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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

EU businesses aren't going to switch to EU providers as long as US providers are just as convenient and provide better services. EU providers aren't going to be as convenient and as good as US providers unless they can have similar levels of investment. They aren't going to get similar levels of investment as long as US providers are available and convenient.

The IT stuff is a replication effort and replication makes sense only when the original isn't available. Russia and China got some good IT stuff only when the US stuff were restricted one way or another.

So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations.

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> So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations.

I think you underestimate the deterioration that's already occurred. These conversations are already happening. It will take a decade at least, but it's already begun.

I'm aware of the state but it's not bad enough. It will be bad enough only when access to US services is just as restricted as in Russia and China.

Currently there aren't any restrictions, the political class is worried and people don't feel good about the maker of the products but that's it.

Why would anybody invest in European mass appeal e-mail provider when things can just improve if Trump changes his pills? As a result in Europe you can't have a Gmail but instead you get Proton Mail. This is cool but its a niche product.

The same goes for everything, EU does have some great niche tech and some content studios but the platforms are always US based. I.e. one of the hottest games at this moment(clair obscur expedition 33) in the world is French made but it is primarily published on US platforms.

On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more.

Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets. Trump for some reason tries hard to change that but he hasn't succeeded yet but on the other hand he just started... So maybe in a few years it can happen after some huge scandal that justifies drastic changes. For example, it can be something like coordinated attack on Europeans by US tech giants and Russia etc. Musk with his actions in Ukraine propelled British and French satellite providers for example.

> Currently there aren't any restrictions, the political class is worried and people don't feel good about the maker of the products but that's it.

There very clearly is the restriction, upheld by courts again and again, that EU personal data cannot be processed on US clouds, including EU-based but US-owned clouds thanks to the US CLOUD ACT.

The political class and EU governments as a whole have kicked this can down the road several times, first with Safe Harbor, then Privacy Shield, and now the EU–US Data Privacy Framework which will inevitably fall.

> Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets.

This is just, well, untrue. Despite the oft-repeated claims to the contrary, the EU is an industrial and technological powerhouse.

What it doesn't have are US oligopolies, which are currently destroying the fabric of US society while being enormously profitable. That's a feature of the EU, not a bug.

> On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more.

Wealth inequality is a failure of US society, not a goal.

> here very clearly is the restriction, upheld by courts again and again, that EU personal data cannot be processed on US clouds, including EU-based but US-owned clouds thanks to the US CLOUD ACT.

Have they? As far as I am aware there's been a lot of handwaving and possibly FUD but nothing more.

Then you're not paying attention, as there is concrete precedence, in particular Schrems 2.

Schrems 2 does not do what you claim: the EU-US Privacy Shield is about sending EU data to the US, not about US companies keeping data in the EU. So I still don't know what "precedent" there might be.

Surely if your claim was factual, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc would have ceased business in the EU...

You should read Schrems 2, specifically paragraphs 179 onwards, which set the now unchallenged precedent that data which remains in the EU but is subject to US legislation that allows access by US public authorities constitutes a transfer.

> Surely if your claim was factual, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc would have ceased business in the EU...

The legal cover is now the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which allows these transfers subject to self certification. This is already under challenge and inevitably will fall judicial review in the next few years.

Once all the delaying tactics have been dealt with, we'll be left with the inevitable conclusion. Data transfers to the US or US controlled companies are unlawful as long as the CLOUD Act and similar are in force.

It's simply unreconcilable with the ECHR Right To Privacy and GDPR.

> which set the now unchallenged precedent that data which remains in the EU but is subject to US legislation that allows access by US public authorities constitutes a transfer.

Not at all. Again, this is only about privacy shield and actual transfers to the US.

> It's simply unreconcilable with the ECHR Right To Privacy and GDPR.

That's the FUD I was talking about considering that this is exactly the same situation as access by EU-based law enforcement.

EU is playing politics and is tangling itself in unworkable legislation.

> Not at all. Again, this is only about privacy shield and actual transfers to the US.

You are wrong on this. The CJEU ruled that making EU data “available” to an entity in a third country is a transfer, and the European Data Protection Board subsequently clarified that remote access from a third country triggers the GDPR transfer rules.

> Wealth inequality is a failure of US society, not a goal.

And moral victory is a poor substitute of the real victory.

With respect, having lived across both continents, Europe is winning the real victory (as well as obviously the moral victory in as far as outcomes for its own citizens).

The United States is a cruel, dystopian nightmare of a market masquerading as a country. No amount of corporate success will save it from it's inevitable collapse as the working class awaken to their situation.

> Europe is winning the real victory (as well as obviously the moral victory in as far as outcomes for its own citizens)

If only Europeans could pay their mortgages and bills with morals instead of money. If only Russia could be defeated by morals and not weapons. If only the pensions and welfare Europeans enjoy could be funded my morals and not by economic growth.

As usual, people who keep scoffing at economic growth saying "money doesn't matter" are those living in a bubble where they already have more than enough money and never experienced massive economic decline and take the economic prosperity they had for granted.

Ask Greece or Eastern European countries how they feel about winning economically.

Eastern European countries are surprisingly nice actually. Those are safe, free, have access to good food and anyone who is living in those is living because they choose to.

The only ones that complain are those who want to have the cake and eat it too. In general, the life in those countries is quite relaxed just as the working conditions. You may see thing like working hours are long but those working hours are not comparable to the working hours in Germany or France for example.

Mortgage default rates or inability to pay the bills is also not that bad. Those who actually have trouble can seek better lives in the western Europe and many do and for quite many the good life is actually in Eastern Europe even if they would complain often.

It's not like those countries lack some resource or something making them poor, it's their expectations. In fact, Eastern Europe has quite a favorable geography with nice climate, access to water and plenty of sunshine. It's such a nice location that those countries receive considerable amount of tourists.

For those who are more ambitious, Eastern Europe offers everything they need - including powerful passports that let them go to the rich parts of the world hassle free.

That nice, but I'm not sure what does it have to do with the point I was trying to make? Did I say anywhere Eastern Europe sucks? My point was that Eastern Europe is now prosperous precisely because after the fall of communism it prioritized getting wealthy and making money first, which is what my parent was scoffing at, which led me to believe he must be form a country who's prosperity was built much earlier in the distant past and he forgot what life without economic prosperity looks like, but Greeks or Eastern Europeans still remember. His attitude felt incredibly hypocritical.

Prosperity comes from wealth. You can have a lack of prosperity even with wealth, but you can't have prosperity without wealth.

Forgive me for being skeptical, but socialists have been predicting the collapse of the United States due to the working class awakening for over a century.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

That's a fair enough perspective, but your alternative future is an enduring oligarchy, so you should be hoping for collapse.

Thanks but no thanks. If history is any guide, citizens almost always end up in far worse shape in actual dystopian nightmares when states collapse.

I'll happily take stability living under an "oligarchy" with relatively weak and divided oligarchs, in a country with free elections that can still effect change, even if it happens at a glacial pace.

Yes, I am all for social democracy, but to have welfare you need to build it. Europe had a nice time living on the dividend from the wealth it gathered in the past, and the fact that US provided military protection. Society becomes older, and US is withdrawing, so that model is no longer viable.

To win you need to have strength. And to build your strength you need to work quite hard. Nothing comes free in this world. I would prefer that Europe sacrifices some of its comfort and survives because of it, instead of dying out with a claim to moral victory.

Europe works hard. Europe is not decaying, not like the United States at least. You lack the introspection to see that.

Europe is strong, stronger than the United States in its core institutions. You also lack the introspection to see that.

It is the United States that is at risk of losing its sovereignty, its wealth, and it's power. Again, you lack the introspection to see that too.

Quite hard to use the power of introspection in such context, for I am not a continent.

>What it doesn't have are US oligopolies, which are currently destroying the fabric of US society while being enormously profitable.

Those oligopolies you claim are "destroying the fabric of US society" are also providing tones of skilled jobs in the US, pouring billions in research (how much FOSS is developed at FAANGs?), and are a vital source of US soft and hard power, while also building a cloud for the German military[1][2] because EU tech industry is far so behind no EU company can replicate what Google can do here at their scale. It's not FAANG's fault there are problems in the US society, that's a failure of US politicians.

And there will always be oligopolies, always have been, better they be on your side that on your adversaries' side. If you cripple your companies to "destroy oligopolies" like your cheer the EU for, then China's state propped oligopolies will gladly step in to fill the vacuum and put your industries out of business. Morality and shaming others for not following your values never wins, power wins. That's Realpolitik. Crazy people still don't get it.

> That's a feature of the EU, not a bug.

It's a feature to have a stagnating economy of archaic companies that are in decline?

[1] https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/131897/google-to...

[2] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...

> And there will always be oligopolies, always have been, better they be on your side that on your adversaries' side.

They're not on _your_ side, as much as you want to believe they are.

> Morality and shaming others for not following your values never wins, power wins.

Do you think the US is winning? The American people?

Right now, Europeans are "winning" with the highest quality of life in the world. That's not true for the American population.

> Crazy people still don't get it.

I think we can both agree on that.

>They're not on _your_ side, as much as you want to believe they are.

They're accountable to the government Americans vote for, that's what I meant. Better for them to be accountable to your government than a foreign government.

>Do you think the US is winning? The American people?

You're deflecting instead of answering my question: If Chinese oligopolies would replace them, would the US citizens be winning more or less?

>Right now, Europeans are "winning" with the highest quality of life in the world.

Tell that to Europeans who can't afford a home and who are struggling to pay the bills. HN users constantly pulling out a random statistic off Google to dispute the reality people actually live in is the bane of this forum.

"You see, you can't be doing poorly, because the graph or the statistic shows otherwise". People don't care about meaningless statistics or graphs, they care about what's in their bank account and how that number has evolved(or devolved) compared to the past. People don't care that on paper they're theoretically higher in an index than Americans, when they're relatively worse off than they were 10 - 20 years ago. What matters is how people feel about their situation.

> Tell that to Europeans who can't afford a home and who are struggling to pay the bills. HN users constantly pulling out a random statistic off Google to dispute the reality people actually live in is the bane of this forum.

Are you suggesting the housing situation is better in the US of all markets?

> People don't care about meaningless statistics or graphs, they care about what's in their bank account and how that number has evolved(or devolved) compared to the past.

People actually care about much more than that, including family life, health, and human rights, which are all better in the EU than the US.

People's finances are _also_ better in the EU than the US in real terms.

> What matters is how people feel about their situation.

If this is true, people in the EU are _much_ happier with their lives than in the US.

At this point, I'm not sure if you're trolling or completely disconnect with the reality of life in the US?

But EU might pull apart itself first.

We in Poland just elected a very pro-America, anti-EU president. By like 51 - 49, so very close, but still...

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