The entire country has been clamouring for this for weeks, and the government has been completely silent about it. A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option, and there wasn't a lot of confidence that the government would do that.
The whole reason for this is that Solvinity host DigiD, the Dutch e-ID system that handles authentication to all government and many other sensitive systems (healthcare). With the US law that the US government should be able to get access to any data held by a US company, regardless of where it's hosted, this system clearly should be kept out of American hands.
Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies. No idea when they're going to do something about that.
Logius is the company that actually owns and manages the DigiD stack, it's just that they hired Solvinity for their expertise. AFAIK Solvinity can't access the data.
I can't find it right now, but on Tweakers there was a long comment by someone on the inside that explained Logius basically had almost no know-how of how the current stack works, and there's lots of bespoke stuff. Basically classic vendor lock-in. The government (rather, Logius) now really wants to transition away from Solvinity, but that will likely be a 5+ year process.
I also feel like this is another thing that the "fast ring" of the EU should do together. Take Estonia's stack as a base, and then countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands adopt it and co- develop it. Make it extensible for the bespoke things the countries need, and every few years check which bespoke extensions can actually be generalized and modularized. Would lead to a much better product. A man can dream :)
Estonia's tech was cool maybe 20 years ago. From what I understand it's a bit too hard on fetishization of PKI and Ukraine goes too hard on apps. Netherlands actually gets it really well with DigId that is doing bare minimum needed to actually perform eidas stuff without getting into the woods with legally blessed asn1 schemas and oid [0].
I'm not sure what bespoke stuff they invented to get their sweet vendor lock in eurobucks, but the whole thing is nothing more than an OAuth provider for 19 million people. I guess NFC integration in the app that reads physical ids is on a fancier side, but I suspect on that side it's vendor locked by card vendor and their SDK.
It's a state owned enterprise as far as I remember. So technically they don't wear civil service uniforms in the office, but still get the usual government office hours.
You are behind the curve. You read here first. Lets revisit this comment in 2 years...
This will be overturned by both Dutch and European courts after the company appeals, and specially after Mark Rutte Daddy calls. The only purpose of this action is for the Dutch government to save face, and its for internal consumption. They already have the internal legal advice stating this, hidden away in some closet. But then they will say: You see, we wanted to do it but a court blocked us.
>>Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies.
The WHOLE Dutch diplomatic and broader civil service, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, runs extensively on Microsoft infrastructure for its daily operations, cloud services, and email. And they leak....
This will also be the core legal argument by the appealing company. They will argue that the decision was politicized, insufficiently reasoned, or disproportionate because binding technical/legal safeguards would have solved the risks...
And they will use as example, the diplomatic service extensive use of Microsoft :-)
So is nothing more than another Polder hypocritical take, by the Dutch government.
>The WHOLE Dutch diplomatic and broader civil service, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, runs extensively on Microsoft infrastructure for its daily operations, cloud services, and email. And they leak....
There is a broad digital strategy to migrate off from American infra. Will take 10 years, but this stuff has inertia once it starts moving.
> This will also be the core legal argument by the appealing company. They will argue that the decision was politicized, insufficiently reasoned, or disproportionate because binding technical/legal safeguards would have solved the risks... And they will use as example, the diplomatic service extensive use of Microsoft
How would that argument support a sale to the US? It sounds like the perfect argument against it. Those technical/legal safeguards clearly didn't work for Microsoft either.
"...Above and beyond the role of chair, the Secretary General has the authority to propose items for discussion and use their good offices in case of disputes between member states....
...In order to facilitate this process, the Secretary General maintains direct contact with Heads of State and Government, and Foreign and Defence Ministers in NATO and partner countries...."
And Mark Rutte has been shaping the domestic fiscal debate inside the Netherlands [2]: "...Mark Rutte said the Netherlands must significantly boost defence spending and pointed to Dutch spending on pensions, healthcare and social security, saying only a small fraction of those allocations would strengthen defence..."
Their sentiment is that Trump intervenes by whining to Mark Rutte, who seems to be the only European Trump is actually willing to listen to, at the expense of course of giving up all his dignity in calling Trump, literally, Daddy [1].
