Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
plausible.io
plausible.io
Thinking about it, it's not so weird? We beat the nazis together, we've generally enjoyed world peace, freedom, and the joys of neocolonialism. Things were sailing along just fine.
Now things are all weird and fucked up and we have to worry about fucking russia, defense spending in general, the fate of greenland, cloud computing and all that shit?
Putting it like that, I'd like things to go back to the way they were too...
If you by "we" mean Britain, the United States, and Russia. And by "we" mean the people living 2 generations earlier, then I agree with your statement.
As a side note, people who were 18 in 1940, would be 103 today. So most people who fought in the second world war have unfortunately passed away.
I personally would never say "We beat the nazis together". The only thing I did was benefit from the war that generations before me have won.
What Europe didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand was the US agenda differs from Europe agenda , always has. But now they start to wake up facing this reality.
It's simple: global trade is good, isolationism is bad. It's as simple as that.
The “EU common classes” don't want higher prices or poorer services. This is a fact that the US's elites in power will soon discover. And it's easy to see why this trend is a train wreck in progress: unemployment, in both the US and EU, is at an all-time low, and if you significantly lower imports via tariffs and economic wars, who do you think will work on those local products and services? Never mind that US's investments and exports are also crashing as a direct result of this administration's policies, so I'm guessing they rely on future software developers that end up unemployed to become lumberjacks.
But yes, now that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally, I want the EU to cut its tech dependencies from it for as much as possible, while strengthening ties with all of our other allies, such as Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India. There's no conflict in this reasoning.
You seem to conveniently forget that all of this was "possible" only with heavy borrowing, and it looks like many countries won't be able to even pay the principal soon enough. When you take this into account, the "growth" has been negative for over 10 years, and it was barely stagnant for quite a while before. We exported the growth and manipulated money, now the truth appear. You can only pretend for so long.
The reality is that the value creating has been quite low in most of the EU and now that the economic engine that was Germany has stalled, everything is grinding to a halt. Germany had heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for its chemical industry and premium car market, both are getting disrupted massively. It's actually a perfect example on why we should avoid too much reliance on other countries. The hilarious part is that in the meantime, Germany was giving "ecology" lessons to all their neighbors and the world at large. In typical arrogant German fashion, they had everything figured out, until they didn't, that is. They actually hold a lot of responsibility for their terrible leadership on the EU.
> To me it seems that maybe the interests of EU elites differ from the interests of the EU common classes.
Common classes in EU are not benefiting from trade war, they are not benefiting from USA annexation threats and they are not benefiting from Russia expanding.
> The EU elites seem to have considered themselves as basically equivalent to American citizens in all but name, and were quite happy selling out their native countries in return for access to America.
This is nonsensical. You are making stuff up, big time. How is buying American arms a symbol of "considering themselves to be Americans"? I cant recall any call or push to be more America.
And monopolies are something the US loves (think of big tech, Comcast, etc.) and the EU dislikes ;-)
With the US stepping away from its monopoly, it is only a matter of time until more European states will enter the nuclear protection market.
The economy, unlike one's personal finances, is a circle. Unless the Europeans buy abroad, all that money is going to stay in Europe, circulating and stimulating the economy.
Even if it's "only" arms, spending it to maintain industry is way better than many alternatives. Manufacturing infrastructure and lots of skilled jobs and workers, sounds good to me to have.
"Debt" is just a number, and if you are in a strong enough position you can always change policies around the purely virtual "money".
Finance/money is supposed to be the virtual control system, and the real world thing it is supposed to help to steer is everything real and what we actually care about. In all other areas we would never accept that the control system becomes the target!! The target is always the real thing, and we will adjust the control system to achieve the desired outcomes.
Not so with finance! It has taken on a life of its own, and the vast majority of people will gladly and unthinkingly subordinate the real world to its whims. Something that makes at least a little bit of sense for the individual makes no sense for the economy though.
We have people in charge who know all and care about the control system first of all, the real world outcomes be damned. If the control system says we need high unemployment and homelessness and less high paying jobs there is nothing we can do, because the purely virtual human-invented finance system is the god. But hey, religion has been on the decline for a long time at least in the modern world, right (/s)?
> which can get very ugly in the long run
Only when the people in charge think like described.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu57D9YcIk0
This has hardly been "abrupt". Even Obama and Bush were telling Europe to step up defense spending.
Maybe if the US stopped bombing their countries, we'd stop getting so many.
Very convenient for the US, not so for the EU
> Help me understand this
The answer is money.
All the get-rich-quick schemes/scams are coming from the US. For a very current example, look not further than Tesla vs Volkswagen valuation.
That level of dollars valuations that are completely detach from reality, and the capacity of getting real, tangible, value out of the scheme before it collapses as a house of card, is orders of magnitude above what you can get elsewhere in the world.
Hence the elites want to continue having access to that market, domestic market be damned.
"Anger in Greenland over visits this week by Usha Vance and Mike Waltz" - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/24/greenland-usha...
So when they see other countries taking the load/lead on things they don't think it's an "us vs them" situation, they think it will stay us, as in together. When everything is working ok, when everyone feel like they are getting their fair share, it works fine; but when the world becomes unstable, and they are tensions about resources and power it all breaks down.
This is the mindset that created the biggest providence state that ever was. But the problem is that it was always a lie. The thing was built on power imbalance between countries, and just because they accepted the deal when they were weak doesn't mean it will stay that way forever.
The only reason it worked in the first place is that they sold the newer generation's future, borrowing aggressively to fund a way of life that wasn't sustainable If they had thought long term, they would never have given so much power to other countries, the USA is one of them, but it's the same for China, and Russia to a lower extent. Now that those big countries are fighting for domination, they find themselves in the crossfire, just now figuring out that we are too dependent and don't have that much say because we don't have a lot of power.
You cannot solve a problem with the mind that created it, and that's the issue we face. We desperately need to think differently that what got us there, but they cannot erase their "programming", for them, it's the "right" way, it's basically the only way.
The US will fare a bit better for a while, precisely because they control important stuff, like the tech industry, decent army power and are still the de facto reserve currency. But in reality, they will face the same problems down the line if they don't change as well. The protectionism is because at the rate it's going, we will all be under China's rule before long. You can trade stuff, but never make yourself completely dependent on another country. You may be friends, until you are not. Things change, politics are unpredictable, it's a bad idea to hope for mercy when a big power is rising.
Why didn't those two things happen? Because of US influence: The US actively prevented any kind of military unification e.g. by preventing West Germany from going in that direction (as the occupier they could do so) and by alienating France and bribing and distracting the UK (by sharing plans for weapons such as nukes and submarines). When the NATO idea came up, the US offered their membership, but with a twist: NATO troops would always be under USian command. At every opportunity, the US made themselves indispensible for European defense and prevented any kinds of European political initiatives in that direction. That is why France rejected the NATO command structure for quite some time and was only "half a member".
This "arragement" had a downside of increased dependence and an upside of decreased spending and responsibility for the Europeans, and they got used to it. For the promise of US protection, Europe would give up its independence in that regard. Europe would be dependent on US-controlled military infrastructure such as AWACS, SOSUS, PATRIOT, and satellite coms and surveilance. Europe would be dependent on US-delivered weapons and weapons components. In many suppossedly national/european military hardware, there are some indispensable USian components like radars, engines or GPS, which is a double advantage for the US: they could sell something and have a means to stop any kind of use they dislike, either by withholding spare parts and support or by builtin remote shutdown switches. Europe participated in the occasional war on behalf of the US like Iraq or Afghanistan, and the US cleaned up some European messes like Yugoslavia.
It all seemed like a dependence that was one-sided, but still somewhat beneficial to the Europeans.
Now, the US are walking back on their promises and are actively breaking their side of the deal by e.g. questioning their future adherence to the mutual defense obligation in NATO article 5. This is a much bigger deal than it sounds at first: When you read the game theory of it, promises of mutual defense must be unwavering, there must not be any doubt in the mind of a potential enemy. If the rockets are flying, a red button must be pressed, no questions asked. Any kind of doubt will be exploited by an enemy, as can be seen by current Russian propaganda threatening Europe. In former times, the US would be first to condemn such threats and issue counter-threats. Nowadays: silence.
This means that the US effectively ended NATO. Mutual defense obligations and promises of defense from the US are now worthless. Of course nobody is cheery about that. A European common defense is years and billions (long scale) away. Of course nobody is cheery about that. After the Europeans dutifully obliged the US and accepted their declaration of article 5 after 9/11 (the only occasion where article 5 was ever invoked), the US now declare their ingratitude and unwillingness to ever reciprocate. Of course nobody is cheery about that.
it's all about rhetorics being used to manipulate for personal gains of a small elite. the kind of elite who makes billion dollar contracts via sms and then accidentally loses such sms.
Who is to blame? European establishment wants of course the citizens of Europe to blame Trump and not them for not preparing for this eventuality.
But the truth is that almost all of them are responsible for neglecting what is the best interest of Europe. Thus they play this game.
But more to the point, you seem to be under the impression that Americans benefit on a personal level from our country's global empire. We really don't. Like I said above, there are a lot of fat-cats making big money grifitng off government contracts, often with overt conflicts-of-interest involving their connections in the government. Some of that money goes to their employees and ultimately into local economies but largely it's just a circuitous way to enrich assholes.
If you ever visit America, try driving about 150 miles or so out of whatever major metropolis you're staying at and take a look at how depressing this country really is. These people don't look like they're living in the epicenter of the world's most powerful and influential empire. It does not matter to them if Europe buys up the new f-47 or whatever. They could care less if the EU becomes a major military superpower in its own right. That's why when you look at these election maps, it comes down to urban areas backing the democrats and rural areas backing the trumpublicans with surprising uniformity.
I am routinely puzzled at the simple ignorance of U.S. citizens decrying the benefits of being the global hegemon:
- global reserve currency: lower borrowing rates, allows us to set economic norms
- massive military and power projections: maintains stability and provides influence wherever it's deployed
- US culture: opens up the world market to US art and culture, all of which redounds to the benefit of industries and consumers inside the US.
These benefits extend to all our allies and generally created an epoch of peace unlike any that existed before (this is including all the wars the US elected to engage in).
You may not like all of the particulars (who would?), but there is no question US citizens are richer for our global power and reach.
>These people don't look like they're living in the epicenter of the world's most powerful and influential empire. It does not matter to them if Europe buys up the new f-47 or whatever.
They may not appreciate how much the military-industrial complex benefits them not, but I think they will experience directly how it had helped when the market is gone.
Instead I would say that US corporate interests and the wealthy undoubtedly benefit from US hegemony, and there is a more or less relentless effort to deny those benefits to the poor and middle class. The cost of living, especially rent or mortgage servicing, has drastically outpaced wage increases. Health care is in terrible shape with medical bankruptcy increasingly common, and outcomes way worse.
The MI complex is again something that Americans don't credit enough for economic stimulation, but if anything it just shows that a command economy works way better than neoliberal capitalists would have us believe.
Even "peace" is poorly distributed internally. A "volunteer army" in effect is one where those with means don't have to risk their lives supporting the latest US adventure.
Not sure how you made the jump here. EU is signalling increased military spending but there isn't really much talk about tech (beyond reddit-like enthusiasm which leads nowhere); which is funny because the top referrals for this site are .. american companies themselves.
That being said, increased spending doesn't necessarily guarantee results.
EU cloud is certainly much discussed, and more than that. Holland for instance voted and accepted a resolution last week for more digital sovereignty. This doesn't mean we'll have an AWS competitor overnight, but we're also only 3 months in.
Where do these 800 bn really come from, how fast they will transform into R&D and products, how much the industrial status quo is going to change? These are hard questions that remain unanswered.
Allocating the money and printing feel good stories on regulations is the EASY part.
Now, delivering on the cut-throat tech competition on a reasonable time frame seems not part of the european ethos.
Okay, but if that's true then what does that say about the relationship between Europe and the United States when they could have done this the whole time and chose not to? Especially when the last 4 or so presidents have all complained about European nations neglecting to meet their NATO defense spending targets only to be politely ignored or in some cases laughed at in public by European counterparts?
I assume Europeans are willing to forgo some, maybe even most of their social benefits in exchange for increased military spending? I understand many currently enjoy fairly generous government support.
If not, then will there be an even bigger increase in taxes? How does EU plan to roll this out?
They're supposedly spending €1.4B this year, up by 17% from last.
https://eic.ec.europa.eu/news/european-innovation-council-in...
