The EU can be shut down with a few keystrokes | Hacker News Reader

The EU can be shut down with a few keystrokes

bitecode.dev

105 pointsBiteCode_dev72 comments

I'm really glad people are starting to wake up to this.

It's been the case for a while, but we've been sliding more and more into the hands of the US.

Microsoft used to ship software that was local first, and removing the activation servers wouldn't have affected deployed software, now though? A removal of a subscription is an immediate revocation.

It's worse with Google Docs.

And of course, nobody knows how to run servers anymore unless they're in US tech company owned and operated datacenters, this is absolutely terrifying, but truthfully it's the office products that have the most capability to cause harm.

It's the main reason Brazil has invested so much in trying to use open source software for goverment institutions. There is a number of reasons, but digital sovereignty is probably the argument that actually convinced our politicians that it is important. Even Lula visited the international free software forum back in 2009: https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/brazilian-president...

The real problem is average mentality: many here for instance still want paper mail, the office, some also on call from home dress with suit and tie, complete with tie clip and shoes, in their own home! Efficiency is an oxymoron for them, being disorganized and pretend the contrary sticking to mere apparent organization is normal thing. Learning organizations? Most are still at Taylor-Weber-Fayol models...

There is a deep social fracture between "the old dying cohort" and a new cohort still struggling to emerge and still without a clear shape. The result is full-quite-quitting mode and sub-par performances on anything with entrepreneurs playing the old https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg deepening the fracture.

The real kicker here, is the that it is not the case in China (which FWIW, has a roughly equivalent GDP to the EU).

Does China struggle if the US cuts off lots of these things? Sure. But they have a local ecosystem that has been forcibly, and which much complaint from big-tech, separated from the US ecosystem.

Are they reliant on Android? Sure, but only the open source bits. Google isn't allowed the same strangle hold over the rest as it is in the west.

I'm not necessarily sure that this is to China's credit, but if this is the discussion that Europe wants to have, then it is a good contrast.

Russia is also in a better position, with their own computer architecture used for military applications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_(computer)

In this regard, RISC-V processors made on a 65nm node somewhere in a Basch foundry should count, too.

According to the article you linked, most Elbrus CPUs are made at TSMC, not locally (click any CPU in the list). Apparently the newest Elbrus produced locally in Russia was Elbrus 4S, from 2014, 800 MHz, 65nm, 4 cores.

Meanwhile reports from Russia's war on Ukraine say there's commercial US GPS devices taped to their fighter jet dashboards, and much of their manufacturing relies on breaking chip sale sanctions by hiding behind intermediaries.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-su34-jets-basic-gps-r...

https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2022/06/21/exposed-capture...

Trust forms dependencies. It's sort of the point of it. Cooperation is dependence.

Independence is often achieved with violent struggle, or just a lot of struggle.

US and EU used to be good partners. Still are, but maybe not as good now. Achieving independence would be costly, because cooperation increases efficiency, and cutting it incurs costs and discomfort. There should be quite a bit of incentive to e.g. drop AWS or stop using Google. Building local equivalents is not impossible, but again is pretty costly and slow.

In other news, all of the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing, everywhere, depends on machines produced my one Dutch company, ASML. A ton of actual production depends on one small island nation, Taiwan. There is a number of examples like that. Achieving autarky, North Korea-style, is really really costly, and slows you down quite a bit.

Agree with everything you've said, but a major differentiator between TSMC and ASML is that you buy a bit of gear and then you kinda own it.

It's like buying a plow; you use the plow to till your land and if a better plow exists (or, tractor) you go buy it.. or if your plow breaks you buy a new one.

But, we're in a situation where the plow can be taken away from us, arbitrarily, and the consequence is that people could possibly starve to death.

The situations are materially different in this aspect, but yes, trust breeds interdependence, which ironically is the point of the EU: if we all depend on each other then we won't go to war with each other anymore; seems to have worked. Longest peace in history.

I get your point, but according to [1] ASML was a bad example.

There is no kill switch which might be pressed only under circumstances that may never be "adapted to current situations". So who does said plow belong to?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/asml-tsmc...

Regardless of whether there's a kill switch or not, it's really not practical to operate any advanced ASML equipment without ongoing support from the vendor.

This is pretty much the F-35 argument. The US may or may not have an immediate kill switch, but they 100% have a logistics kill switch that can be triggered with a weeks-to-months delay.

> There should be quite a bit of incentive to e.g. drop AWS or stop using Google.

the way the EU should retaliate to the US tariff clown fiesta is by adding a levy on purchase of any services supplied by US hyperscalers (or any companies under their control, directly or indirectly)

start at 1%, increase by 1% every month until it hits 50%

the aim is being not to raise revenue, but to remove the threat to national security posed by the US regime

whilst providing a boost for your own domestic industry

>adding a levy on purchase of any services supplied by US hyperscalers

How do you propose we do that? If you buy AWS cloud services from Amazon, you don't buy from Amazon Inc. Seattle USA, you're buying from Amazon S.a.r.l. Luxembourg, an EU company. It's an EU-to-EU business contract. Same with Google, Microsoft, etc.

Unless you wanna start tariffing EU companies of foreign origin IP now, which would be a great if your goal is to torpedo all foreign investment in the EU.

Not sure it's such a great idea, but if you want to know how it could be implemented, just ask your favourite chatbot about DST (digital service tax).

> How do you propose we do that? If you buy AWS cloud services from Amazon, you don't buy from Amazon Inc. Seattle USA, you're buying from Amazon S.a.r.l. Luxembourg, an EU company. It's an EU-to-EU business contract.

exactly the same way VAT already works?

you could even use the existing VAT infrastructure: a custom rate on hyperscaler owned companies and subsidiaries

and forbid claiming it back

> which would be a great if your goal is to torpedo all foreign investment in the EU.

this is the point, where "all" means "US hyperscaler"

>exactly the same way VAT already works?

Care to explain in more datil since what you just said makes no sense. VAT is already applied to all consumer transactions.

> Care to explain in more datil since what you just said makes no sense.

no, you just don't understand VAT

business also pay VAT on everything they buy, but they are permitted to claim it back on qualifying expenses

so, you:

- classify spend on services from targeted US companies/subsidiaries as non-qualifying

- increase the VAT rate on their services

and this requires no new no new tax collection or infrastructure mechanism

the result: a very effective, targeted, and unavoidable slow death of US hyperscalers in the EU market

Wouldn't Amazon S.a.r.l. Luxembourg then have to pay the levy on their purchase from Amazon Inc. Seattle USA?

It will only get worse with LLMs being at the core of ever more activity.

I'm not sure why only the USA is capable of creating state-of-the-art LLMs. As for Europe, I can say that it has a simple but effective strategy to keep falling behind:

    1: Prevent innovation via regulation
    2: Problem: Being dependent on foreign technology
    3: Fight the problem with more regulation
    4: Goto 1

Maybe people from China, Japan, India, or the UK can shed some light on why no state-of-the-art LLMs come out of these countries?

5: Tax companies and individuals until doing business is no longer viable.

6: Make employees much harder to fire, make companies much less likely to hire

7: Continue speaking 48 different languages and teach english too late so you have fragmented markets that on average can barely talk with each other at a 1st grade level

8: Have wildly different regulatory, legal and tax schemes within each fragmented mini-market such that EU-wide expansion is difficult

9: Cement social welfare expectations based on economic and population-driven realities that no longer exist, making competitive taxation regimes impossible

10: Force almost all private capital into centralized government run pension systems that are massively underinvested in risk assets, starving the business/venture ecosystem of capital while not meeting the social welfare expectations.

> 8: Have wildly different regulatory, legal and tax schemes within each fragmented mini-market such that EU-wide expansion is difficult

Is it worse than in the United States? Each state has those, too.

I could list a million examples. But here's one, imagine if selling a physical product in Illinois vs. Ohio required:

- hiring a human representative in each state and paper-based filings and correspondance in different languages for the VAT register

- Joining a dual-state system for financing the recycling of the packaging

- Registering with a package register who has the right to refuse your product over marginal differences

- Changing the packaging language for each state

- Having your supply chain examined by officials of each state, in different language (better hire someone), for things they don't like

- Hiring a local representative in each state to manage interactions with regulatory bodies related to EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility)

- Treating your IT systems in each state differently based on nuanced data rules and compliance

Yes, it's worse than the US. California is the most regulation-happy US state and they're a cake-walk compared to interfacing with EU beaurocratic idiocy (in many different languages!).

100% agree

I spend 90% of my tax/regulation effort on handling EU VAT, which is <10% of my revenue.

It really makes the IRS seem like Google in comparison to EU revenue services.

>Is it worse than in the United States? Each state has those, too.

1) How many official languages are you mandated to speak and write in order to be allowed to legally do business in each US state?

2) How much difference is there in the regulation between US states versus between EU countries?

Spoiler: There can be a bigger difference between doing business between neighboring EU countries than between California and New York.

The Commerce Clause of the US Constitution answers your question: Yes, it's worse.

Federal law and regulations ALWAYS supercede state laws. If the federal rule says "X must be allowed", states can't make X illegal.

counterpoint: is a "SOTA LLM" a net benefit to society as a whole?

On this note, even if LLMs or "AGI" make businesses more profitable by improving margins and allowing them to cut labor costs, you eventually have to balance it out somehow - all those people who've lost jobs are competing for a smaller number of available jobs, and the people who can't find jobs will either need to be supported by taxpayer dollars or die in poverty.

People talk about UBI as a solution for this but the money for UBI has to come from somewhere. Are corporations going to voluntarily pay a new tax to support UBI?

It's not a zero sum labor market. Some jobs are being destroyed but others are being created. The new AI data centers will require a huge amount of electrical power and someone needs to build that infrastructure.

That doesn’t really matter for the point at hand, which is that Europe’s overregulation stifles innovation and international competition. Unless you’re arguing that the reason Europe hasn’t produced a SOTA LLM is because it’s not a net benefit, in which case that’s ignoring that it’s going to happen regardless and if Europe supposedly has its head on straighter than others, it would be most beneficial for the leading LLM to be European.

Replace "leading LLM" with progressively more evil things and see at what point the "if they exist, they better be European" logic stops seeming logical to you.

Innovation is not the same as improvement, but improvement without innovation is highly unlikely.

> in which case that’s ignoring that it’s going to happen regardless

we dont know the long term effects that llms have on a society that does not have these regulations in place. having europe as a backup in case the usa falls apart is probably a good idea

Regardless of what happens with LLMs, I predict that another country will leave the EU before a US state again attempts to secede from the union.

Then explain this: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/07/a-l...

OP said "state-of-the-art" specifically

What kind of regulation do you think prevents the development of LLM in the EU?

China is pretty close to state of the art. The rest I would agree.

    China is pretty close to state of the art.

With DeepSeek-R1-0528?

Isn't Mistral pretty good?

Not sure. Looks like they are behind even DeepSeek-R1 on the LMArena leaderboard:

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text

I wish I could try myself. I wanted to test via their website:

https://chat.mistral.ai

But the website drives me crazy.

It makes the fans of my laptop spin at full throttle. And you don't get the plain text reply from their LLM. You get a mingled html-rendered version that chops up code left and right, so I can't test it.

Isn't Mistral based on LLaMA, a US model?

The solution is obvious but titanic: develop our own hardware. The software side in infrastructure terms is not so dramatic because we already have excellent open source options: OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux.

The article is missing one big and critical sector as well: defense.

I think is pretty obvious that buying military tech from the other side of the world is an extremely poor choice. China and Russia (in terms of development) are the examples to follow.

On the other hand it can take many decades and ridiculous amounts of money to develop the defense industry to be neck to neck with the west (if such thing is achievable).

When I see countries praising jet fighters like the F-35 and acquiring or wanting acquire them, do they really understand that is not their fighters at all? If total control over mundane CPUs and hardware is already a reality imagine what level of control the might have over those machines.

I think EU politicians have either not grasped the seriousness of this situation, or they think that there's nothing that can be done so they don't talk about it. I'm not sure what's worse.

EU politicians don't know how computers work, how do you expect them to grasp the "seriousness of the situation"? They think it's this magical thing coming from 'The Elders of the Internet™'.

