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 is running 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 verified deliveries per month. 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.
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.