And I would not put it past Trump to do that... I mean, that's what he already did regarding Tiktok.
With Trump nothing is impossible any more, especially if he or someone in his circle stands to make or lose money. And that's the greatest danger in the US turning into a full blown banana republic.
> A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option,
Given what we know now, this seems perfectly logical. It's just that we don't know what else is going on behind the scenes.
I'm sure there was some negotiations on how to keep the data separate or something, with the threat of blocking it altogether as a final solution.
> which i'm sure the current administration would honour
It would've been the same administration as the one doing the negotiations, so I would assume yes.
> There should be grave consequences alone for the fact that the goverment acted against the parliament
In general I think there's a pretty good understanding between the legislative branch and the executive branch. The Netherlands has always had coalitions. Also, every single government will talk to the other parties.
I'm not sure what country you're referring to but the Netherlands has a properly functioning democracy. The only problem it has is splintering into too many small factions making coalitions super hard
DigiD itself is government-owned, but its infrastructure is managed by Solvinity (a private company). Not really different from the US gov running half its stack on AWS.
Because too few IT capable people are willing to work under the government's pay scales; in most cases going private / corporate earns more. So most Dutch IT projects end up with private companies, which also means that, in the case of DigID and the secure / official messaging platform, the hosting party can charge exorbitant rates. Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox? So when the government does its annual "it's time to fill in your taxes" message, they have to pay millions. Assuming they don't get a bulk deal, anyway.
For the record, Logius (the government owned enterprise dealing with DigID) vacancy for Java developer: https://www.werkenvoornederland.nl/vacatures/lead-java-devel... . 92k EUR per year for whatever they measure as 40 hours a week (I bet they close the shop at 4 pm).
>Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox?
In a country with paid toilets what do you expect lol
I wish more news outlets actually stated so - Kyndryl was formerly IBM, has 73.000 employees worldwide. When this news first broke, nobody had ever heard of it so it sounded like some small random hosting company, but it's huge.
Should be simple matter to escalate this up to the President, who will put the squeeze on the Dutch government, and then secure his 10% fee for rescuing the take over deal
Good for them, but I doubt this will be the last we hear about this especially with the current US government. ASML was only permitted to acquire US company Cymer (the actually valuable EUV light source technology) back in 2013 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement.
The Netherlands blocking a US acquisition due to technology control concerns is sure to ruffle some feathers in Washington.
This is not some sort of company making unique tech, it's a company handling some of the most the vital infrastructure for our government, you can imagine the privacy concerns. Completely different case
In 2013, the same deal would likely have gone through. US-Dutch relations looked very different in 2013 under Obama than they look now under second-term Trump. Any reciprocity today based on things Obama did back then falls flat because we all know Trump opposes nearly everything Obama ever did
I keep seeing variations of “okay but this will be temporary” or “this is a one off” or “they’ll relent eventually, they have no choice” in response to the EU’s (and to a lesser extent, global) divorce from US tech stacks.
You cannot unring this bell, however, nor can you put the genie back in the bottle, close Pandora’s Box, etc, pick your own metaphor. The US burned through the trust thermocline very suddenly these past few years, snapping the tension that had been brewing over several decades from US hegemony and the abusive diplomacy it created.
Now that the US regime is openly hostile to everyone else and US firms have dropped the pretense of being anything less than a global surveillance state, there’s nothing to go back to. These sorts of rejections and blocks will continue to escalate until a new norm is agreed upon by cooler heads, which I don’t see happening in the current climate.
Make no mistake, power everywhere wants more surveillance capabilities; the EU wants it as much as China or the USA. The difference is that with the leading empire in decline, everyone realizes that owning their own surveillance state is an advantage over outsourcing it to a potential enemy.
The Dutch should be aware that if Netherland has some information-sharing agreements with Five Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, all this data will still be available to the US (and other allies) (hopefully, presumably, with your government acting as the gatekeeper).
The issue was less privacy concerns, and more "hey lets not hand over one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure to a potentially hostile state". DigID is the user authentication platform for basically every government site in The Netherlands. A foreign government could use sanctions to pressure Dutch individuals to comply by limiting access to it.
