Reverse Google: From Email to Decentralisation — FOSDEM 2026
Talk summary: On 1 February 2026, Georg Greve presented “Reverse Google: From Email to Decentralisation” at FOSDEM in Brussels (Track: Decentralised Communication, Room AW1.126). The talk made the case that email — the technology Google used to capture global identity in 2008 — is now the gateway through which we reverse that capture and rebuild trust at the edge.
The web was built without security or identity. That was not an oversight — it was an architectural choice for a knowledge-sharing network. Retrofitting security through TLS, DNSSEC, and Trust Service Providers created a layered system of band-aids that, by design, drives centralisation. Each additional layer amplifies the advantage of scale players, producing the Platform and Surveillance Industry flywheel: identity federation begets economies of scale, which enable extended validation, which locks in more identity — and so the cycle runs. The unintended consequences — the surveillance economy, the erosion of social trust, the commodification of personal data — are not accidents. They are structural outputs of a broken foundation. The insight the talk offered: paper is peer-to-peer. Build digital identity infrastructure that works the same way.
The proof that this is not theoretical lives in Swiss healthcare. HIN — the Health Info Net, founded in 1996 by doctors to provide secure communication for the Swiss medical sector — operates roughly 900 S/MIME gateways connecting more than 30,000 GP offices across Switzerland. SEAL is deployed in production as the starting point for a secure communication transformation across that network, processing more than 800,000 messages per month. This is not a pilot. HIN has been a Vereign partner since 2024, and the deployment is ongoing — the transformation of S/MIME routing via Stargate, delivered across a swarm of 850+ gateways, is the next phase. Stargate does not replace SEAL; it replaces the S/MIME routing layer, enabling the broader ecosystem to evolve.
The Stargate vision the talk outlined is the nervous system for future health data exchange: a Mail-enabled Mesh Node combining SSI and DKMS with Programmable Policy and a next-generation transport layer. The architecture treats every gateway, every organisation, every device as a Certificate Authority at the Edge — removing third-party trust delegation, eliminating single points of failure, and making digital interactions auditable without surveillance. The open source community has a direct role here: building out DKMS, advancing OCA, and creating the economies of scale for sovereign technology that centralized platforms have so far monopolised.
Watch the talk on FOSDEM.org · Download the slides (PDF)
If you want to explore what it takes to build or join a sovereign communication network — whether in healthcare, government, or any sector where trust boundaries are operationally critical — get in touch.
