Europe’s mission to distance itself from its reliance on American technology companies has come for the “special relationship” between the US and the UK. A recent report published by the U.K. Parliament’s Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee warned that the country’s ongoing relationships with tech giants will make it hard to ever achieve digital independence, and it highlights Palantir as a particularly risky partner to continue to deal with. The report broadly deals with the challenges of being locked into agreements with third-party technology vendors for essential governmental services. Enter Palantir as the case in point of what can go wrong, in part due to the risk of ongoing enshittification of the company’s technology eroding government services, and in part because the company’s owners can’t stop talking like wannabe fascist dweebs. The NHS serves as a cautionary tale Let’s start with the tech concerns, which are not unique to Palantir, but the committee concluded that of all the companies they have an unfortunate amount of reliance on, “Palantir concerns us most.” Currently, Palantir has a contract with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to build a Federated Data Platform (FDP) to securely store patient health information. The Committee report cited the concerns of Medconfidential, a patient privacy advocacy organzation, which warned that Palantir “followed their commercial self-interests in attempting to burrow so deep into the NHS that they cannot be migrated away from and can name their fee.”