Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why
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This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world.
Much like the diving head first first into AI uptake, the whole cloud mania thing coming home to roost.
If calling a war criminal a war criminal results in sanctions, could sanctions be the new tariffs? I don't want to give him ideas...
This should scare pretty much any organisation outside of the US.
He has even bigger levers to pull unfortunately. Sanctions are this giant hammer that can be dropped on anyone and the weight of the US ensures compliance. When the ICC chief prosecutor was sanctioned it wasn't just US companies who gave in, like Microsoft. His UK bank also blocked him. Sooner or later in the chain of dependencies there will be something based in the US or relying on something based in the US. Your MSP, the airline you travel with, anything will be used against you if sanctions are transmitted like a disease to anyone giving you assistance. No company or country wants to risk being buried to fight the US on this.
This is a 'funny' situation, and potentially telling as to who holds more power, given that the UK government has recently sanctioned two Israeli ministers: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settl...
Are UK Banks (maybe only this UK Bank) more beholden to the US than the UK?
Is / Would this UK Bank also block(ing) those two Israeli ministers?
If there's no concentrated source of revenue, the people need to be involved and thus a more democratic path is likely.
With the internet and software, especially with platforms, you see this concentration of power effect. That then easily leads to certain kind of power dynamics. Ie just as a hypothetical example, if there's only a few closed conversation platforms, government can control them relatively easily.
I believe engineering in growing countries have completely different mindsets. They put the enterprise in enterprise and the results speak for themselves.
Of course you have to stay pragmatic here and not every battle is in the interest of a company. But engineers with the ability to pursue their craft, sensible knowledge management and training have become a rare sight. So R&D is just plainly better in other countries.
Problem is that this laziness of course empowers other players to grow to insane dimensions, like Microsoft did. Microsoft has many competent developers, but their success isn't due to software quality. Especially if you look at the latest cloud offerings. They are so large that they don't have to be good anymore.
and of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the SEC etc.
EU already does this:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p...
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/
Bert Hubert is good at identifying problems like this, but his proposed approach is always to demand the EU pass new laws even when the problem is Europeans asking people in foreign jurisdictions to run everything for them because they can do it better, partly due to not being under EU control. The cause of the problem is presented as the solution.
The internet has a compressive effect on markets. Most markets can only sustain about 3-5 competitors before the number of choices becomes overwhelming and customers can no longer easily differentiate between them. If you offer your services over the internet, that means 3-5 competitors globally, and in turn that means hacking one of them can give you control over a huge chunk of the market. It also means it's easy to end up with all of those competitors being outside your jurisdiction if you aren't highly competitive.
The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now, but the basics really should be doable. The newly launched EU DNS is a good start. Rules like taxpayer money needs to only fund open software etc need to be pushed. The large hosting providers need to be incentivized to build out more complete offerings that don't have gaping product holes vs big cloud etc.
Both China and the US are aggressively pushing homegrown & favouring their own players. Time for the EU to do the same
> The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now
for this case, ASML, being Dutch, and crucial to essentially all cutting semiconductor production, gives Europe leverage.
That said, a bit like Biden & Trump banning the export of certain tech to China, it is a slippery slope. Past a certain point they're just forced to develop the tech themselves. Hopefully Europe won't be as short-sighted or wilfully-ignorant, and will capitalise on their advantage here- as you are very correct to point out the ultimate vulnerability.
Also, the machines are just one part of the equation. You need chip designs, you need actual foundries where these machines need to be installed and so on.
It doesn't.
Firstly, ASML's core EUV light source tech is licensed from the US who threatened to pull the plug if ASML sold EUV steppers to China. That's what actual leverage looks like.
Secondly, you also need cutting edge semi fabs, which EU lacks. If it were that easy ASML would open some fabs in its own back yard with its cutting edge machines and keep the highest profits for themselves instead of letting TSMC, Samsung and Intel have them, but it's not easy. EU semi fabs are behind Taiwan, the US, China and Japan in node sizes despite having ASML domestically which is a huge blow for domestic industry and leverage. That's like making the best hammers but having no idea how to use them effectively.
