The networker: Microsoft shutting down email accounts of Trump’s foes should be worrying to us all

On 4 February, Netanyahu became the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump after his inauguration. Two days later, with impeccable timing, his host issued one of his decrees – AKA executive orders – imposing sanctions on the ICC on the grounds that it had “abused its power by issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister of defence Yoav Gallant”.

The decree goes on to threaten any person, institution or company that provides “financial, material, or technological support” to the ICC with sanctions backed by the full might of the US government.

As far as I know, only one senior official – the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – has, to date, been thus sanctioned, but he is likely to be joined by others in due course. And that’s where things may become sticky for people in other jurisdictions who imagine they are immune to the wrath of King Donald.

Khan, who is a British subject, has already lost access to his bank accounts, which is what happens when you’re sanctioned. More interestingly, though, Microsoft has also blocked his email account.

That decision might have been a product of lawyerly caution; after all, giving him an email address could be construed as providing a service to someone who is newly defined by the Trump administration as an outlaw or a pariah. Better to be safe: cut Khan off and avoid a drubbing on Truth Social.

In a way, however, it doesn’t matter whether Microsoft was being cautious or cowardly. The reality is that it’s a global company based in the US. So its interests are now inextricably intertwined with the national interests of the US, as defined by the president.

And we are all enmeshed in its products and services. Virtually every corporation, school, local authority, government department, university, media outlet and organisation in the UK runs on Microsoft operating systems and apps.

The vast majority of white-collar workers use Microsoft Office in their jobs and – poor wretches – Teams for remote meetings. And most large organisations have outsourced their email to Microsoft’s Outlook or – less commonly – to Google’s Gmail.

This was the outcome of a decades-long process of pragmatic managerial thinking. Running email servers, local networks and IT is an arduous and often tedious task best left to geeks who like that kind of thing. It’s not the core business of an organisation.

So, the thinking went, best to get rid of the IT millstone and let the big boys do it. And if they were all American, well, so what? They were well resourced and knew what they were doing. Oh, and they were based in a friendly country where the rule of law applied.

Which is why it seemed sensible to trade dependence for convenience. That bargain doesn’t look so sensible now, though, for two reasons. First, when the tech giants sidled up to Trump before his election, something significant changed. For decades, it made sense to see their dominance as an example of what the late political scientist Joseph Nye called “soft power” – aspects of American life that made the US seem attractive or glamorous to the rest of the world. (A bit like Hollywood in the 1950s, perhaps.)

But once these corporations had realigned with Trump, they became elements of American “hard power”, with coercive overtones. Their commercial interests fused with the national interest, which is why countries such as the UK that wish to regulate social media are now threatened by Trump with economic reprisals.

The second seismic change is that Trump and his crowd have finally realised the power of what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call, in a book of the same name, its “underground empire”; the sprawling network of fibre optic cables and arcane payment systems it controls and has transformed into powerful coercive tools that enable it to impose its will – for example, with sanctions.

This is what gives American administrations dominance over other sovereign states, and Trump and his cronies are getting the hang of how to use it. So if you think that what’s happening in Washington doesn’t affect us, then you haven’t being paying attention. The ICC shenanigans may be just a dry run for what’s yet to come. We’re about to find out if “digital sovereignty” is worth the paper it isn’t written on.

A law unto himself

Law ≠ Power is an interesting essay by the legal scholar Rebecca Roiphe on the irony of seeing the liberal critique of law weaponised by Donald Trump.

Vanishing point

A fabulous New Yorker essay by D Graham Burnett is Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Diminished responsibility

Managing American Decline is an intriguing, contrarian Substack piece on recent US history by travel writer Bill Murray.

Photograph by Middle East Images