>Certainly, a small state has the same rights and the same cause to protect their citizens from the surveillance and manipulation from foreign owned social networks.
Next up, we could migrate government systems away from foreign IT software and services. The FOSS world has plenty of capable offerings, and it's not as if the choices were made on technical merit in the first place. I'd love to see Free Software and open standards being taught in schools, and being used in government.
I think that's okay. I'm not opposed to foreigners at all. What I find a bit strange is that (proprietary) tech provides a backdoor to the user - I think this is something that a reasonable govt would oppose, but of course they have other things on their plates too, and they are corrupt as well.
This concern is similar to what is cited as the reason for the Huawei sanctions in the US.
Of course, it's not like FOSS magically eliminates all threat. If FOSS was commonly utilized by governments, I think we would see more "XZ Utils backdoor" type of attacks, as it were a juicier target. I firmly believe though that using FOSS would be a step in the right direction.
Next up, we could migrate government systems away from foreign IT software and services. The FOSS world has plenty of capable offerings, and it's not as if the choices were made on technical merit in the first place. I'd love to see Free Software and open standards being taught in schools, and being used in government.