Thirdly, once you have the lithography machines and the fabs, you also need top IP to make cutting edge high margin chips with them, which the EU lacks. The highest grossing chips are all US IP: Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, Amazon, Ampere, while European chip companies are way down below the pecking order in profitability: Infineon, NXP, ST, making low margin chips the likes of Nvidia and AMD can't be bothered.
Fourthly(is that correct in English?), once you have your litho, fabs and high end chips, you can now put all those powerful chips into datacenters to create powerful cloud hyperscalers, which the EU lacks. EU has nothing close to AWS, GPC, Azure, Tencent, Alibaba.
This is what tech dominance looks like. And EU is third place behind the US and China.
That's not any leverage at all. The EU would instantly write a law invalidating those licenses on their territory. Paperwork like that is meaningless in geopolitical conflicts.
They don't even have to burry ASML, they can sanction it, or better, just convince ASML to move all cutting edge operations on US soil like the US is doing with TSMC.
...but they're an outlier in a specific part of the chain, not an ecosystem.
The bridge is right there, the EU just needs to cross it.
> [Would we allow a situation where] a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power?
We did just that with Russian gas imports. It took a massive effort to transition of these imports after Russia closed the tap.
It is amazing how objective reality and basic common sense go out the window when it comes to the Ukraine/Russia situation.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gas-still-flows-russ...
If you unilaterally decide to change the terms of a contract it's quite obvious that the other party may not agree.
Russia decided to not fill EU gas storage to usual levels ahead of the invasion.
Russia decided to not fulfill its contractual obligations in retaliation to the sanctions imposed by the EU.
Objective reality is only inconvenient to Putin's apologists.
Even before the war, the German subsidiary of Gazprom had already started deliberately lowering the amount of gas stored underground in Germany, at a time when it was usually being filled up for the next winter.
Examples, there are many articles from around that time: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-gas-russia-nord-stream-crisis/a-666... (it shows the timeline, the explosions were inconsequential, gas had already long stopped flowing)
September 2022: "Russia cuts off gas exports to Europe via Nord Stream indefinitely"-- https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/02/energy/nord-stream-1-pipe...
August 2022: "Nord Stream 1: Russia switches off gas pipeline citing maintenance" -- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/31/nord-stream...
We may have to mine coal, oil, and natural gas in specific places, but everywhere has access to the sun and wind.
Ironically, I have set up thunderbird as a client for my exchange email just for archival, and it does much better finding them.
Why does "digital sovereignty" have to rely on stuff like "FOSS email client"
Honestly, as much of FOSS has its importance, focusing exclusively on open source solutions is probably part of why things don't go ahead
Honestly Thunderbird was good 20 years ago. And even then...
Makeshift solutions with pieces duck-taped together and inconsistent UX are not going to win any friends
Many highly polished, widely-used pieces of software are also FOSS. Firefox, for instance.
FOSS can also be a software suite built by a well-funded international partnership for the specific purpose of making something that can replace Europe's current dependence on proprietary US-based software.
Yes, it's important to try to make sure Europe is in good shape with the software (and hardware) it depends on now, but a solid long-term strategy can—and, IMO, should—include building new packages from the ground up to fill niches not currently well-served by the independent, distributed FOSS community. It's likely to take years to truly come to fruition, but if done thoughtfully it will benefit everyone.
> FOSS != "makeshift solutions with pieces duck-taped together and inconsistent UX".
Sure. Firefox is good. The fact that it's FOSS is of second nature
But let's not kid ourselves, the majority of "User facing" FOSS apps has terrible UX.
And then it always goes back to "it sucks but it's free"
We should go for FOSS choices that are good, free/open shouldn't matter (if they are from European vendors)
> include building new packages from the ground up to fill niches not currently well-served by the independent, distributed FOSS community
Sure, who should do that? Pretty much all linux vendors went out of business, and managing those solutions is easier said than done, also it looks much cheaper than it actually is.