All governments are "doing something". It just isn't at all effective and mostly because they're unwilling to invest even marginal amounts.
Like in this case. The technology here utterly depends on Google Play Services on Android or App Attest on Apple (or "secure enclave"), and that is in fact essentially the only functionality.
This could have been solved instead switching to a standard (switching to OATH, RFC 4226 and RFC 6238), thus killing the dependency on Google/Apple while still allowing those devices to work smoothly, but also allowing a Linux implementation, allowing anyone . Plenty of European companies provide implementations for this, some with and some without the dependency on Google/Apple attestation.
I'm not talking about some abstract sense of "did the government do anything at all today", I am saying "good on the government for doing something in this specific case instead of doing nothing and letting it be sold", which was a possible outcome, and in fact the default outcome of the vast, vast majority of acquisitions is that the government does nothing to intervene.
Could they do something better, sure. I am still glad to see they did something at all.
I can sign in to DigID without using my phone, except sometimes with an SMS verification code. (Of course they want to, and should, phase that out. Hopefully that won't be replaced by app store dependence.)
Great news. Would have been devastating to have such an integral part of our society at the whims of not just another nation, but an unstable and downright hostile one.
We're terrible at company and brand naming here in Europe. Just look at the "Wero" payment solution (formerly/currently iDeal). Like, who the hell came up with that stupid name?
The list of stupid European company names and product names are endless.
I agree, the Dutch iDeal was probably the better name. However I'm not sure if this is an uniquely European problem. Wero's counterpart 'Zelle' doesn't seem to be that much better of a name.
I find it okay'ish. At least it's unique. Say, as much as I like Mario Zechner (who doesn't like HNers anymore for whatever reason), naming your product "Pi" is just terribly bad.
Facebook was a good name (hate the company but the name was good). But "Meta" is just dumbfucktarded.
Wait... I've got an idea: I'm going to make a product and name it "Alt". Or "Control".
Really: there are a lot of totally unhelpful name that just confuses everybody, including search engines, humans, and LLMs but I don't think "Solvinity" is that bad.
I've always found Whatsapp a terrible name, but its so established now that 'apping' is understood. If you're big enough it seems that a bad name hardly hold you back.
Finally!
The entire country has been clamouring for this for weeks, and the government has been completely silent about it. A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option, and there wasn't a lot of confidence that the government would do that.
The whole reason for this is that Solvinity host DigiD, the Dutch e-ID system that handles authentication to all government and many other sensitive systems (healthcare). With the US law that the US government should be able to get access to any data held by a US company, regardless of where it's hosted, this system clearly should be kept out of American hands.
Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies. No idea when they're going to do something about that.
It is a bit more complex tham that.
Logius is the company that actually owns and manages the DigiD stack, it's just that they hired Solvinity for their expertise. AFAIK Solvinity can't access the data.
I can't find it right now, but on Tweakers there was a long comment by someone on the inside that explained Logius basically had almost no know-how of how the current stack works, and there's lots of bespoke stuff. Basically classic vendor lock-in. The government (rather, Logius) now really wants to transition away from Solvinity, but that will likely be a 5+ year process.
I also feel like this is another thing that the "fast ring" of the EU should do together. Take Estonia's stack as a base, and then countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands adopt it and co- develop it. Make it extensible for the bespoke things the countries need, and every few years check which bespoke extensions can actually be generalized and modularized. Would lead to a much better product. A man can dream :)
Estonia's tech was cool maybe 20 years ago. From what I understand it's a bit too hard on fetishization of PKI and Ukraine goes too hard on apps. Netherlands actually gets it really well with DigId that is doing bare minimum needed to actually perform eidas stuff without getting into the woods with legally blessed asn1 schemas and oid [0].
I'm not sure what bespoke stuff they invented to get their sweet vendor lock in eurobucks, but the whole thing is nothing more than an OAuth provider for 19 million people. I guess NFC integration in the app that reads physical ids is on a fancier side, but I suspect on that side it's vendor locked by card vendor and their SDK.
