Belgium’s government might not be in its best shape. But still the logical conclusion in my humble opinion isn’t “let’s shutting down the one power source that actually works.”
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
Also another Italian here. For context, the "Piracy Shield" mentioned in the order is basically a legislative hacksaw authorized by the regulator (AGCOM) primarily to protect Serie A football rights. Soccer rules Italy more than the Vatican..
It’s a mess technically: it mandates ISPs and DNS providers to block IPs/domains within 30 minutes of a report, with zero judicial oversight. It’s infamous locally for false positives—it has previously taken down Google Drive nodes and random legitimate CDNs just because they shared an IP with a pirate stream.
The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.
My personal take idea likely outcome: Cloudflare wins.
EU Law: The order almost certainly violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) regarding general monitoring obligations and country-of-origin principles.
Realpolitik: The Italian government can't risk the Olympics infrastructure getting DDoS'd into oblivion because AGCOM picked a fight they can't win. They will likely settle for a standard, court-ordered geo-block down the road, but the idea of Cloudflare integrating with a broken 30-minute takedown API is dead on arrival.
“OpenAI is now able to release open-weight models that meet requisite capability criteria.”
Was Microsoft the blocker before? prior agreements clearly made true open-weights awkward-to-impossible without Microsoft’s sign-off. Microsoft had (a) an exclusive license to GPT-3’s underlying tech back in 2020 (i.e., access to the model/code beyond the public API), and (b) later, broad IP rights + API exclusivity on OpenAI models. If you’re contractually giving one partner IP rights and API exclusivity, shipping weights openly would undercut those rights. Today’s language looks like a carve-out to permit some open-weight releases as long as they’re below certain capability thresholds.
A few other notable tweaks in the new deal that help explain the change:
- AGI claims get verified by an independent panel (not just OpenAI declaring it).
- Microsoft keeps model/product IP rights through 2032, but OpenAI can now jointly develop with third parties, serve some things off non-Azure clouds, and—critically—release certain open-weights.
Those are all signs of loosened exclusivity.
My read: previously, the partnership structure (not just “Microsoft saying no”) effectively precluded open-weight releases; the updated agreement explicitly allows them within safety/capability guardrails.
Expect any “open-weight” drops to be intentionally scoped—useful, but a notch below their frontier closed models.
This is a small step in installing an app, but a giant leap for digital freedom. I hope that non-UE citizens can achieve this goal by the end of the decade, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.