There's a significant amount of EU-based companies being created in the defence space. Helsing was visionary in that sense, but also paved the way for many startups to follow suite.
Europe doing so now is good for America because it reduces the risk of Americans once again dying in yet another European war.
We need to go back to WW2 for you comment to have any value.
I think Americans can thank themselves and nobody else for their people dying in wars.
How's the proposed Canada / Greenland wars fit into this? As well as ongoing support for the forever proxy war in the middle east between the US and Iran.
There have been many cases over the last decades where European interest and opinions have been quite different from US foreign policy pushes, but European countries almost always yielded to US pressure, partly due to the close relationship, but more so due to the de-facto dependence.
If Europe becomes more self-reliant and builds up more notable and integrated military capabilities, it will also mean that the we will persue different goals and prioritise our own strategic and economic interests, which sometimes might align with the US, but plenty of times will not.
It will bring about a marked decline of how much sway the US has.
Doing so rashly? That vastly increases the chances because it encourages Russia to do something in the 3-5 year timeframe.
Now their successors, who have been hoping that there isn't a tough discussion coming up, are now edging around that it was a terrible idea and backtracking as quickly as possible. Fortunately the US didn't move all the staff out so there are US subsidiaries in Europe which have staff in an uncertain situation who are probably quite easy to hire.
It's a step in the right direction for Europe but only because it was historically a terrible step in the wrong direction.
I think France are probably in a better place than most countries at the moment. That is it.
Keeping an eye on this myself, as a Brit working in the UK for a US chip company; I'm wondering when the right moment to pull my RSUs from the US brokerage account and back across the Atlantic is.
EU politicians right now are trying to use this moment to unify the EU more and to justify more spending, but they way they steer the narrative is very awkward. They want to spend but only some regions will benefit from this spending as it stands and the others will only pay the bill further causing division.
Private companies in EU face a different problem - switching away from industry leading vendors makes them less competitive. We will have to see how this plays out.
I don't understand why Europeans have to blame Trump for "spending a fair minimum on their own defense in the face of existential threats" or "investing domestically in technology".
These are things you always should have been doing.
For the US though, this European reliance on what is in effect rubbish is great. Rubbish in return for cars and all sorts of sophisticated technology.
I don't like calling ad firms etc. 'tech'. Technology for me is things like new chemical processes, whatever TSMC is doing, etc. and the US does have that, but firms like Meta are not a big player outside of machine learning research.
Not sure how much that's true. EU spends billions buying US military hardware such as the Reaper. It's unclear how the story will end up for US taxpayers here.
The thing is, West Germany alone had about 3000 tanks at the end of the Cold War, and reunified Germany nowadays has 300. Navies and air forces have been run to the ground across Europe, even the nuclear forces of UK/FR are nowhere near what they had once been.
The expectation over the last decades, especially after the pacification of the Balkans, was that open war would not return to Europe any time soon - on the one side because almost all European countries were either members of the EU, EEA or Schengen and thus were likely to more integrate instead of going back to 19th century fiefdom wars, and on the other side because the only realistic opponent was Russia... which we thought we could handle by "peace by trade".
The US has done a terrible job regulating digital privacy irrespective of which party has held the office of president. The whole world absolutely should be challenging America to do a better job being the custodian of so much sensitive data. Competition in that market is very welcome and does not represent the death of American tech infrastructure. As an American citizen and alternative search user I love to see pressure on the Google and FB scale giants to compete at providing better privacy in their products. And I think that the only way to solve the data privacy issues rampant in our industry is through legal requirement and market pressure.
Finally, please try not to cheaply patronize Americans and Trump’s foreign policy. We can talk about this issue without the political zingers insinuating that Trump and his supporters are a bunch of reckless ye-haw cowboys-idiots.
Also, these people don’t come from cowboys; they’re unrestrained salesman-on-TV personalities humiliated by poor competitiveness. I think that slightly matters; never seen it in a cowboy.
This came with a responsibility to provide military protection to the US via NATO. Trumps voters don't want America to be an empire, responsible for protecting a bunch of far-away places that don't share their values, that's why they called the movement "America first". Historically speaking being an empire generally turns out to be a terrible deal in the long term, with maintaining the empire eventually becoming too expensive and leading to collapse and reduced living standards back home, like happened to the Roman empire, and the British empire after WW2.
You mean Europe? There's literally not a place in the world (except for Canada and Australia) that shares as many common values with the US as Europe. Unless the very definition of these values suddenly changed for the US with Agent Orange.
As far as "far-away places go", it might take a similar amount of time to get from east to west coast of USA as to fly from one of the US coasts to somewhere in Europe...
Europe has been aligned with US culturally and politically for decades and it helped to promote US interests worldwide and to fight US wars. And when we need you the most for the first time since the 1990 you decided to fuck us. I feel personally betrayed, and I imagine there are many, many more like me. Your decisions will ultimately be bad for us all.
I just don't think that's true. Europeans seem much more collectivist, whereas the US is more individualist. That's why Europeans express disdain for US policies around healthcare, guns, etc. Europeans express a tremendous amount of disdain for the US online, calling Americans fat, dumb, neo-imperialist, etc.
That's been going on for ages before Trump. It's done a lot to undermine the transatlantic relationship, in my view. People-to-people connections matter for diplomacy.
How would you feel if an American insulted your leader with a derogatory nickname such as "Agent Orange"? Europeans are so used to expressing disdain for the US that they hardly even notice themselves doing it.
>when we need you the most for the first time since the 1990 you decided to fuck us.
From my perspective, we deterred Russia for 80 years following WW2, and provided almost 50% of the support for Ukraine to date. That's more than enough to account for European support in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US provided 80% of the muscle for Iraq and Afghanistan. For a fair relationship, Europe should expect to provide 80% of the muscle to deter Russia. A reset to fairness should not feel like betrayal. Europe gets most of the benefit from NATO, therefore Europe should do most of the spending in NATO. Fix this pie chart: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/...
Why the leadup (complete with de-humanization of citizens!) to annexation of Canada, then? Why normalization of invading parts of Europe (Greenland)? Why talk about taking over Panama?
Trump is 100% pro-empire, he's just too thick to understand that America already had empire without having Google Maps have everything the same colour.
Then why did they elect an imperialist? The current president has already announced the possibility of military interventions against Canada and Denmark in order to expand US territory.
That's a kind of imperalism not seen since the middle of last century, when most empires started to proritize soft power over territory as the military and economic powers started to unite. It was easier to secure cheap natural resources than to secure the resources themselves.
> that's why they called the movement "America first"
We should always listen to action, not words. Rhetoric is cheap.
The actions tells us that the US deficit will continue to grow. It is not clear yet how much, but everything points to an increase in military spending. Other parts of the state will have to be cut back.
I think it's more they are threatening to attack the EU (Denmark) and aid it's adversaries (Putin). I put that down to a Russian asset president rather than wanting money.
China is no longer communist, it's this weird hybrid of capitalism with heavy government controls and heavy censorship.
Europe is more than two decades behind and in a death grip of the woke left, basically hell-bent on self destruction.
All talent has left to US and Asia. Endless stupid regulations and crippling taxation make startups impossible. There is no way Europe will ever be able to compete.
<<Universities around the world have reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers, who face an increasingly uncertain climate under President Donald Trump’s administration. And some countries and their institutions are already looking to use the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.>>
https://www.science.org/content/article/overseas-universitie...
Trump wants countries to lower tariffs and not steal US jobs. So he hits them with reciprocal tariffs and dis-incentives for making stuff out of US. Trump does not want other countries to think US will defend them. So he makes it clear to them.
What is this deal about extortion and increase dependence?
> So now EU is investing in their own tech and military ...
It's amazing that we're supposed to believe there's going to be a EU renaissance now that, for the third time, the EU wants to begin a world war. There's talks of gigantic investments in the EU war machine, talks of making the military service mandatory again in the EU, talks about how "wonderful" it is that so many young europeans are willing to go to war to save "democracy", etc.
It's really nothing short of amazing that the warmongers are happy that the EU is planning gigantic investment in its military apparatus and that that is supposed to be where the EU's renaissance shall be coming from.
What a future for the EU! Military investments!
If I had 5 million USD to spare, I'd buy the US golden visa that Trump created and I'd GTFO of the EU in a hurry.
I do believe things are going to turn from worse to shit in the EU and it's not the tens of millions of uneducated, unemployable, unwilling to adapt to western civilization armies of religious fanatics that the EU imported and keeps importing that are going to solve anything. The only outcome is that it'll accelerate the descend into shitholeness.
The EU has its own problems and there's a reason so many countries started seeing the far-right gain lots and lots of votes and this started way before and has nothing to do with Trump.
> ... is the US now GREAT enough for you yet?
It's great enough for me. Way greater than the EU.
Why are you still here?
Not our boy. Trump was elected by uneducated farmers, not by HN crowd.
Almost 78% of farmers endorsed his most recent presidential run. https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...
I see this divide all the time, and I can't bear seeing this used time and time again to make the rural vs. the urban populations angry at each other, which in the end only detracts from trying to see how to make everything work together.
I wish we'd be smarter and stopped just being condescending towards the other group. The only ones actively benefitting from this divide are not well-intentioned people in my mind.
Yet in my lifetime I have seen them consistently go or vote against their own interests (see Brexit which absolutely gutted British farmers which overwhelmingly voted against "evil EU rules").
They need to be educated in politics and economy in order to navigate all regulations and subsidies.
The critique is that too many Americans have become complacent and allowed the political system and media landscape to evolve as it has. The Democrats are also corrupt and need to be replaced, but it requires a sacrifice of wealth that people aren't willing to give, for selfish reasons.
But you will experience the consequences.
Maybe not the HN crowd (though that is debatable, there is no homogenous group here) but a seizable amount of the SV rulers have endorsed him.
Which is surprising because they were bitten by his tariffs last time round. What made them think he'd do better for them this time?
While America is internally divided between rural and urban, or red and blue, or Woke and MAGA, the rest of the world is becoming united in seeing it all as just those damn Americans, and a growing threat.
The world at large has stopped caring about the petty squabbling that goes on in America, the boorishness and the melodrama.
America is the house down the street that always has shouting and screaming coming from it, someone throwing someone elses crap on the front lawn and the cops getting called to it every other week.
It is embarrassing and no one cares who started it anymore. We just want peace and quiet.
But your democracy has spoken now. The first time can be waived off as an aberration. The second time you have to own it.
Now, either you're commenting reactively on HN about it, or you're doing something about it and not taking it personally.
Keep people uneducated, dont support the poor and then act like you will solve these issues, its conservative 101
We've just decided to use Mistral for OCR, even though everything we currently use is embedded in Azure / IntelDocs or something.
Usually any push for EU products would be dismissed because of the initial friction compared to SV products. This seems to have shifted significantly all the way to the top. Everyone seems on board to just accept more friction to use EU products.
We are now even moving to a non-AWS/Azure K8s cluster. This was unheard of even a few months ago.
And don't get me started on O365...
But the fact that there's money available for this is a big shift.
Their website suggests so but I'm not familiar with them.
If someone is interested in getting to know STACKIT, feel free to contact me. I'm working for a STACKIT partner.
Shouting to the Board of Directors at any company about security risks and geopol implications usually meant screaming into a void.
"But their HQ is here." "We have a solid security annex in the contract!" "Their sales person was here and he promised me." Classic lawyer C-suite talk.
But when the attitude started shifting billions were thrown around to move back to Ericsson.
C-suite people will constantly get these questions and start to feel like they 'have to' go European just like how they all thought we 'had to use Agile' and 'had to do something with blockchain'.
Few forces in economics are stronger than C-suite FOMO.
There is a reason every product page usually has a reel showing what other well known companies 'trust' their solution. It works.
If only your company is down then you’re made and fire the cto
If only your company is up then nobody notices as “the internet is down”.
Businesspeople have seen the U.S.A. do things like the Citibank account freezes, which is explicitly welching on paying money owed on a contract to companies in its own country, turning off and on supplies to a country at the personal whim of its leader, putting air traffic safety at risk as a means of privatization (using the OCP playbook straight out of RoboCop), and arresting foreigners at its borders.
If they've been paying close attention they've seen civil suit court orders ignored, lawyers having executive writs of attainder proclaimed against them, and rulings handed down about blanket and extensive executive privilege and immunity that take things back to the centuries past when banks could go out of business by lending to monarchs who then just decreed that they weren't going to pay.
Even the dumbest CEO would by now be thinking of the business risks of things like flying in personnel to a business conference or to visit a satellite office; let alone of supply chain reliability, whether U.S.A. courts are still capable of enforcing any civil decisions or U.S.A. lawyers capable of doing their jobs on behalf of foreign businesses, and what this means for loan risks and banking stability.
Large companies aren’t driven by opinion/ethics/politics except where there’s a branding incentive, so the motivation here is cost/risk.
That these same companies are actively trying to nope right out of the US tech market where they can shows that they’ve priced in very real costs to both Trump’s unpredictability and the very predictable response to tariffs in their domestic markets.
Trump’s second term may end up being a great thing for tech markets outside of the US, as it drives investment into those regions and actively away from the status quo of SV hegemony.
The USA tech corps are falling in with Trump, presumably so as to get favourable tax situations and such. That makes them subject to his vagaries.
Surely, Trump might rug pull your IT services if you're competing with someone who gave him a bribe is a massive reason to move.
Companies need to operate under the rule of law which is now vacant in USA.
With threats, no matter how stupid, to invade allies. What are European companies going to do when Trump has their compute switched off? Or trade embargoes are put in place because Trump tried to takeover Greenland?
These seem to be real risks to business continuation that arise out of Trump's politics.
Buy off the junta that runs the place and you can do what you want. Oil companies, mining companies, clothing companies, all the same.
Normally the company is bigger than the people you’re bribing though, and that makes the USA unique, and more akin to working in North Korea rather than Nigeria.
Its not until we actually see numbers. This guy could be making up/exaggerating ( "everyone" really?) these stories, because thats what ppl do on the internet.
These type of protests usually die down because human beings always choose convenience and lower price.
Also see blm, dei and other "movements" that died down as soon as news cycle changed.
The movement might slow down, but it's fundamentally different from a social movement limited to the US.
Are your referring to greenland gaining independence from denmark? good for them .
Why is denmark so hesitant to give up control of greenland if thats what ppl of greenland want. Colonial mindset ? They have king thats changing flags. nothing says allies than "boiling viking blood" OG colonizers still living in middle ages.
Well, Trump did promise to make it so people would never have to vote again.
The news cycle should be orthogonal to your opinions on such matters. It shouldn't form them. A good acid test is to ask yourself if you had an opinion on something before it appeared in the news. If not, be very wary of the opinion that you adopt.
The thing is - a lot of actually very important topics got swept under the rug for a loooong time. Let's just take gay people for example. Up until the late 90s, gays got routinely beaten up by police, called "pedophiles"... hell it took until 2011 until open gays could serve in the military. That all only changed due to widespread outrage (and a few constitutional courts reinterpreting constitutional wording).
I hope this gains more momentum!
Tesla in particular are so easily targeted for "secondary picketing": people making it embarrasing to own a Tesla or just straight up targeting them for vandalism.
Which... I never realised, I didn't think soda was still so popular, let alone coca-cola and co.
I do find it hillarious that Red Bull outsells Heineken nowadays. And I'm happy to see Hertog Jan sells much better, it tastes much better than Heineken.
As you say, big effects for most companies, if they come, will come later.
Additionally there are a few that cater to certain groups with special products like mate soda (Loscher invented it with Club Mate I guess, but nowadays there are 10 big brands and a few small ones) and special kinds of cola like AfriCola or Mate Cola. Fritz-Kola is one of those products, you can get it in every city in well-stocked supermarkets, but it is a product that only caters to a certain kind of people and establishments (think "Berlin-like club-going techno-mad party-crowd" maybe). So many places will carry something else that caters to their group, and their region.
That is also why the Coca-Cola marketshare that the sister comment mentioned will go down, but it will not be replaced by another big producer, just maybe a handful of nationwide brands plus tons of regional ones.
Recently got back to drinking Afri cola. Tastes great (particularly their zero product) and is line 1,50€/L which is relatively reasonable.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/es-gibt-ein-deutsc...
[2] https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/industrie/fritz-kola-der-coc...
I personally don't know if they ship their sirup around the world.
Probably they move a bit of their secret sauce, but rest is probably sourced locally.
So impact of tariffs on coke in Germany is mininal.
During WW2 german bottlers missed some ingredients so they've started making Fanta.
[1]: https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/handel-konsumgueter...
One of the Colas that tastes good enough to replace Coke in my experience.
A bar owner I know here says selling these more-premium sodas is a good way to make a bit of extra money on people who aren't buying alcohol — you can charge more for Fritz-Kola than for Coca-Cola.
A different bar owner I know chose Jolly Cola, avoiding an American product but keeping a low price.
It's going to take time.
Media services (films, video games, social media) is pretty tricky to move on.
Will my company switch away from azure today? Probably not. Will my company include more European alternatives in the next vendor selection. Definitely yes.
For me personally, I had to install the "Go European" browser extension [1] before I actually started switching, due to more frequent reminders, from using mostly chatGPT/claude to LeChat by mistral (which feels at least as good).
My Take-away: User stickiness is hard to break due to providers' walled gardens, even for me who is aware and willing to change.
But in the past two weeks, I've done the things I've previously put off because they require real work. I've set up a NAS and switched all of the remaining things. I'm now using Immich for photo hosting, Vaultwarden for passwords, Hoarder for bookmarking, and a self-hosted Standard Notes instance for note-taking, to-do lists, and saving articles for later reading.
I'm super happy with this setup. Immich, in particular, is absolutely fantastic; its default face recognition model works better than Google Photos, at least for me. Once you've set it up, you can log your family into the same NAS and have them use it, too.
It looks like they're planning to build a European index with Qwant [2], but their help pages still say they're on Bing and Google so I guess nothing materialized yet.
[1]: https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/579-search-results-...
The results are interesting, they aren't bad, just different. Localized search isn't great, but it might be perfectly fine if you're in the UK.
On the minus side, the way their email is set up means you can't easily use third-party email clients without using an intermediary tool (Proton Mail Bridge), and because email is encrypted at rest, their own email search is abysmal.
Just a note for anyone looking for alternative password managers - 1Password is Canadian!
no matter who is hosting your email (megacorp, a hn darling, your hosting provider, yourself) you get to keep your email addresses. this also means one of the primary means of authenticating you online is not kept hostage by any business.
even for free email services that don't support custom domains, you can likely set up mail forwarding for free or very cheap with your domain hoster, and set up 'send as' alias in your inbox.
4 months on, I'm still type twitter[.]com and finding myself on localhost.
However, I just replicated the most obscure search request that I can remember, an extremely obscure automotive request for help - and, in one go, the DDG result actually got to exactly the end result it had taken me ages to Google.
I'll give DDG another shot.
On the other hand, I am mostly involved in startups where lots of tech choices need to be made from scratch. The startup I'm currently working for doesn't even consider US based tech solutions at the moment. And I think more startups that pop up nowadays will think twice before choosing non-EU based tech.
So that in the long term, we preserve viable alternatives, exactly for times like these where we cannot trust the US govt
Honestly, it's pretty exciting.
[1] EU Infrastructure with DevOps included - https://lithus.eu
* https://european-alternatives.eu
* https://dataethics.eu/european-tech-alternatives/
* https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/03/19/private-eu...
* https://dev.to/devlinkstudios/top-20-european-alternatives-t...
India has its own, now slightly faltering, Indian alternatives movement that came out of the border conflict with China a few years ago.
* https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/indian-alte...
* https://socinator.com/blog/indian-alternatives-to-chinese-ap...
* https://techbaked.com/best-indian-alternatives-to-china-apps...
* https://www.thenewsminute.com/atom/all-you-need-know-about-t...
* https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/tiktok-is-gone-but...
There is a lot more in this vein from India during 2020 to 2021.
In some ways the critical event was the BLM protests. Faced with the question of "are police subject to the rule of law", the country comprehensively chose "no". Combined with the decades-long process of stacking the Supreme Court with partisan judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, this eroded rule of law really badly to the point that all this was able to happen. And now they're trying to export gunpoint extortion as an international norm.
Before Globalisation of markets there must be a globalization of citizen rights to the highest standards.
The evidence is overwhelming that it has been win-win, albeit with some negative side effects that need to be managed better.
We can always do better but that should not involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater based on a faulty understanding of where we currently are.
It's not a win-win when the rich side wins 100 and the poor side 10
Also you are operating in dollars space instead of utility space, which is a mistake. Even if a poor person "only" gains an extra $2000/year in annual earnings due to globalization, that can be a life changing amount of additional wealth given that their utility function is highly sensitive to small changes.
Then the disadvantage of scale slowly becomes clear: this concentrates wealth and power in less and less, and eventually one, location. This is how Rome, Paris, London and, outside of the US, Teheran and Beijing are not just a bit bigger than the cities around them but completely outclass them on every metric. Even within those cities it's not exactly equally divided. The amount of wealth in the City of London is more than all the rest of London combined.
Of course, as Ireland and Scotland can explain, by then the exit is closed.
"Wealth" is nothing but debt, mostly from people living in the further away parts of the empire. That's why a poor person from middle America is tending the golf course in Florida. One problem with that, is that debt is a fiction. Someone strikes a few lines in a law book, and debt is gone. For people living far away from the power centers that sounds better and better.
The US hasn't had enough time yet, and on top of that, it is the hub of the world in many ways. Mostly because in WW2 the rest of the world decided to destroy itself, leaving the US as the only intact industrial power, and thus lots of debt is being created in the world and brought to the US to build stuff. Technology, internet, military, financial, ... plus the power centers in the US haven't (fully) merged yet. It will come.
The bigger the empire, the less equal it is for the people living inside it.
Empires collapse because large parts of the empire are plundered of all economic value they can generate, in trade for wealth in the power centers, after which most of the empire becomes a resource sink ... and that is not something the military can fix. But by then the power centers have depended on wealth being brought in to them for decades, sometimes centuries ... and more and more they have to care for themselves. A lot more work, done by the locals, must be done for less in return. For one thing, the power centers must militarily defend the heartland ... and at this point, must do so while getting nothing in return.
Here's a funny (but meant very seriously) illustration of the end and if you think about it, terrible, article about China's southern border asking the questions: WHY would China defend this border? HOW would China defend this border? WITH WHAT would China defend this border? Illustrating the problem. Read it now because this will become crisis #1223, at which point this subject will become yet another target of CCP censorship. And it's not like the US or Russia, or India, or Europe don't have the same problem.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3287769/c...
I mean, the exit was always closed to Ireland, from the initial invasion onwards. That wasn't a case of choosing to be in until you're trapped, Ireland was conquered (and subject to periodic ethnic cleansing in the plantations, reprisals etc.)
[1]https://apnews.com/article/japan-china-south-korea-foreign-m...
This is basically an attempt to create a new game, with the hopes that they can govern the rules again. Nobody wants to give up the power, obviously. But yeah, good luck to all of my American friends, I really hope (genuinely!) it turns out well in the end for you all!
LG? you mean the tv company?
One way out of this would be if content creators would en masse upload to multiple sites. Even with preferential treatment for YouTube, this would enable consumers to follow their favorite creators outside of YouTube, and get the same content. Of course, this onus is now on the creators, and I imagine they have enough to manage as it is. So what they would need is a good incentive. But that is people, and as long as they have enough people on YouTube, there is no incentive to diversify. So we're back at the network effect.
Maybe we should raise money to pay popular creators to publish on these peertube instances.
I see something else. If Europe has anything to offer (and because we are technically behind it is neither price nor quality), it must be based on political values.
The USA is an "ally in distress". What I am wondering about is those US customers who will now relocate to Europe where democratic values are better defended. If Europe can demonstrably uphold those values, given the true democratic spirit of the US people, then I see more than a "local first" movement for Europe. We can also anticipate an exodus of US principals in exile taking refuge in EU.
This is begging the question. I would say the US spirit most prevalent on this site is neofeudalist, not democratic. The discourse here has always tended to defend or excuse monopolist behaviour ("it's their app store/OS/device, they should have 100% control over what happens with it") and discourage small or local initiatives ("this will not scale and therefore you shouldn't waste effort on making things better for only these 100,000 people").
`curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh`
and then you have tens of templates for alternative self-hosted websites that you can use (Hoarder for bookmarks, ownCloud to replace Dropbox, etc)
I'm not going to keep putting all my notes and personal data in the hands of American companies which might be pressured by the fascist US govt to hand them over personal infos and passwords...
