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Comment by xbmcuser | Hacker News Reader

Lets see if they put cash where there mouth is they should have been pouring billions of dollars into opensource software instead of paying Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle etc in the first place. Europe countries have been client states of the USA for decades and just do whatever USA wanted first time USA has hurt their own interests so are waking up to the fact.

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And there were so many wakeup calls... Microsoft alone would be reason enough to not use any of their software. They've been breached how many times in the past years?

Microsoft is huge and produces a ton of software. The bigger the surface area and the bigger is their popularity and number of consumers, the more the breaches. It's not like there's a breach every day. They're being good a patching their software and we have Patch Tuesdays where often they often patch zero day holes.

Last time I've checked they didnt even know if they were still breached after losing highly important keys, for months. And sorry, thats inexcusable.

its really far less cash than you think, if they make a central clearing house for digital ad sales and anoint a EU wide cloud leader, they have two trillion dollar companies in the next few years with little innovation needed. then use the funds and talent from that to build a tech industry, this is exactly what china did.

Europe actually has put a bunch of money into open source software. Things like Mastodon come from the EU. Look up the projects funded by NLnet: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

But European open source projects tend to be, you know, open source, so they don't get nearly as much marketing attention as things which have a billion dollars spent on marketing.

I was pondering in why the EU never really got targeted directly like Canada and Mexico with Trumps tarifs.

I think this is it.

And it would be incredibly bad for US tech billionaires if the EU started to move home all these contracts.

Nothing so rational, I'm sure. Tariffing Canada was already insane and he didn't care.

Your point exactly - why didn't he do the same to the EU?

His particular personal obsessions? Errant random neuron firings? Who knows. But definitely not an accurately calculated balance of incentives, is all I'm saying.

Who says he won't? I think he is just waiting for the market to stabilize first. When the DOW has flattened out and started to rise again, he will do it.

"fentanyl"; this weird conspiracy theory that Canada and Mexico are somehow major drug producers / importers and that they don't do enough to stop it or "illegal immigrants". Even though only 1% of fentanyl enters the US from Canada.

Look, I'm both Canadian and not a supported of Trump, but people keep repeating this "1% of fentanyl enters from the US from Canada", and it's a little disingenuous. 1% of the fentanyl entering the US that is CAUGHT is CAUGHT at the Canadian border. We don't actually know how much is entering because we aren't catching or examining everything. Admittedly, this is likely because Mexico does produce and export more fentanyl. Carry on.

> Tariffing Canada was already insane and he didn't care.

Was it really ? It seems a bold and smart move. Some Canadian companies have already moved to the USA and many are contemplating moving this year if the tariffs still hold.

Indeed. In many quarterly reports of large tech companies, the revenue from the whole of Europe combined is sometimes bigger than that from the US. European revenue is often a close second.

It's truly significant if this revenue dissapears. Which is why I am baffled by how e.g. Zuckerberg is flailing at Europe and the EU. If EU regulations cut services off, or users move elsewhere out of fear or disagreement, that would be a crippling drop in revenue. For some tech companies enough to put them under, I'd say.

In some ways, these contracts are already 'home' in that the datacenters used are in Europe; they meet all the data protection and locality laws, get certified for it, etc.

But, if the US parent company or its government decides to pull weird shit - like Alexa changing its data collection policy one-sided - it'll be too late to withdraw the data and reliance.

A major current day concern is the US siding with Russia and putting sanctions on the EU by for example pulling the plug on US tech companies' services in the EU unless they also withdraw any military aid from Ukraine. It's a huge escalation but given how unstable and rash the US leadership is at the moment, that's the kind of scenarios we have to consider.

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