[0] https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/z1398-12#Text
> AFAIK Solvinity can't access the data.
Solvinity is the hoster. It can fully access the stack.
How can you be sure that Solvinity can't access the data if Logius doesn't know how the current stack works? 5+ years to migrate sounds really bad.
Logius is actually not a company but a part of the dutch (national) goverment.
In that case we can indeed safely assume they have no technical knowledge.
It's a state owned enterprise as far as I remember. So technically they don't wear civil service uniforms in the office, but still get the usual government office hours.
>> Finally!
You are behind the curve. You read here first. Lets revisit this comment in 2 years...
This will be overturned by both Dutch and European courts after the company appeals, and specially after Mark Rutte Daddy calls. The only purpose of this action is for the Dutch government to save face, and its for internal consumption. They already have the internal legal advice stating this, hidden away in some closet. But then they will say: You see, we wanted to do it but a court blocked us.
>>Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies.
The WHOLE Dutch diplomatic and broader civil service, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, runs extensively on Microsoft infrastructure for its daily operations, cloud services, and email. And they leak....
"Microsoft Accused Of Sharing Dutch Officials’ Data with U.S. Government" - https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/microsoft-accus...
This will also be the core legal argument by the appealing company. They will argue that the decision was politicized, insufficiently reasoned, or disproportionate because binding technical/legal safeguards would have solved the risks... And they will use as example, the diplomatic service extensive use of Microsoft :-)
So is nothing more than another Polder hypocritical take, by the Dutch government.
>The WHOLE Dutch diplomatic and broader civil service, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, runs extensively on Microsoft infrastructure for its daily operations, cloud services, and email. And they leak....
There is a broad digital strategy to migrate off from American infra. Will take 10 years, but this stuff has inertia once it starts moving.
> This will also be the core legal argument by the appealing company. They will argue that the decision was politicized, insufficiently reasoned, or disproportionate because binding technical/legal safeguards would have solved the risks... And they will use as example, the diplomatic service extensive use of Microsoft
How would that argument support a sale to the US? It sounds like the perfect argument against it. Those technical/legal safeguards clearly didn't work for Microsoft either.
You are using logic to argue for the best and most correct outcome, I am using logic, to state how and why, this will play the way it will...
> Mark Rutte Daddy calls
Mark Rutte, the chief of NATO and ex-PM, that has nothing to do with civilian tech? Can we please leave unfounded conspiracy theories to Reddit?
Does that sound outlandish to you? It doesn't to me...
It's probably something he would use as 'change' to resolve something unrelated with NATO. Then he can sell how well he's keeping NATO together
[1]- NATO Secretary General responsibilities:
"...Above and beyond the role of chair, the Secretary General has the authority to propose items for discussion and use their good offices in case of disputes between member states....
...In order to facilitate this process, the Secretary General maintains direct contact with Heads of State and Government, and Foreign and Defence Ministers in NATO and partner countries...."
[1] - https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/organization/nato-structure...
And Mark Rutte has been shaping the domestic fiscal debate inside the Netherlands [2]: "...Mark Rutte said the Netherlands must significantly boost defence spending and pointed to Dutch spending on pensions, healthcare and social security, saying only a small fraction of those allocations would strengthen defence..."
[2] - https://nltimes.nl/2024/12/03/nato-leader-rutte-netherlands-...
And on conspiracy theories - Do you trust the Financieele Dagblad?
https://nltimes.nl/2025/11/20/asml-offered-spy-us-breaking-e...
> unfounded conspiracy theories
Their sentiment is that Trump intervenes by whining to Mark Rutte, who seems to be the only European Trump is actually willing to listen to, at the expense of course of giving up all his dignity in calling Trump, literally, Daddy [1].
And I would not put it past Trump to do that... I mean, that's what he already did regarding Tiktok.
With Trump nothing is impossible any more, especially if he or someone in his circle stands to make or lose money. And that's the greatest danger in the US turning into a full blown banana republic.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/25/nato-chief-calls-tr...
> A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option,
Given what we know now, this seems perfectly logical. It's just that we don't know what else is going on behind the scenes.
