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Take Control: How You Can Protect Your Digital Life and Help Norway Stay Sovereign
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Take Control: How You Can Protect Your Digital Life and Help Norway Stay Sovereign

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You have insurance on your house. Insurance on your car. Travel insurance. Health insurance.

What insurance do you have if you can’t log into your own computer?

You Have the Power
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Here’s the good news: you can protect yourself. You can protect your family. And in doing so, you can help protect Norway.

The tools exist. The alternatives are mature. The path is clear. All it takes is starting - one small step at a time.

This article will show you how. But first, let’s understand what we’re insuring against.

The Risk Is Real
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Imagine waking up tomorrow and finding you can’t log into your Windows PC. Not because of a technical glitch - but because your account was suspended.

Sound far-fetched? Consider:

Windows 11 now requires a Microsoft account. Microsoft has been progressively eliminating the ability to use Windows with a local account. The latest Windows 11 builds make a Microsoft account mandatory during setup.

Your computer. Their permission.

Your data lives in their cloud. OneDrive. Outlook. Microsoft 365. Your documents, your emails, your family photos - increasingly stored on Microsoft servers, accessed through Microsoft accounts.

Accounts can be suspended. Microsoft’s terms of service give them broad authority to suspend accounts. And as we’ve seen with the US sanctions against the International Criminal Court - the world’s war crimes tribunal - when the US government wants to cut off access to services, American companies comply.

Ask the Iranians
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People in sanctioned countries know exactly what this looks like. In Iran, Cuba, Syria, and other sanctioned nations:

  • Microsoft accounts are blocked or restricted
  • Google services are unavailable or limited
  • GitHub access is restricted for developers
  • Cloud services refuse to serve users based on location
  • Payment systems don’t work

Iranian developers have written extensively about being locked out of GitHub, losing access to their own code repositories, and being cut off from the tools the rest of the world takes for granted.

These aren’t criminals. They’re ordinary people trying to do their jobs. Their “crime” is living in the wrong country.

The sanctions don’t distinguish between governments and citizens.

Insurance You Buy Before the Fire
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You don’t buy house insurance when your house is already burning. You buy it before, hoping you’ll never need it.

Digital insurance works the same way. The time to prepare for being locked out is before it happens. The insurance policy? Open standards.

Open standards mean:

  • Your documents work in multiple programs, not just one vendor’s
  • Your data can be exported and moved elsewhere
  • Your tools can be replaced without losing your work
  • No single company can lock you out of your own files

The Burden of Change
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Here’s the honest truth: switching tools is hard.

We all have workflows built around specific software. Muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts. Templates and macros we’ve refined over years. The thought of changing all of that is exhausting.

Now imagine this: you don’t choose to change! You’re forced to. Overnight. Everything different. No preparation. No gradual learning. Just sudden, complete disruption.

That’s what happens when you get locked out.

The burden of changing one tool at a time, on your own schedule, learning as you go - that’s manageable. The burden of changing everything at once because you have no choice - that’s catastrophic.

Which burden would you rather carry?

Three Choices
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When the lockout comes, you have three options:

1. Give in to the ransom

Comply with whatever demands are made. Change your behavior, your speech, your affiliations to satisfy whoever holds the key. Abandon your principles to regain access.

2. Change everything overnight

Scramble to find alternatives for every tool you use. Lose access to your history, your files, your carefully built systems. Start from zero, under pressure, with no preparation.

3. Change tools over time (starting now)

Begin transitioning to open standards and alternative tools while you still have access to everything. Export your data. Learn new software gradually. Build redundancy. Create your insurance policy before you need it.

Only one of these options is really a choice. The other two are surrenders.

Where to Start
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You don’t have to change everything at once. Start with the most critical areas:

Documents and Office Work
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Instead of: Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) Consider: LibreOffice (free, open source, reads/writes Microsoft formats)

LibreOffice isn’t identical to Microsoft Office - but it handles most common tasks well, and your documents remain yours. Export your important documents to open formats (.odt, .ods) as backup.

Email
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Instead of: Outlook.com, Gmail Consider: ProtonMail (Switzerland), Tutanota (Germany), or self-hosted options

At minimum, ensure you can export your email and have a backup email address on a different provider.

Cloud Storage
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Instead of: OneDrive, Google Drive Consider: Nextcloud (can self-host or use European providers), Tresorit (Switzerland)

The key isn’t necessarily moving everything - it’s having copies of critical files somewhere you control.

Operating System
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Instead of: Windows with mandatory Microsoft account Consider: Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint for beginners)

This is the biggest change, but also the most complete insurance. Linux doesn’t require anyone’s permission to use.

Photos and Memories
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Critical: Ensure your family photos exist somewhere other than OneDrive/iCloud/Google Photos. Local backup. Multiple copies. These are irreplaceable.

The Interoperability Bonus
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Here’s something interesting: when you use open standards, interoperability often gets better, not worse.