The reason Europe should use FOSS software is that it cannot, inherently, be beholden to any company or country. It can't be bought, or subverted without that subversion showing up in publicly-viewable code repositories. These are attributes that inherently go with the fact that it is built in the open, with anyone able to take the source and make their own version of it even if the people who originally built it want to start doing nefarious things. And there's nothing about this that makes software hard to use; that's a consequence of the volunteer, distributed nature of most independent open-source software, combined with the lack of strong incentives to create good UX.
So if Europe wants to get serious about this, it can, and should, make some that's high quality and still open. There are a number of ways it could do that, and the amount of money it should cost to make it happen should be pocket change by the standards of the entire EU working together. There are plenty of good programmers and UX engineers in Europe.
commercial because of the insane dark pattern hell and contact us for pricing and 345 step signup onboarding madness to get the sweet sweet data juice
FOSS, on the other hand, because it starts with build it yourself with CMake or cry because there's only a 3 years old prebuilt binary but not for your platform/architecture
Are we blind or something? Is there a single Microsoft product that has an even halfway decent UX? We're up to like a dozen setting panels in Windows. Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name. Nobody likes Outlook.
then they fucked it up gradually but royally. Office is completely ridiculous for like 20-30 years. (I still think people who heralded the ribbon menu as some kind of UX panacea should have stopped sniffing glue before it got too late.)
I don't think anyone is taking this seriously enough.
Management would rather depend on "Microsoft" than "that employee that talks a lot without saying anything useful / understandable". That's a huge bridge to cross. Even under the mad king, I think most Management would prefer to remain dependent on Microsoft and go out of their way to avoid the ire of the The Kingdom of Trumpistan than to migrate their "everything computer" to a lesser known, lesser proven entity.
this is a business/operations risk management question. compliance, legal liability, BCP, regulatory environment flux, and so on.
the case of the ICC obviously shows how little they cared about these things.
MS closed the account? where are the offsite/independent backups? etc.
obviously most IT/software/tech businesses - especially weighted by capital, impact, influence, pedigree, and other factors of visibility and sales pushiness - are US based, so there's no point in caring too much about picking non-US vendors.
and many European businesses are targeting the US market, so again not much they can do to escape the influence of Uncle Trump.
This used to be a huge complaint across African countries (because they had the same problem: African governments went pretty far in suppressing islamic insurgencies that threatened their existence. Of course the insurgencies committed 100x the human rights violations that those states did, but never got convicted)
That's a pretty crazy claim. 125 countries have joined the ICC. The OIC only has 57 members (not all of them even have a Muslim majority).
Of the three judges who issued the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, two are European (one is French, the other Slovenian).
The US has the same problem with the ICC as it does with the ICJ: the US government does not want to be subject to international law. The US is used to acting as a superpower, in whatever way it wants. It just fundamentally does not accept the premise that its actions should be in any way constrained by international law.
In this particular instance, the problem the US has with the ICC is that the US is Israel's primary backer. The US provides the money, weapons and diplomatic support that Israel needs to continue its war against the Palestinians and occupation of the Palestinian territories. The US itself is heavily implicated in the crimes that the ICC is prosecuting here.
And it's not limited to this conflict. Other examples include that in order to "join the international order", ie. the WTO, China promised to not support any companies with state support and to charge all companies normal company taxes. And while I'm not aware of definitive proof, nobody seriously believes they are doing this. The agreement also outlaws what they're (very publicly) doing with loans in the belt and road initiative, by the way.
Or other examples: the US, France, the UK and other countries specifically signed that if Russia invaded Crimea that they would do some combination of:
1) declare war on Russia (this is in all agreements)
2) support Ukraine economically
3) support Ukraine militarily
4) commit to attack Russia physically and help free Crimea "kinetically"
In trade for Ukraine denuclearizing. Whilst there are different agreements, let's just simplify and say that any particular agreement contains 3 out of those 4 provisions.
