Who can say no¶

Before the move, the Home’s contracts were the GDPR page’s list of gaps. Microsoft’s data protection addendum covered the tenant, with the EU Data Boundary behind it for a tenant whose region nobody had checked. Covenant’s DPA had been signed at onboarding and not reviewed since the Events module. Fabulist’s DPA for Bestiary existed in a version nobody could confirm, under a support contract renewed with price rises and no review. Brevo’s DPA was available and not signed. The Burrow, Sendstone and the Coven had no DPA because a personal account, a service with no login and a consumer app on personal phones have nothing to sign. The Consortium’s sharing agreement had two amendments the Home had not formally accepted. And the whole estate sat on a rented foreign tenant obtained through a grant that its landlord could withdraw at any time, for any reason. The scraps for this layer say what the first stack’s small print page says: whether a thing is European is the wrong question, and the right one is who can say no, under which law, and what happens the morning after.

The table¶

Every party the Home now holds a contract with, from the pages before this one, with the seat each gives on its own pages, what was signed, and the company under it where one is named:

Eighteen rows where there had been one landlord and a shadow of others. The table is longer than the tenant was, and each row can be read.

The last column¶

The column the small print page exists for is the one that says what is under the party, and reading it top to bottom produces one name four times. Hetzner Online GmbH of Gunzenhausen sits under the Home’s files, its identity provider, its donor ledger through Golem Trust, and its bank through Golem Trust, on four contracts with four parties, none of whom mentioned the others. That is no reason to move any of them, since Hetzner is a German company on its own hardware, the property this whole section wanted. It is the reason the premises page sends the backup to Roubaix and to a safe, and why the failure bullets on four pages describe the same afternoon.

The appeal, without the account¶

For each row the scrap holds what a suspension would look like: how the Home would hear, what would be asked, where the appeal goes, and whether the appeal can be made without the account that was suspended. The pattern that fell out is the one the identity page built for: each landlord keeps a local administrator account with its own second factor, each recovers through a mailbox at Posteo that none of them runs, and the Home’s public name and identity name are at different registries under different registrars. So no suspension takes the door the appeal has to go through, and the nasty arrangement the first stack’s small print page draws, in which the appeal needs a login that needs a device that needs the suspended account, cannot be assembled from the Home’s parts.

What the table cannot do is make a Swiss or German court less reachable than an American one. It can only say which court.

The Office¶

The across-the-Disc page says two things about the Home. The Home’s testimony, the human terrain of half the Disc, was never reached by the Office of Civil Surveys through the tenant. It was reached through people, a field worker who mentions things to someone who asks after her kindly, and the Office has never signed anything, never tasked anything, and can deny everything at every level that was ever asked to approve it. Moving the servers from a US tenant to European landlords changed none of that. Nothing in the rows above is between a field worker and a kind correspondent.

What the move did change is which courts the testimony sits under. On the tenant it sat under a US company’s contract and a grant. Now it sits under German and Swiss companies on their own machines, which are reachable by the courts of Ankh-Morpork’s allies in ways a foreign tenant on a grant was not, and the Office’s formal reach, which was never the reach it used, got shorter, because the companies it would have to ask are nearer. The across-the-Disc page says the Home could not afford sovereignty and had never been asked to want it, and it would be a lie to end a section called taking back the stack without saying who the stack was taken back to.

What the move did for the field workers is the answer to the across-the-Disc page’s question: a second name nobody in a hostile capital was ever given, phones the Home owns and can wipe, a chat that needs no phone number, medical notes kept out of it, and a file store whose export reads without any landlord. None of that protects a worker from a border guard. All of it protects what the border guard finds on the phone.

Names on the contracts, translated¶

The Home, its vendors and its city are invented, and each one stands for something that is not:

Everything else on these pages, the providers the Home moved to and the companies under them, is real, on its own pages, at the dates given.

Countersigned¶

   who can say no to the Home, after the move

   the city's registry ─── the public name           EURid, TransIP ─── the identity name
   mailbox.org ─────────── the mail                   Threema ────────── the chat
   Hetzner ────────────── files, identity, and, through Golem Trust, Covenant and the bank
   Mollie ─────────────── the gifts                   Fabulist ───────── the residents' system
   the Consortium ─────── the registry                Microsoft ──────── one box, one date
   Apple and Google ───── whether the phone buzzes    the Office ─────── nothing it needs a contract for

The courts the testimony now sits under are named as closer than before, and the cover is protected where a contract can protect it and nowhere else.

What could go wrong?

• A designation reaches Hetzner’s bank, insurer or lawyers, and four of the Home’s contracts stop on one afternoon while the safe disk and Roubaix carry the day.

• A court in an allied capital asks a German or Swiss landlord for the testimony, and gets it, faster than a US tenant would have answered.

• The Consortium suspends the Home, and no contract on the table is the one that matters.

• A field worker is stopped at a border with a phone the Home owns, which the Home can wipe, and cannot wipe the worker.

One landlord suspends the Home today, with no explanation, what now? The contracting entity and the law are on the table. The appeal goes through a door that landlord does not hold. The data is on the safe disk and at Roubaix. The other rows never noticed. And the question that the first stack’s small print page ends on, who owns the keys to the door, who wrote the rules on it and whether there is another door, has, for the first time in the Home’s history, a different answer for every door.

Granny Weatherwax has never signed anything, and every agreement in Lancre is understood to include her anyway.