[state_throw_2]

>It became clear to us in the last weeks, that all political initiatives to create an independent European digital infrastructure have been stalled or postponed for years.

This is pretty bad, if people who were allegedly concerned about tying themselves to a foreign mast suddenly throw up their hands and say "Google/Apple/Facebook it is!" at the first sign of trouble. It's even a little surprising, given the borders being slammed shut to both people and goods around the world. I guess Europe will just be a "scramble for Africa" style battleground between being an American digital colony and a Chinese digital colony.

I hope they open source all the software they can as well as their index. This whole thing really is pretty sad. It is also sad they couldn't come up with a way to scrape by besides government backing. It is true "the world needs a private search engine that is not just using Bing or Google in the backend." At least there are private.sh, Mojeek, Yippy, and Yandex around for now.