And while all countries (except of course Russia) have indeed supported Ukraine, none of them have followed through on their commitment to declare war on Russia.
I took a year of law school, because, you know, bored. And I do remember one professor (who was a sitting supreme court judge at the time, btw), described international law as "fiction, a guideline at best". The problem being that nobody, except the US and Israel, have any real intention of following through on international agreements. Of course, this was before the current iteration of the conflict, even before 2014. On one hand, his opinion has not changed ... but it's because he has since left us.
The Palestinian Authority works extremely closely with the Israelis to hunt down anyone who engages in armed resistance against Israel. Just think of how incredible that is. The PA, which is run by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, supposedly dedicated to freeing the Palestinians from Israeli oppression, is working with the Israelis to prevent Palestinians from resisting an occupying military force. The PA has burned a huge amount of political capital doing this, and is now widely hated by the Palestinians. It's seen as a collaborationist organization. So when you demand that the PA work even more slavishly for Israel than it already does, I don't know what you're seriously expecting.
> China promised to not support any companies with state support
China did not make a blanket commitment to end all state support to its companies. Not even the United States or Western European countries have made such a commitment. China promised to carry out many different types of economic reforms, and it did indeed carry out very deep and painful reforms. The Chinese economy is drastically different than it was in the 1990s. Most of the big state monopolies have been broken up, private companies play a much larger role than before, and foreign investment is much easier.
> the US, France, the UK and other countries specifically signed that if Russia invaded Crimea that they would do some combination of
No, the US, France and UK never committed to defend Ukraine militarily. The Budapest Memorandum just said that each country agreed not to attack Ukraine, and that they would discuss with one another if there were any violations of the agreement.
> The problem being that nobody, except the US and Israel, have any real intention of following through on international agreements.
Huh? The US and Israel are not known for following through on international agreements. The US might have had some sort of reputation many decades ago, but that reputation is thoroughly shot through now. Israel never did. It has always been a loose cannon on the international stage.
Point me to the treaty that commits the US, France or the UK to what you're describing - what amounts to a full blown defense pact of Ukraine.
The only thing I'm aware of that is remotely close to that is the Budapest Memorandum and that contains none of what you describe. At most, it obligates countries go to the UN Security Council if nuclear weapons are used against Ukraine.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/05/06/united-states-unsigning-...
This paints a stark negative picture of the US. However, of course, as soon as you consider intent of signing ... and the fact that some signatories to the Rome statute, like Palestina or South Africa, have signed it without any intent to carry out their side of the agreement, and that the ICC has in fact accepted these members (kind of).
The idea of the ICC ... was supposedly the same idea that created Gaza in 2007. If you give them something in trade for cooperating with the treaty, they'll cooperate. Of course, reality was they greedily accepted what they got (e.g. Palestina immediately tried suing Israel), but never carried out their side of the agreement. Palestina, for example, in their "Martyr fund", paid out money to people the ICC said they should arrest, but never took any action and several times publicly declared they would never arrest any Palestinian, no matter what they did, for the ICC. (their "Martyr's fund" paid money to Palestinians according to how many Jews they had killed and/or wounded [1], which the PA committed a $330 million per year budget for). South Africa has now twice publicly protected people they should arrest (Omar Al Bashir and Putin) against the ICC.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority_Martyrs_...
The Palestinians are vastly outgunned by Israel, which militarily occupies the Palestinian territories. The Palestinians correctly believe that if everyone is forced to follow international law, it will be a huge net benefit the Palestinians. Of course, the Israelis have no incentive at all to submit to international law, because Israel can enforce whatever it wants through military force.
It's a David vs. Goliath fight. The Palestinians have very few cards to play. International public opinion and international law are two of those cards.
Israel does not occupy "the Palestinian territories". It does not occupy Gaza (not even now, or at least only about half).
The Israeli have a LONG history of submitting to international law, including retreating from Gaza in 2006 ...
