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Comment by JacobiX | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that unlike some other markets (China and to some extent other Asian countries / Russia / etc) it's surprising how dependent the EU is on US corporations for digital services. As said the EU anti-monopolies chief Margrethe Vestager: "In the past few weeks we have all been fascinated by what is possible digitally. But the coronavirus showed how dependent we are on US corporations, and that was a wake-up call,".

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I might be overthinking this but I find her wording a bit concerning if they weren't fully awake to this dependency pre-pandemic. Everyone knows where Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple are based and these companies generally are operating under their own names so it's not like a shady conglomerate who owns everything without you realising.

Anecdotal and hardly conclusive but I work in UK local government and we get a weekly email from our web proxy showing the top 50 domains by proxy traffic in that period. The usual split is something like 42 domains that are linked to US companies, 5 are UK companies with the remainder being the rest of the world (including the EU). That's been the case for years now.

It gives cover to those who dismissed the concern pre-covid.

It's common for a pragmatic 'Cassandra' to point to the newest evidence as permission for people to finally wake up to the problem rather than berating them for not paying attention any earlier.

I think you're correct. Most EU politicians did not work with technology a lot, they prefered travelling and having chats with cabernet and camembert.

Surely the pandemic forced them to use some more tech.

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense with all the poltician's discussions over the recent years about the GAFA tax. (Whoopsie, we dropped the M. Can't be antagonizing the maker of our hospital and army software!)

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