If too much of these services are provided by another country, that country could severely cripple your infrastructure by denying you service. In times of international conflicts, this could be a very serious problem.

So when can we stop with this “free markets” nonsense in the third world aswell??

If i got it right, flatpacks gather all of the dependencies of the package and bundles them with tha package. Maybe those extra 290mb were from dependencies that you already had installed but that flatpak wanted to install another copy.

I think pirating scientific papers is a good thing all around. The research isnt funded by the selling of access to those papers, much on the contrary.