I'm sure there was some negotiations on how to keep the data separate or something, with the threat of blocking it altogether as a final solution.
But agreed, this is a good outcome
> I'm sure there was some negotiations
which i'm sure the current administration would honour
There should be grave consequences alone for the fact that the goverment acted against the parliament
There was that chip company that was almost nationalized by the Dutch government few months ago when their Chinese owners started making funny noises.
> which i'm sure the current administration would honour
It would've been the same administration as the one doing the negotiations, so I would assume yes.
> There should be grave consequences alone for the fact that the goverment acted against the parliament
In general I think there's a pretty good understanding between the legislative branch and the executive branch. The Netherlands has always had coalitions. Also, every single government will talk to the other parties.
I'm not sure what country you're referring to but the Netherlands has a properly functioning democracy. The only problem it has is splintering into too many small factions making coalitions super hard
There are certainly countries that have it worse, but Netherland has some weird political games being played sometimes.
If it's such a vital piece of Dutch infrastructure, why is it in private hands at all?
DigiD itself is government-owned, but its infrastructure is managed by Solvinity (a private company). Not really different from the US gov running half its stack on AWS.
Okay, maybe let's not take the US as a point of comparison.
Fine. Not really different from most governments relying on private suppliers to manage their infrastructure.
Because too few IT capable people are willing to work under the government's pay scales; in most cases going private / corporate earns more. So most Dutch IT projects end up with private companies, which also means that, in the case of DigID and the secure / official messaging platform, the hosting party can charge exorbitant rates. Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox? So when the government does its annual "it's time to fill in your taxes" message, they have to pay millions. Assuming they don't get a bulk deal, anyway.
For the record, Logius (the government owned enterprise dealing with DigID) vacancy for Java developer: https://www.werkenvoornederland.nl/vacatures/lead-java-devel... . 92k EUR per year for whatever they measure as 40 hours a week (I bet they close the shop at 4 pm).
>Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox?
In a country with paid toilets what do you expect lol
Apologies in advance for wasting anyone's time with a light hearted tangent. But as I scrolled past your comment I read:
> If it's such a vital piece of infrastructure, why is it in Dutch hands at all?
It was the funniest thing I have misread in a while.
because privatisation
Never heard of 'Kyndryl' before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyndryl
> Officially formed in late 2021, Kyndryl was created from the spin-off of IBM's infrastructure services
> Kyndryl operated in 63 countries in November 2021
I wish more news outlets actually stated so - Kyndryl was formerly IBM, has 73.000 employees worldwide. When this news first broke, nobody had ever heard of it so it sounded like some small random hosting company, but it's huge.
Nobody gets fired from hiring Kyndryl.
They’re not doing too great atm: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/kyndryl-s-stock-is...
Should be simple matter to escalate this up to the President, who will put the squeeze on the Dutch government, and then secure his 10% fee for rescuing the take over deal
Good for them, but I doubt this will be the last we hear about this especially with the current US government. ASML was only permitted to acquire US company Cymer (the actually valuable EUV light source technology) back in 2013 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement.
The Netherlands blocking a US acquisition due to technology control concerns is sure to ruffle some feathers in Washington.
This is not some sort of company making unique tech, it's a company handling some of the most the vital infrastructure for our government, you can imagine the privacy concerns. Completely different case
Sure, but the point is that it's tit-for-tat. This US administration is petty.
All the more reason to block vital stuff going to the US. They cannot be trusted anymore.
In 2013, the same deal would likely have gone through. US-Dutch relations looked very different in 2013 under Obama than they look now under second-term Trump. Any reciprocity today based on things Obama did back then falls flat because we all know Trump opposes nearly everything Obama ever did
Absolutely, no one would have batted an eyelid.
I keep seeing variations of “okay but this will be temporary” or “this is a one off” or “they’ll relent eventually, they have no choice” in response to the EU’s (and to a lesser extent, global) divorce from US tech stacks.
You cannot unring this bell, however, nor can you put the genie back in the bottle, close Pandora’s Box, etc, pick your own metaphor. The US burned through the trust thermocline very suddenly these past few years, snapping the tension that had been brewing over several decades from US hegemony and the abusive diplomacy it created.