A document saved in Open Document Format (.odt) can be opened by LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and many other programs. A document saved in a proprietary format might only work properly in one.

Open standards were designed for interoperability. Proprietary formats were designed for lock-in.

When everyone uses standards, everyone can communicate. When everyone uses one vendor’s formats, everyone depends on that vendor’s goodwill.

How You Contribute to National Sovereignty
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This isn’t just about protecting yourself. Every choice you make shapes Norway’s digital independence.

When you choose open standards:

  • You create demand for sovereign alternatives
  • You build skills that don’t depend on foreign vendors
  • You make it easier for colleagues, friends, and family to follow
  • You reduce Norway’s collective vulnerability to foreign pressure

When you stay with proprietary systems:

  • You deepen the dependency
  • You make it harder for alternatives to survive
  • You accept that Norwegian data flows through foreign hands
  • You vote with your wallet for lock-in

Norwegian Minister of Digitalization Karianne Tung has called for exit strategies from foreign cloud providers. But government policy alone can’t create digital sovereignty. It requires citizens and organizations making different choices.

Every LibreOffice installation, every ProtonMail account, every Nextcloud server is a small act of sovereignty. Individually, they’re personal insurance. Collectively, they’re national infrastructure.

Your digital choices are political choices - whether you make them consciously or not.

What About Your Work?
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Your personal computer is one thing. But what about your job?

If you work for a company that uses Microsoft 365, your work email, your documents, your Teams conversations, your SharePoint files - all of it lives on Microsoft’s servers, accessed through Microsoft accounts.

Does your employer have a Plan B?

Has anyone at your workplace ever discussed what happens if your organization loses access to Microsoft services? Not a temporary outage - a permanent lockout?

Most Norwegian organizations have disaster recovery plans. They plan for server failures, natural disasters, cyberattacks, data breaches. How many have planned for: “Our cloud provider suspends our account”?

This isn’t in most risk assessments because it seems impossible. But ask the ICC - an international court backed by 124 countries - how impossible seemed before February 2025.

If your organization does work that might ever conflict with US interests - humanitarian aid, human rights documentation, environmental activism, journalism, international law - the question isn’t whether you should have a plan. It’s whether you can afford not to.

Why This Dependency Exists
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We didn’t end up dependent on American technology by accident. Microsoft created genuinely excellent products. They standardized how we work with documents. They made computers accessible to ordinary people. The productivity gains they enabled are immeasurable.

But somewhere along the way, a dependency became a vulnerability.

A Pattern, Not an Accident
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This isn’t the first time dominant tech companies have used their position to eliminate choice.

In the 1990s, Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and used its operating system monopoly to crush Netscape Navigator - then the leading web browser. The US Department of Justice sued, and in 2001, a federal court found Microsoft guilty of maintaining its monopoly through anticompetitive means.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s findings of fact were damning:

Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft’s core products.

The court found that Microsoft had:

  • Illegally tied Internet Explorer to Windows
  • Threatened PC manufacturers who promoted competing browsers
  • Deliberately made Windows incompatible with competing software
  • Used its dominance to eliminate consumer choice

Microsoft was nearly broken up. Instead, they settled with restrictions that have long since expired.

Bill Gates was CEO throughout this period. The guilty verdict came in April 2000. Gates stepped down as CEO in January 2000 - just months before the ruling - and announced his transition to philanthropy. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which would reshape his public image from monopolist to humanitarian, was founded that same year.

The timing is worth noting. Today, Gates is remembered primarily as a philanthropist. The antitrust conviction that nearly broke up his company is largely forgotten.

Three decades later, the pattern continues - but now the stakes are higher. It’s not just your browser. It’s your entire digital life, held behind a mandatory account.

Your Choice
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The question isn’t whether the tools we use are good - many of them are excellent. The question is whether you want your ability to use your own computer, access your own files, and do your own work to depend on a foreign corporation’s continued permission.

You have insurance for your house, your car, your health.

What’s your insurance for your digital life?

The premium is learning some new tools. The coverage is sovereignty over your own data.

And unlike house insurance, this policy only works if you get it before you need it.

Getting Started
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This week:

  1. Download LibreOffice and open a few of your documents
  2. Export your most important files to open formats
  3. Create a backup email account on a non-US provider
  4. Copy your photos to a local drive

This month:

  1. Practice using LibreOffice for some tasks
  2. Export your email archive
  3. Identify which cloud services hold your critical data
  4. Research Linux if you’re curious (try it in a virtual machine first)

This year:

  1. Gradually shift your primary workflow to open tools
  2. Establish redundant backups for everything important
  3. Reduce your dependency on any single vendor
  4. Help others understand why this matters

Small steps. Big insurance.

Sources
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Windows 11 Microsoft Account Requirement:

Microsoft Antitrust Case:

Sanctions and Service Access:

Other: