Grabbed the PDF and commented over here with:

The Norweigans missed the most important (and easiest!) action:

• Public services themselves need to get off Facebook & Twitter. If they can’t walk the walk and take their own advice, it’s not just an optical embarrassment. As someone who already boycotts the shitty gatekeepers (Cloudflare, google, ms, fb, apple, twtr), I am already free from enshittification — except when I must interact with a public service.

WTF?! The only unmanagable evil force I must deal with comes from the gov itself, who imposes shitty gatekeepers in the course of doing public tasks. I can’t boycott the government.

Belgian public services ALL use Microsoft for their email. So you should do everything on paper in Belgium. But what do they do? They scan paper letter/form/submissions and then they email it to themselves via Microsoft’s server. I shit you not. Microsoft is inescapable even by the most disciplined. And it’s only because the government itself will not ditch the motherfuckers.

Exceptionally, it’s somewhat redeeming that the Norweigans mention that public services should use open source. But that just scratches the surface. The very first thing they should do is get off Facebook and Twitter.

The Norweigans missed the most important (and easiest!) action:

• Public services themselves need to get off Facebook & Twitter. If they can’t walk the walk and take their own advice, it’s not just an optical embarrassment. As someone who already boycotts the shitty gatekeepers (Cloudflare, google, ms, fb, apple, twtr), I am already free from enshittification — except when I must interact with a public service.

WTF?! The only unmanagable evil force I must deal with comes from the gov itself, who imposes shitty gatekeepers in the course of doing public tasks. I can’t boycott the government.

Belgian public services ALL use Microsoft for their email. So you should do everything on paper in Belgium. But what do they do? They scan paper letter/form/submissions and then they email it to themselves via Microsoft’s server. I shit you not. Microsoft is inescapable even by the most disciplined. And it’s only because the government itself will not ditch the motherfuckers.

Exceptionally, it’s somewhat redeeming that the Norweigans mention that public services should use open source. But that just scratches the surface. The very first thing they should do is get off Facebook and Twitter.

ah, shared ownership was naturally my assumption. Now that I translated the article, I’m not sure why they needed to cooperate, as opposed to each independantly buying them.

I didn’t hear of the shared ownership but certainly that weakens the defense argument for the merger.

Defense was one of the stated notable motivations. But I struggle to imagine what weird corner case scenario would require NL and BE to be merged in order to react more effectively.

I also think future wars will be heavily information based… like cyber attacks that bring down banks. Netherlands cashless direction makes them more vulnerable to that.

Brussels Times blocks tor, but I was able to get past the barriers and reach the article this way:

torsocks lynx http://web.archive.org/web/20251208075118/https://www.brusselstimes.com/1842240/turning-the-benelux-into-one-country-belgian-pm-wants-to-reunite-beating-heart-of-europe

Merging these countries seems like crazy talk. I certainly don’t like the Dutch idea of making shops cashless (which violates EU law), and the fact that there is a cartel on ATMs in NL. Dutch public services are also non-responsive to complaints, such as when trains and buses fail to meet legal quality standards and neglect consumer rights.

I like Amsterdam’s ban on ads for meat and fossil fuels, but that’s less important than the other factors.