I mean, we can keep going with getting the facts and prejudice out of your post, but ...
The reality is that Palestinians have a dream of eliminating Israel. As they showed before and during the war of 1948, and the wars after that, they want to massacre Jews to achieve that. A long time ago, probably before even 1970s, with help from the KGB, Arafat El-Masri (that's his full name btw, "the Egyptian mountain of knowledge") was an Egyptian KGB agent that scammed the Soviets and the UN out of literally billions of dollars, and that was his only goal). Palestine was created (it did not exist, except as a Jewish state before 1948, a colony of the British Empire, and as a colony of the last 3 caliphates, and a Roman province before that) as a scheme to collect money from international institutions, and that's what it still is. Both Hamas and the PA want conflict, because that gets them about 800$ per month per Palestinian monthly (and that's just the public part). That makes it VERY important for Palestinian leadership to neither lose nor win the conflict, but to keep the conflict, the deaths, the suffering going for eternity, ideally from the side of a Qatarese pool.
There is not a single population on the planet, no matter how badly off they are, that gets 10% of what Palestinians get, on a per-capita basis. Palestinians are absolute geniuses at this. Did you know there are Palestinian "refugees" living in New York, who have never once left the US, who receive an UNRWA pension (tax free, I might add)?
> Both Hamas and the PA want conflict
It sounds like you're still living in the 1970s, when the PLO was engaged in armed resistance against Israel. Those times are long gone. The Palestinian Authority (dominated by the PLO) has tried for 30 years to work with Israel. The last thing it wants is conflict. Israel has been bombing Gaza for 20 months now, and what has the PA done? Nothing. It's actually incredible how passive the PA is.
> There is not a single population on the planet, no matter how badly off they are, that gets 10% of what Palestinians get, on a per-capita basis. Palestinians are absolute geniuses at this.
Oh yes, how lucky the Palestinians are. I hear Israeli bombs are filled with butter tarts and pixie dust.
> Oh yes, how lucky the Palestinians are. I hear Israeli bombs are filled with butter tarts and pixie dust.
Let me just address this claim in your style: "Oh yeah, that's impossible, because NOBODY has ever heard of large groups of people doing war so they get amounts of money they have no other way of making".
Wait, that's so common just about every language has a word for such people? Oh my ...
In 2020, Israel killed 33 Palestinians. Compare that to Americans killing 19444 Afganis, drug lords killing 34512 Mexicans, Saudis killing 19056 Yemenis, Boko Haram killing 7300 Africans, etc. [2]
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/24/un-condemns-israel...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_in_202...
and paramilitary forces attacking civilians were illegal in British Palestine
taking private property also
and poisoning wells is also technically not super bueno under a little know statute, the laundry list of deeds for which Hammurabbi will fuck you up personally, but I'm not a legal scholars so maybe it was so legal a mockingbird granted them statehood.
We can see China and the US developing AI tooling (and other tech) at a high speed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of regulation and even active deregulation. In the EU, we won't be able to keep up with this speed because we tend to want to regulate first and many of our regulations hinder gathering the insane amounts of data needed.
Falling behind on AI and not wanting to be dependent on tools from outside the EU will put us at a significant disadvantage in research and production of new technologies and we're already far behind in that aspect.
We also don't want to drop our values just to keep up. Which is partially because we're still in the luxury position of being very rich. I wonder, though, whether we can keep this going in the current state of the world. Things seem to have changed massively in our disadvantage over the past 5 or so years.
Oh, but the EU didn't just "tend to want to". They already did regulate AI in the most onerous possible way for AI users and producers. They even pride themselves on regulating before everyone else and before even knowing what they are regulating: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO...
AI is inevitable, for better (open, transparent, self-hostable) or worse (closed, opaque, cloud-only).
Once hype train vibrations reach a certain frequency, the topic they represent become inevitable.
Purely subjective of course, my vibration frequency sensitivity is not your vibration frequency sensitivity.
