementation details or narrow topics.

I assure you forcing everyone into one of two options results in way more division. You can probably imagine why.

A continuous spectrum is only divided if it has too few bins.

This is quite normal in Europe.

E.g. there are currently 14 political parties with at least one seat in the UK Parliament - but most of them only have a very small number of seats.

500,000 people aligned to a party platform isn't wild.

Claiming that 100,000,000+ are aligned to a party platform is much more crazy.

Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a society. Much more so than just about any place i’ve spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit of diversity in certain things, politics being one — but only within certain parameters, so I suspect the differences between the parties are more around specific issues up for debate than big ideological / identity concerns, as they are in the US, for example.

This is fairly common for smaller parliamentary systems; you can think of it as a side effect of proportional representation.

I have no experience with them, so not a recommendation, but perhaps https://greenmountain.no?

They're owned by an israeli company nowadays fwiw

Oh, I missed that.

They deploy Pegasus from there or what would Israeli company need in there ?

Seems mostly to be a real-estate investment but the ownership structure is a bit opaque. Their DCs host some critical infrastructure for banks.

I somehow missed them. Thanks for the information. I’m afraid that the lack of public prices and an invitation to contact their salesman means it’s as expensive as it could be, but I’m sure Proton can afford.

Having worked in the hosting and colo business in Scandinavia, it's normally not cheap. It's been a few years, but you're starting around €500 per month (in 2016 I think we could get you started at €350) and frequently you'll need to take at least a quarter of a rack.

Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.

That's normal for colocation. It's not a jellybean service. It's something you have to individually negotiate with your supplier. We've been spoiled by being able to rent virtual servers that are all the same within one provider. Colocation is not all the same. ("Jellybean" is what electronics people call basic parts that are commodities, as opposed to, say, highly specialized integrated circuits. Some say it comes from when electronic part stores would have them in jellybean jars. You could just grab one out of the jar because the individual differences didn't really matter.)

There are some places that have jellybean colocation offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers, so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that business model), but it only covers a small portion of colocation possibilities.

But typically colocation is just one of those products where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is. So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a couple hundred dollars a month worth.

By the way, the same is true for business internet access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as every residential user does), you get the same basic service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn enough money, your ISP will negotiate with you. Though I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the "residential area == ordinary residential connection" assumption (and in many cases their network may not support certain upgrades). And it's true for business transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the best match off the shelf. You want five million screws, we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars, the bank has a problem.)

There's several that don't have immediate exposure to the US, like Bulk, Telenor, Blix, Orange Business Service (former Basefarm). Most of these are in or around Oslo.

But is an absolute monarchy (e.g. non-independent judiciary).

But it isn't.

To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy".

It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.

It's a country where if the Prince decides he doesn't like you, well, he can bring the entire administrative arm of the state down upon you. It's basically a European version of the UAE – not a great place to be.

They had a popular vote to decide if the prince could overrule the democratic government, and the people voted that they prince could. seems to work for them, they hare rich and happy

Yes, because it's a tax haven. That doesn't mean it would be sensible for Proton to move there!

How delightfully paradoxical to see democracy vote itself out of power.

I feel like you need to complete this thought. Australia has an independent judiciary, and look what they did to tech privacy. So I'm not seeing how it follows that an absolute monarchy is a hindrance.

This is very specious reasoning. At least in Australia if you have a legal problem there is a full court system set up that can help you – Liechstenstein is basically just a state owned by a single man attached to a bank (LGT) owned by the same man.

Australia's "full court system" completely failed to stop "Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018", where by people can be compelled to install security backdoors at the behest of law enforcement.

It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.

And their military defense is outsourced to Switzerland.

Mullvad operates out of Sweden. Unlike proton, mullvad doesnt have to respond to court orders. proton gives up user info thousands a year its right on their transparency page.

Correction:they do in fact have to respond to court orders, but they can't give any info as they simply do not have it.

Mullvad stores account (kyc) + payment information in line with Swedish tax laws for (I think) 7 years.

What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)

Doesn't Mullvad accept cash without identifying information?

All entities with known physical addresses have to respond to court orders, or men with guns will break into those addresses and kidnap whoever is supposed to have responded.

> a "major violation of the right to privacy" that will also harm the country's reputation and its ability to compete on an international level.

Exactly. Were the fear mongers and authoritarians so successful that the infected organism starts acting against its own wellbeing?

Title needs a dash after Google, otherwise it reads weirdly

No more "Swiss-Privacy" then.

Another day, another digital illiterate politician trying to regulate the digital world

Just a reminder that Proton's CEO supported Donald Trump because of similar activism.

No, he didn't. You're thinking of the story where he expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and where he subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side.

Implying support for Trump here borderlines deceitful disinformation.

Why didn't you just look it up before making that comment?

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

This was discussed on HN as well.