Now that the US regime is openly hostile to everyone else and US firms have dropped the pretense of being anything less than a global surveillance state, there’s nothing to go back to. These sorts of rejections and blocks will continue to escalate until a new norm is agreed upon by cooler heads, which I don’t see happening in the current climate.
Make no mistake, power everywhere wants more surveillance capabilities; the EU wants it as much as China or the USA. The difference is that with the leading empire in decline, everyone realizes that owning their own surveillance state is an advantage over outsourcing it to a potential enemy.
The Dutch should be aware that if Netherland has some information-sharing agreements with Five Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, all this data will still be available to the US (and other allies) (hopefully, presumably, with your government acting as the gatekeeper).
The issue was less privacy concerns, and more "hey lets not hand over one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure to a potentially hostile state". DigID is the user authentication platform for basically every government site in The Netherlands. A foreign government could use sanctions to pressure Dutch individuals to comply by limiting access to it.
Good on the Dutch government for actually doing something.
All governments are "doing something". It just isn't at all effective and mostly because they're unwilling to invest even marginal amounts.
Like in this case. The technology here utterly depends on Google Play Services on Android or App Attest on Apple (or "secure enclave"), and that is in fact essentially the only functionality.
This could have been solved instead switching to a standard (switching to OATH, RFC 4226 and RFC 6238), thus killing the dependency on Google/Apple while still allowing those devices to work smoothly, but also allowing a Linux implementation, allowing anyone . Plenty of European companies provide implementations for this, some with and some without the dependency on Google/Apple attestation.
I'm not talking about some abstract sense of "did the government do anything at all today", I am saying "good on the government for doing something in this specific case instead of doing nothing and letting it be sold", which was a possible outcome, and in fact the default outcome of the vast, vast majority of acquisitions is that the government does nothing to intervene.
Could they do something better, sure. I am still glad to see they did something at all.
I can sign in to DigID without using my phone, except sometimes with an SMS verification code. (Of course they want to, and should, phase that out. Hopefully that won't be replaced by app store dependence.)
Uhm, no, DidiD works without Play Services:
https://www.logius.nl/actueel/qr-code-scanner-digid-app-werk...
(Also works fine on my GrapheneOS phone with only basic integrity, also worked on microG when I tested.)
Great news. Would have been devastating to have such an integral part of our society at the whims of not just another nation, but an unstable and downright hostile one.
Solvinity is a pretty terrible company name.
Solvinity = Solvent Divinity
We're terrible at company and brand naming here in Europe. Just look at the "Wero" payment solution (formerly/currently iDeal). Like, who the hell came up with that stupid name?
The list of stupid European company names and product names are endless.
It's called Wero, because it means we and euro in all of the official EU languages.
I agree, the Dutch iDeal was probably the better name. However I'm not sure if this is an uniquely European problem. Wero's counterpart 'Zelle' doesn't seem to be that much better of a name.
> Solvinity is a pretty terrible company name.
I find it okay'ish. At least it's unique. Say, as much as I like Mario Zechner (who doesn't like HNers anymore for whatever reason), naming your product "Pi" is just terribly bad.
Facebook was a good name (hate the company but the name was good). But "Meta" is just dumbfucktarded.
Wait... I've got an idea: I'm going to make a product and name it "Alt". Or "Control".
Really: there are a lot of totally unhelpful name that just confuses everybody, including search engines, humans, and LLMs but I don't think "Solvinity" is that bad.
I've always found Whatsapp a terrible name, but its so established now that 'apping' is understood. If you're big enough it seems that a bad name hardly hold you back.
Reminds me of the old joke:
After Bill and Melinda Gates have their honeymoon, Melinda says, "Now I know why you call it Microsoft."
How come the Dutch people aren't offering more than the US investors to purchase this company, since this seems to be so close at heart?
One word: good.
A ground invasion would be an appropriate response.
By that we mean, send a whitehouse crony over to throw a temper tantrum on Dutch soil.
Something something, a free ticket to Den Haag
https://archive.ph/GbZhm
"US Takeover"
Best news of the year!