I would say that it feels as if AI is being 'pushed' far more than cloud was. Cloud services were made available, and companies took them up. AI uptake has a pressure behind it from the big players. Refer anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234139
It's a bit VHS vs Betamax, except it's VHS vs No-VHS. Playing on FOMO.
Regulation is good, it keeps actors in line and prevent cheating, but then overregulation comes into the picture and shoots them in the foot while expecting them to compete on the world stage.
Think balance.
That's why I wrote that we don't want to do that. But not doing that comes with a risk that we need to be aware of. There's two sides to the coin and we need to look at both before we pick a side.
I don't have an opinion on which side to pick, since I think it's one of the hardest decisions of our time and I value our sovereignty and privacy. I just don't know if we can keep those in the long term if we start lagging behind on a global scale.
Europe chose degrowth instead of abundance, now it reaps the whirlwind.
And renewables can only get you so far.
Wind/Solar/etc cannot produce fertilizer - arguably the most important use of fossil fuels.
And the EU's land does not produce enough food to support its population without fossil fuel derived fertilizers (requires lots of nat gas). Hence why the EU still imports $billions of Russian fertilizer despite publicly talking tough about Russia.
The EU leaves fossil fuel extraction to other countries and then imports the result while loudly shouting about their own "morality" and sustainability. It's child-like and pure silly-ness. Until the EU starts fracking they will never have independence over anything.
You can create ammonia (and thereby nitrogen-based fertilizers which you are probably referring to) from electricity, water and air alone. However, doing it with gas or oil is often cheaper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-023-00362-y
However, the process is very old and proven, see e.g. this historically significant and well-known facility from 1907: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Hydro_Rjukan
Renewables in Europe simply can’t scale up to meet the need for fertilizers the way nat gas can.
The EU or your hysterical reply?
Apologies for including an ad-hominem insult that triggered you emotionally. I would edit that line if I could.
Through regulation. Regulation is more than just regulation of software. We're also at a disadvantage because of regulation on employee rights, wages and payments in stock options. In the US it's way easier to pay with theoretical money (like options) than actual money. So the start-up scene is way more interesting for young people who work hard and hope to become part of a unicorn to hit it big.
The reason the EU cannot compete in tech, is because its market is way too tight with the US market. Any founder has a choice (if you can raise this insane level of seed capital you have the choice). They could pick US, Canada, UK, France, Germany ...etc. Given that choice, they will pick the US every single time. It's strategically the best choice, simple because of its size and wealth.
But what about AI? Soon all of our email will be pre-handled by our OpenAI assistant while we will be driven around by Waymo and a good part of our work is done by a Tesla humanoid robot. How can Europe catch up and do that in a sovereign way?
For world-class AI, a country needs:
1 Photolithography
2 Wafers
3 GPUs
4 Software (SOTA Neural Networks)
5 Energy
We already have AI in-house. Mistral is based in France, and their Le Chat platform hosted exclusively in the EU.
People will always want to use the best model. Like they use the best search engine.
How would Mistral catch up with US companies, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on improving their models? As far as I know, Mistral raised something like $1B so far.
So keeping the company in USA is a favour they do to the country, not that they rely on it.
Also plenty of software developers. And USA just hires indians and europeans, no reason europe can't hire indians too.
Do I make less money? Sure. Do I feel much safer and enjoy a much higher quality of life? Yup.
No time to enjoy said money
No time with your family
Extremely easy to get laid off
If you are laid off, all your savings can easily be used up if you need healthcare, sending you into permanent poverty.
If you consider that a better quality of life… sure… but not everyone likes betting their existence on the lottery.
edit: forgot to mention, if you get laid off you also get quickly deported.
I had the deportation risk while waiting for the Greencard. But I'd happily go back to my birth country with a ton of money if I was deported vs my friends who tried Europe and went back home (due to low Software wages and underemployment in Europe) with nothing to show for it.
