Both Dutch authorities The country’s citizens should be able to log in securely. This is what their government promises them. With their digital identity, or DigiD for short, people between Groningen and Maastricht can regulate matters with the tax office, pension funds or insurance companies, as well as educational or medical settings. The Dutch do this a lot, because even though DigiD access is not mandatory, you can hardly avoid it in everyday life. In 2023, almost 17 million citizens provided a good 480 million log-ins. “Your personal data,” the government assures, “is well protected.”
But that’s exactly what we’re currently worried about: the Amsterdam resident Cloud provider Solvinity, which specializes in government customers including DigiD, announced in November that shareholders had approved a takeover by Kyndryl Netherlands. The local branch of the New York IT infrastructure giant Kyndryl was created in 2021 from a spin-off from the US tech group IBM.
The BTI Investment Audit Office is now examining legal concerns about these plans, as an inquiry from taz revealed. Investments that pose potential risks to national and economic security must be reported to the office, which reports to the Ministry of Economic Affairs. A corresponding report has been received regarding the Sovinity deal, as a BTI spokesman confirmed. He didn’t want to say who did it because there is generally no information about ongoing procedures. The length of the review process varies from case to case, said the spokesman.
Alarm bells have been ringing in the Netherlands since the takeover plans were announced. The gap in data protection standards between the EU and the USA, where authorities have extensive access options, has long been a concern for Parliament in The Hague. Accordingly, the demand for less dependence on US tech companies is by no means new. The experiences since then Return of Donald Trump to the White House but they have made it a lot more urgent. Against this background, the Solvinity case seems to confirm all fears.
MPs warn against the deal
On behalf of many, Chris Stoffer, parliamentary group leader of the right-wing Calvinist party SGP, wonders what will happen to the population’s data in the future: “Will we be able to fill out our tax returns in a secure way soon?” Barbara Kathmann from the left-wing electoral alliance GroenLinks-PvdA has already made inquiries about this. She fears that digital services for citizens could become a geopolitical football: “If the Dutch government does something that Trump doesn’t like, he can quickly switch off our government at the push of a button. That’s really a big danger,” said the MP.
A parliamentary majority is demanding that the new government under Rob Jetten do everything possible to prevent the takeover. After a technical briefing by the Commission for Digital Affairs, Silvio Erkens from the liberal-right VVD admitted that his worries had “increased rather than diminished”. The conclusion: The basic constellation that US law applies to Solvinity as a Kyndrl subsidiary cannot be shaken.
“Many of our digital systems were developed in a different geopolitical era,” quotes the daily newspaper Volkskrant Art de Blaauw, who is responsible for nationwide digitization policy in the Ministry of the Interior. This finding is reminiscent of the dispute over the Dutch chip producer Nexperia, which is now owned by the Chinese company Wingtech. The Ministry of Economic Affairs in The Hague placed Nexperia under Kuratele in October to ensure the availability of chips in Europe and to prevent essential know-how from flowing to China and Dutch chips from continuing to end up in Russian weapon systems.
The dispute over Nexperia has significantly sensitized the Dutch discourse. This is also why the Solvinity case has been making headlines for two months. The threat potential is often linked to Trump as a person. Several media outlets created a scenario in which the president himself is snooping on Dutch citizens’ data. The risk is much more structural: Solvinity’s customers include the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Justice, the Dutch police, the state collection authority for fines and the municipality of Amsterdam, which wanted to reduce its dependence on Microsoft.