Overall I think this is a good thing. It could mean the end of the monolithic closed SaaS era, which is the absolute worst possible model for software if you care about privacy or any kind of personal or business sovereignty.
I work in a research project in a EU country that looks at how educational certificates (diploma's, degrees, credentials) will be done in the future.
A big part of it, are requirements and frameworks imposed, dictated or assumed by governments, commissions, universities, etc. The most important¹ parts of these requirements are:
- it must be self-sovereign. Not decentralized per-se, but technically often one step further than decentralized. My diploma, in my wallet (mobile?) is mine. I hold it, I am free to share it, delete it, copy it.
- it must be separated from the issuers. A person getting a degree might outlive a university, high school, or their servers/services.
- it must be privacy preserving - GDPR and better.
These constraints tell me that the EU, and EC are serious about decentralization and self-sovereign-identities. Which is very different from what local or current governments like and want - At least one EU government is in conflict with its universities and wants to be the gatekeeper of diploma's - they truly want the ability to deny or retract diploma's from people who they don't like.
Which, ironically, makes these constraints and requirements all the more important and critical in e.g. our projects. It went from a "decentralization is nice because in theory someone could..." to "decentralization is critical to ensure no-one, on any end of any political spectrum can take away diploma's as is currently being attempted".
(And for the curious: I work with W3C, openId, IETF and many more standards and -bodies. Verifiable Credentials, OpenBadges v3, OIDC4VCI, VP, etc)
¹ Edit: well, maybe not "most", as there isn't a clear prioritization. And obvious requirements such as "you cannot just fake a diploma" are probably higher in priority.
Data is proving to be valuable and should only be managed by very trusted allies - countries with similar ideals that truly are buddies.
Manufacturing, imo, makes a lot more sense to be spread based on strengths and weaknesses and the logistics benefits (localize supply chains closer to end product).
The current US admin has certainly exposed some of the pitfalls of being technologically reliant on America. Honestly, the main outcome of this will be lower economic/job prospects for American tech employees. It will soon be that having a branch of Microsoft in Europe is not quite the same as utilizing actual European countries.
I would really like to see this trend reversed, but I am afraid some of the damage is already done and will take a long time, if ever, to recover. It would not surprise me if some of this damage is intentional, since it will actually take power away from west coast tech - a population that tends to vote in one direction.
Outside Trump — not all Republicans, specifically Trump — the USA was as close to being Europe's buddy as I think it's possible for nations to be.
I'm not convinced nations can actually be buddies, but even with my cynicism, Bush's administration was Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, while Trump is behaving like each "deal" is a completely independent Prisoner's Dilemma.
And yes, that's despite how much we mocked GWB (I even got quoted on the national news for doing so!), and despite how America mocked itself with Team America: World Police, that version of the country still saw itself as needing to go through the motions of friendship.
Meanwhile, a unipolar is totally fine....
Just gonna leave this here.