The vast majority of my US-born and foreign friends in the software field are doing great financially. A few got laid off but had good savings and were eventually hired elsewhere. Even the ones in the West Coast. They had to buy small houses (like the ones in Europe) but they got to do it anyway.
I have a few friends who came from the richer parts of Europe. A handful went back, but not most. The ones from the poorer parts of Europe are certainly not going back.
Europe is great for the rich, though. Thus a good place to retire if you can afford it. But the same can be said about many parts of the US, so ultimately it's a matter of taste.
If things continue on the trajectory they're currently on, you probably won't be allowed to go on living in the US as a foreign-born anything.
VW is the world's largest auto maker and it's German.
Europe is leading the world in Energy, by far.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...
Europe has severed itself from major sources of the fundamental driver of civilization, energy, it has bet on “renewable energy” in reckless ways, which was demonstrated by the small black swan event energy grid collapse just mere weeks ago. Germany has totally abandoned nuclear energy and has no real alternatives as it imports the majority of its energy and all its renewable energy sources are subpar, at best, and are unsustainable without massively distorting government command economy subsidies keeping afloat what is essentially a Ponzi scheme with decreasing real marginal returns. Germany, the engine of Europe, which keeps the whole EU boondoggle afloat has an avg of €0.44/kwh electricity prices.
That does not really indicate energy leadership.
Maybe Germany can get productive fusion energy online, but it also does not solve the deeper issue of a political system and control mechanism that is self-harming.
It’s the near future: Germany has successfully provided operational fusion energy. German politics and psychological control will all the sudden just give up on blaming, punishing, and hating its own people?
Everyone in Germany gets free AC and free unlimited heating? Free cars and free transportation because fusion basically nullifies the cost of energy? No, the German/EU political class loathes its own people and is recreating aristocracy, which for its own purposes relies on control and suppression of the masses. If anything the EU Lords would use that de facto unlimited energy to create unlimited AI surveillance and thought-crime robot armies to control the serfs.
For personal assistant AI it seems to me that improvements in efficiency will make this a non-issue. We’re able to squeeze more and more out of smaller language models. Eventually the models that require 100s of GBs in GPUs and giant datacenters will not be able to provide enough additional capabilities to justify their cost. Most tasks will run on-device with 10s of GBs.
Don’t know if there’s hope of state of the art CPUs, GPUs and/or NPUs being designed and manufactured in Europe. It has a lot of the expertise. Imagination Technologies and ARM designs GPUs in Europe. But the scale is lacking
Europe, or the EU?
Because DeepMind, despite being owned by Google, was started in and still has HQ in the UK.
Also, given Musk burned his bridges with Brazil, most of Europe, then the US Dems, Canada, SA, and now the US Reps, I don't see him going anywhere any more. Even with his personality aside, Tesla would have an uphill battle getting people to trust that their Optimus won't get hacked and turn into Mr Stabby The 100% Deniable Robot Assassin.
Regarding 5 - Europeans are working on it
If it were an EU-based subsidiary that controlled the data about EU citizens, it would not be beholden to US executive orders, while still otherwise offering MS the ability to control global corporate strategy from its US HQ, right?
EDIT: fixed s/division/subsidiary/ in the second paragraph
All this talk of divisions is marketing window dressing as far as I can tell. If decisions are made from the US, it will be used as a weapon against our sovereignty.
Meanwhile turning away from the US means running into the arms of the Chinese for most things. And they are the much bigger threat to the EU economy given their superior manufacturing abilities -- which still today is the base of the EU's prosperity.
Once European industrial companies start losing to the Chinese, it's over for Europe's entire way of life and the social benefits systems all collapse. I'm sure they'll try USSR-style blanket protectionism before this happens, but will just lead to falling even further behind.
In the anti-money-laundering world for instance, this is very real. When a person gets sanctioned in parent company, you need to action it all the way down your subsidiaries. If that action is at the root of the company, then all subs get caught. The AML world is even weirder because of the overlapping jurisdictions of you and your banking/money-transmission partners (even if you, yourself, are a bank).