For bookmarks, I recommend Linkding: https://linkding.link
Why wouldn't it be feasible? Storage is cheap, backups are cheap. It's not for everyone, obviously, but for 20 EUR/month you can get a VM with a couple hundred GB of storage and 1TB of backups on a storagebox in hetzner. Or have a raspberry pi with a 1TB SSD in your home, or both!
The things that's interesting is how you're accessing and writing to it - depending on that, it might indeed be infeasible to do everything yourself as an individual.
A "cloud" storage like next cloud with only 1-3 users? That's not gonna become a problem, while the base configuration with backups will likely take you a weekend, it's not that hard.
> Hosted in: Sweden
Well that's interesting, I'd have thought they would work with Scaleway for "the cat", is there some Swedish company offering cheap GPU instances?
The interesting part is when he deplores the lack of support between local actors, where instead of pulling each other up, everyone plays in their corner.
Many people who have been avoiding big tech companies now have stronger arguments for doing so. It has become easier to avoid services like Instagram, Google, Gmail, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Amazon, and X. Convincing friends and family to use alternative communication platforms such as Signal, Telegram, Mastodon, Posteo, or Proton is more feasible. However, moving away from Amazon remains challenging for some. Nonetheless, every small step towards this goal is valuable.
Professional Perspective:
From a professional standpoint, some of my clients are transitioning away from AWS and/or Vercel due to political risks and ethical concerns. Others are moving from AWS to Vercel for financial reasons. Personally, I emphasize ethical considerations and political risks beyond just vendor lock-in. When project requirements and team structure allow, we prefer to build on self-managed Kubernetes (K8s) clusters.
German "Mittelstand":
Generally, the German "Mittelstand" (mid-sized companies) tend to avoid vendor lock-in. They often implement solutions that combine private and public cloud services, enabling them to switch cloud providers quickly.
Sure, this interest has recently gone up significantly, but it already was there, especially in the area I've been working in (hospitals / medical devices).
But here's what I can't wrap my head around: Why do the European alternatives suck so much?
- Pretty much all cloud providers seem (very) subpar to AWS. Some are better in a very isolated way, e.g. Hetzner offers better prices for cloud instances, bare metal servers and object storage. But they don't offer anything else. OVHcloud's web interface is terrible. Telekom Cloud runs Huawei hardware and software (!) and the dev experience is really bad.
- There's no real Cloudflare alternative.
- There's no real Google Workspace / Microsoft Teams competitor (Mail + Calendar + Drive).
- No search engine / Google alternative.
Or, let me rephrase this from another angle: In the US, startups regularly build serious competitor products to some of the incumbents mentioned above. Look at what fly.io and render.com did to Heroku, I think that's very impressive. Or hey.com slowly building a Gmail alternative, very cool.
So it's possible, technically.
But why not in Europe?
I can't get a satisfactory explanation for this observation. We certainly have smart people and good universities. Is it about funding? Or about the culture of not promoting entrepreneurship? Bureaucracy? GDPR?
I genuinely don't know. What do you think?
- The USA is a huge and fairly homogenous fairly wealthy fairly risk-positive market.
- The USA has a bigger = better mindset. "Your restaurant is fantastic, you should open another one!".
- Abysmal work-life-balance. Great for making stuff.
- Minimal language and cultural barriers.
- Because of the USA market, you can grow huge before having to expand to other countries.
- Because you can grow huge in the USA market, that is where the funding goes.
- All the the USA's allies didn't mind too much, because they are(/were?) allies
- All the non-USA-allies developed their own markets (Russia, East Asia, Africa, India, etc).
- And so now, given the messaging coming out of the USA, EU governments/companies/people are giving their USA-entanglement a second look.
Which, being in the EU, is pretty exciting. I feel like there is a lot of opportunity here right now.
Disclaimer: I'm sure there are 1001 reasons, and the above is just one potential view.
I’ve spoken with other DevTools founders, and many of them see 60–80% of their revenue coming from the US. When you’re building a PLG model targeting software developers, you really have to think globally from day one.
Even though demand for EU-based server providers has increased recently. It wasn’t always like that.
Being EU based and trying to target only EU customers is more complicated, from fundraising to customer acquisition, especially when you factor in language localization and legal bureaucracy. It’s even harder if you’re building a B2C startup where regional differences are more pronounced.
This is a global phenomenon - Americans didn't care about TikTok being a Chinese company either.
Cloudflare - BunnyCDN, KeyCDN and quite a few others with not so complete offer.
Google Workspace / MS Teams - Infomaniak, Mailbox.org, Proton.me
Search engine - Qwant, Ecosia, Startpage
Search engine is the one where best alternative is Kagi which is US. But rest of the categories has been viable for years. Many of the companies are older than Google. Yes, UX/polish might be not same but unlike the Googles/Microsoft of the world which have been going down these companies are getting a lot better.
- Private $ market: EU is decades behind the US in private capital management and the appetite for risk. In the US, it is not uncommon to raise $20M on an idea. In the EU (at least until recently), you'd raise literally 10X less.
- Piling effect: companies grow quickly by selling their product to the previous generation of growing companies: internet -> mobile -> cloud -> AI. Each wave feeds the next one, all currently centered in the US.
You're not going to like this answer, but I think there is a lot more tall-poppy syndrome in Europe. Success isn't celebrated the way it is in the US. This also drives European resentment of the US in general. (And that resentment has undermined the transatlantic relationship.)
I don't know for all options in the category but Scaleway offers a viable alternative to EC2, EBS, Lambda, S3, EKS, ECR, CloudFront and many more (although IAM is still lacking depth). OVHCloud also has a Public Cloud offer than differ from their baremetal offer (the plain old server one) but IMO it's lacking compared to Scaleway. I've heard good about UpCloud and Exoscale but never tried them myself.
I do think integration with compliance vendors and marketplace offers are two things where these providers are lacking but I'd be curious what you find is lacking to qualify them as "real clouds".
It predates HN and always has always been the place the best technical people in Australia butt heads. Their problem is they aren't up to the same standard as here - where you have the best technical people in the world butting heads.
But that would be a very big "maybe", because it is very different in all aspects.
For the personnal tools, people have lots of leeway (change mail provider, search engine, ai chatbot, etc...)
For the enterprise, I really wonder how you defend a "let's migrate our infra from AWS to X" in general, even for technological reason or business reason ; I don't even know how you start a conversation like "aws works fine for us, but let's switch for political reasons" (whether the political reason is good or bad is out of topic.)
