Digital Independence Day: When Someone Else Holds the Switch

In 2025 the chief prosecutor of the world's war crimes court was cut off from his Microsoft account. This week, Microsoft 365 prices go up. Both are the same pattern. Here's what helps, app by app.

In February 2025, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, lost access to his email account. Not to a hack. To a US sanction. The court had issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, after which US President Trump sanctioned Khan by executive order. His Microsoft account went dark, and he moved to the Swiss provider Proton. Microsoft president Brad Smith denies to this day that any services were stopped, calling the episode a «disconnection».

Let's be clear about what happened: the top prosecutor of a world court was locked out of his own systems because another state wanted it that way. If it can happen to an institution with an international legal mandate, then for your SME the question isn't whether this switch exists. It's only who flips it, and when.

The thesis: dependency is the product

That sounds like conspiracy, but it's plain business logic, and it runs in three steps.

Step one, bait: the entry is cheap and convenient. From six dollars per user per month for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, everything from one vendor, one login, works instantly. Nobody thinks about the exit on day one.

Step two, entangle: over time, everything hangs on everything else. Word saves to OneDrive, OneDrive needs the account, the account opens Teams, Teams hangs on Entra ID. Your identity management, your files and your communication become a single tangle. Each connection is handy on its own. Together they're a chain you can't cut without halting the business.

Step three, squeeze: once you can't leave, the screw gets turned. Two examples from the last few months.

On 1 July 2026, this very week, Microsoft raised prices on its commercial subscriptions. Office 365 E3 went up 13 percent, from 23 to 26 dollars per user per month. It's the first increase on the Office bundles since 2011, justified by over a thousand new features and AI. Across roughly 446 million paid seats, this single adjustment is estimated to bring Microsoft an extra 10.7 billion dollars. Pay monthly instead of annually and you're paying a permanent premium of around 20 percent anyway.

When Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025, more than 40 percent of all desktops worldwide were still running it, in companies nearly 60 percent. Those devices weren't broken; they were declared a security risk by calendar date. Need more time? You pay for the security updates: 61 dollars per device in year one, a figure that doubles every following year. You're paying so that working hardware isn't switched off. Even the «free» consumer option requires a Microsoft account and cloud sync, meaning still more lock-in.

That's the pattern: bait, entangle, squeeze. Khan's dead account and your rising bill aren't two stories. They're one.

The map: app by app

The good news: for every link in that chain there's now a sovereign alternative. Five years ago that wasn't true. Today it is.

Windows gives way to a Linux distribution such as Fedora or Linux Mint, fine for office workstations as long as you check specialist software first. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are replaced by Collabora Online or LibreOffice, with files staying .docx- and .xlsx-compatible and only complex macros being the exception. OneDrive and SharePoint give way to Nextcloud, ready to use including sync client and sharing. Teams chat is handled by Matrix with Element, fully federated and end-to-end encrypted; calls and meetings run over Jitsi or Element Call straight in the browser, no installation. Entra ID, or Azure AD, is replaced by Keycloak, one login for everything over the standard OIDC protocol. Outlook tasks and Planner are covered by Plane, appointment booking on your own domain by Cal.com, and passwords by the self-hosted, Bitwarden-compatible Vaultwarden.

This isn't theory. It's exactly the path the International Criminal Court took after the Khan incident: away from Microsoft, onto openDesk, an open-source suite from a German sovereignty initiative already widely used across the German public sector. If a court can pull that off, it's not rocket science for an SME.

Where the catch is, and nobody else will tell you

Each of these alternatives is mature on its own. Even so: an app is not a platform.

Whoever «just spins up Nextcloud» ends up with a file store. But no user management, no central login, no encryption between services, no backups, no monitoring, and no answer to what happens at three in the morning when the box falls over. This is where DIY projects fail. Not on the single app, but on how the pieces fit together.

openDesk solves the political problem, not the practical one. It proves a complete Microsoft alternative exists and runs in government. But openDesk hands you the toolbox. Operating, hardening and securing it is on you, and for an SME that's where the mountain of work begins.

What we do differently

At MilesGuard we run exactly these tools as one coherent system on Swiss and EU infrastructure. Not a pile of separate installations sitting next to each other, but connected, with a single login and encrypted between themselves.

And because we come from security, not sales, we don't trust a platform until we've put it under load and deliberately driven it to fail. We want to know the breaking point before an attacker finds it. What goes into our production has been through those tests.

In practice that means one login for everything: sign in once, then reach files, chat, calls and project tools; when someone leaves, you disable one account instead of forgetting ten. Encryption between services: the building blocks don't talk in the open but over mutually verified, encrypted connections, so getting inside the network still doesn't let you simply listen in. Your data stays here: logs, backups and content never leave the jurisdiction you chose, no CLOUD Act, no fine print. And it runs even without the internet: the platform can run from its own internal source and keeps working when the line to the outside is cut, which for sensitive industries is not a gimmick but a regulation.

Day to day it feels like always: a browser, a login, documents, chat, calls. The difference is that nobody on the outside holds the switch.

Where it starts

Nobody rips everything out tomorrow. An exit starts with an inventory: which Microsoft services do you actually use, and which are easiest to replace? Usually it's file storage and video calls, long before anyone touches Windows.

Khan had no choice left once the switch was flipped. You do, as long as you make it now. If you want to know where an exit would concretely start for you, let's talk.