Going on-prem is probably the safest, but you're still at risk of physical search and seizure as well as being subject to pressure placed on your ISP to cut you off if someone really wants it done.
So reject the cloud and self-host!
1. Where and how is the data stored and retrieved? This can be made local by forcing all data users/services to use an EU data storage service that is locally owned and operated and under EU jurisdiction. Access to the data would only be to the service delivery operator and the appropriate EU legal authorities.
2. Where and how is the data accessed? The data needs to be accessed by the service provider (eg an email service) to handle incoming updates and requests. The access could be limited to the required updates and inquiries, or otherwise logged so that the service provider is held accountable for access.
3. Where and how is the service accessible to legal authorities? For example, police warrants for an email inbox. The service provider should be required to identify and reveal publicly what data is available and how it is legally accessible if required. Given encryption, it may be that the service provider is unable to provide that access to anyone except the end user (eg Protonmail, Signal).
4. What control does the end user have over their data and the associated meta-data maintained by the service provider? GDPR covers a lot of ground here, including the right to be forgotten.
Stealing from Wikipedia since frankly it's better articulated than I could do
"The CLOUD Act was introduced following difficulties that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had with obtaining remote data through service providers through SCA warrants, as the SCA was written before cloud computing was a viable technology. The situation was highlighted from a 2013 drug trafficking investigation, during which the FBI issued an SCA warrant for emails that a U.S. citizen had stored on one of Microsoft's remote servers in Ireland, which Microsoft refused to provide."
US Companies can't simply say "well that's in Europe. That's outside *our control*". The US truly considers its data reach to be global in nature when it comes to US companies. it's absolutely terrifying to think about
Microsoft can do that by simply using the normal data retrieval API that data storage service makes available to all its customers. To the data storage service the API call Microsoft will make to get the data the FBI wants is no different than the thousands of other API calls Microsoft is making daily to store and retrieve data.
What using an EU owned and controlled data storage service gets you is that you don't have to worry about non-EU law enforcement getting your data by forcing the data storage service to give it up directly to them.
We've stacked on so many layers of abstraction to computing and every step of the way Europe missed the boat due to its underlying structural issues for investment and fragmented cultures/markets. It's quite frankly too late.
Here's a NYT article from 34 years ago with the exact same story as today: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-...
Europe missed the PC, the internet, the smartphone, and is currently burying its head in the sand over AI.
Dumping a bunch of money into building an inferior domestic version of Microsoft 365 just as it's about to be disrupted by AI-native paradigms would be the amusing cherry on top.
It'd be like Apple moving the final cardboard packaging step to US factories and claiming their entire supply chain is 'sovereign.' Sure, China can't affect that last packaging step. But every layer of (far more important) abstraction below it they still have power over.
Now, out of all alternative EU email providers they list only themselves as an alternative and expect alternative seekers to trust them?
1. https://tuta.com/blog/boycott-us-choose-european-products
>A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
The original news, and the claims by Tuta, are still correct: Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to his email due to US sanctions.
The claim that it is "central to Europe’s commitment to human rights" to fluff their case is FUD basically to promote their products.
It's an issue of "this could happen to us".
You might say it is a little more complicated, but actually it isn't. Nobody wants any kind of change, so things stay as they are. Only the Americans can change things and change your Windows/Outlook/Azure, because then "it is like it is, we have to update"...
One line of functioning code?
But as always, most of it is pork for some cronies anyways.
One related thing that has been developed/packaged is the "sovereign cloud stack" https://scs.community/ . However, it didn't see much use yet, for the reasons mentioned.
Europe could easily have its own stack but I'm not sure taxpayer money would ever reach the right people to make it happen.
This is already happening. The European Commission funds thousands of open-source projects:
For instance, Stalwart is an open-source, Rust-based mail server and collaboration suite that has received grants from the EC:
So globalisation is actually not the answer here, the opposite has to happen.