Normally, if "infra as code" works as well as advertised, this would be a "convert yaml to json" exercise ; so we should see someone write "what we learned switching from AWS to EU-based X". I'll be on the lookout for that - but to be completely honest, I'm not holding my breath...
Some companies may see it as "let's switch for continuity-of-business reasons", not political reasons as such. Things may get worse over the next few years. Amazon is not spending billions on https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/europe-digital-sovereignty... for _fun_; even before ol' minihands's return, some highly risk-conscious companies, particularly those in sensitive fields, would not use AWS out of caution (the US-EU data protection treaties keep collapsing, for instance see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU–US_Privacy_Shield ).
I'd say AWS is less at risk from this than most, actually, in that, as above, they have a plan, though just how watertight it is remains to be seen.
We're using the same as everyone else; but we're not sure we can trust US cloud anymore, so we want to try an unknown company from country-you-can't-place-on-a-map-either.
We'll have to spend several months of engineering and incurr tens of thousands of dollars of extra licenses to try and migrate our infra.
We have no way to be sure it will work.
And it will make no discernable difference to our customers.
We have to start on Monday, so that we can be ready in time for next US presidential blunder.
Which project do we cancel ?"
The current US president favours bribery by the US to foreign officials. Doesn't seem completely insane to assume that he also favours spying on non-US competitors.
If you are a big company and use US services (e.g. Microsoft Teams or Slack or GMail or the countless others), then you have to assume that the US can see all the conversations you have on those services.
Sounds like a good enough reason to consider migrating.
We migrated to Scaleway pretty easily and the main argument was that it's easier to conform to EU regulations if all your servers and data are on an European cloud.
Were you using "boring" AWS services (EC3 / S3) or where you depending on more things ?
Are there an AWS service that you feel is missing in Scaleway, and could be a deadlbreaker for other people ?
(By the way, is it ok if I start abbreviating Scaleway as SWA, just for fun ?)
Someone relatively senior sees an article, blog, whitepaper etc and mentions it. Staff at any level who agree with the politics can then push a little to make it happen — even just by keeping it as a lunchtime discussion topic.
My employer moved away from American-hosted products due to privacy concerns, except for Office 365. The relatively senior people read about legal risks, asked a local lawyer, and made it a moderate priority to get done. For Office 365 we have the standard assurance from Microsoft that our data is in Ireland, but I could see that being reviewed.
i live in asia - indonesian vs vietnam foreign policy (despite problems in domestic policy) has shown how vast the difference in policy can generate foreign trust which lead to manufacturing which lead to a lot more money being brought to VN overall.
Europeans feel under threat from two directions now. His military threats against Greenland are an extremely serious matter.
Imagine if the USA had an ally who sold you much of your military equipment and maintained bases on your territory. One day that ally would suddenly start saying that they’re going to take over Puerto Rico, and also that they support China if they wanted to invade Hawaii “because quick peace in the Pacific is so important to everyone.”
That’s where EU finds itself now.
My main takeaways: governments sabotage Fr cloud by giving huge contacts to US companies + lack of understanding of the software development by EU and Fr decision makers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250324104040/https://plausible...
There are serious consequences that can happen in a trade war. Digital Services are how the U.S. makes billions of profits from the EU. In a trade war it is possible that digital services are hit with tariffs as it would hurt the most.
This will not happen with EU products.
For decades here in Norway we have had talks about how we need to denuclearize, stop all industry, stop all energy production, stop all mining. This, if not directly a result of Russian interference, is at least something Russia and China are entirely behind. They would love nothing more than to see their rivals self-destruct.
European alternatives are not great. That is just a fact. I want them to be great. As Donald Tusk said, it's insane that Europe is expecting the much smaller US to defend it against the even smaller Russia. The time has come to stop acting like petulant teenagers rebelling and start acting like adults.
All of this also ignores the fact that Europe jails people for thought crime at a much higher rate than US or even Russia. And European countries are much more draconian with trying to restrict privacy and encryption. Right now, my data is more private in US than in most of Europe.
> Right now, my data is more private in US than in most of Europe.
Could follow the train of thought until it catastrophically derailed in the last three sentences..
This sounds crazy to me and I have trouble believing it. I tried to find sources, but could not. As you were mentioning rates i.e. numbers, I am sure you have some source for this? The fact alone that hate-speech and holocaust-denial laws exist is not sufficient.
Like the Soviet Union, the European Union operates at a scale where it can feasibly create a nearly full suite of goods/services in parallel to the market alternative.
It's interesting that you imply the European Union is communist or state capitalist in a similar way to the Soviet Union or that European Alternatives are not part of the market, analogous to state-produced consumer goods in the Soviet Union. It's especially interesting (which is a nice way of saying preposterous) considering the primary function of the European Union has always been a European single market (the EEA includes the EU and EFTA) to ease trade between countries in Europe, with most other concerns logically following downstream from that (e.g. moving towards a United States of Europe is a logical consequence of the need for a state to back the Euro which was a logical consequence of the desire to avoid currency exchange when trading goods within the EEA).
Considering the only thing the Soviet Union and the EU have in common is part of their names in English and there's literally no similarity between Soviet consumer products and European Alternatives other than that they're foreign to the US, I struggle to understand what the point of your comment is supposed to be as good faith demands I assume the nonsensical implication is unintentional.
Legislation like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the Forestry Regulation, as well as heavy tax burdens and expansive restrictions on contracting freedom in the labor sector, have resulted in a situation where no EU company founded from scratch in the last 50 years has a market capitalization exceeding €100 billion, while the US has six such companies valued over €1 trillion. Also, the EU has only 14 publicly traded companies, founded from scratch within the last 50 years, worth at least $10 billion, with a combined market cap of $430 billion. In contrast, the US has 241 such companies (data here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e3MnYQ044U1gzi_8bDMo...), and they're collectively worth nearly $30 trillion — almost 70 times the EU total.
source: https://geekway.substack.com/p/a-visualization-of-europes-no...
I mean, it's hard to see how it would work at all! Their tariff take is simply not going to be sufficient to move the needle very much, and it's not implausible that the revenue loss on income and corporate tax due to lost economic growth will be larger.
If the future can't be predicted that's because one can't predict when Trump and his imbeciles will be stripped of power.