Granted, US politicians also don't know how computers work, but they they have a tech empire that's a large part of their economy and constantly lobbies them, so they're forced to learn a thing or two about the economies of the tech industry. See Jensen Huang's famous million dollar diner with Trump or the fact than many US politicians have shares in big-tech so it's in their interest to protect it and help it grow, which is not the case in the EU's with it's lackluster tech industry.

Since EU has not many tech giants, labor and politicians don't care much about by this industry as it doesn't bring much lobby money, jobs and votes and see it just as a cost center. It is that simple.

An alternative to securing or recreating the entire technology stack top to bottom would be to own one critical piece of the stack. If European interests owned a vital slice of the technology stack that was difficult to recreate and too cheap/convenient to not be used by international government/business/consumer interests, that could be a powerful deterrent. I.e., it sets up a "mutual assured destruction"-style defense.

I would like to hope the non us branches of these companies could be forced to mitigate a total cutoff. Giga corps like MS and Amazon are not entirely monolithic and one could in a doomsday situation like this try to take control of either the European branches or the people working there to mitigate the worst of the outcomes.

> "Partner with elite schools like Central, Polytechnic, les Mines, etc. to give a special focus to this. We need more Fabrice Bellard"

*I have an immense admiration for Fabrice Bellard*, but he is an exception among these school populations.

He is perhaps an exception amongst all programmers, 1 in (total number).

There are a few that may be comparable, but all we can do is make sure we don’t prevent the next Bellard, not make more of them

Yes, but those schools do produce more strong engineers, thinkers, and company leaders than other schools in the country.

I have worked with people from Polytechnique, ENS, INSA, and other schools like Supelec. They are above ordinary people, but this is to be expected; however, most of the people I met are unable to create like Fabrice Bellard did.

I guess something has changed several times in the past, for example, the number of Nobel prizes per inhabitant in France dropped in the first half of the 20th century, and I don't know why.

I also remember reading a text in the 2000' by a Polytechnician who complained about the new generations.

> virtually all user devices run American-controlled OS on American-designed chips.

True, but the US don't control the entire supply chain, which is spread all around the world. It's a much desired stalemate that will hopefully persist.

The trouble with chains is you only need to break single link to make them non-functional. In practice, supply chains are more like nets, but they're worryingly sparse nets. It's very likely the US can break enough links to do some real damage.

EU Eyes Ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331045

SUSE launches new European digital sovereignty service to meet surging demand

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507166

'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552389

SourceHut moves business operations from US to Europe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44365246

US based computer services for the EU could be shut down with a few keystrokes as could US based services anywhere in the world including in the US, but life would go on, if with a fair bit of inconvenience. We got through WW1 and 2, we could survive without google for a bit.

During WW 2, the entire economy didn't have things like a cold chain, thousands of gas stations, a JIT food supply, half the country working white collar jobs, most heating relying on electricity to work, administration going mostly online, people having to commute 30 minutes away on average, electronic payment being the norm, most of the economy running on something virtual and a super dependence on the outside world for pretty much everything.

It's not about Google, it's about what critical part of our system now relies on Google to function.

Having lived in Africa, I can live in pretty minimalist conditions.

I don't think the EU is ready for them, though.

The current state of affairs is concerning. But what really concerns me is how much of the innovation in the infrastructure layer is American. I can browse innovative infra layer startups all day and not come across a single European company. Why is that?

The almost-superset relationship of the respective non-waivable human/employee/consumer rights, and the weak enforcement of a level playing ground in each market.

If you want to have competitive business both sides of the pond, the logical choice is to put the money on the American side and achieve ROI before the EU dishes out noteworthy fines for non-compliance. In maybe 10 years when you have outgrown those sums. Much cheaper/easier than the other way around: build a company in Europe and to European standards.. and then try to make it skip all the costly procedures it may legally skip when doing business with/against Americans.

because the American companies pay better and even if people managed to come up with something very innovative, they would then be purchased by a US mega corporation anyway.

All you will end up with is more or less rich, and frankly the risk is that you go broke. So, why not take the money and work at a US tech company? They’ll get the tech anyway if its good and you get more stability this way.

Indeed, the UK airforce runs on windows and domain servers and all that MS garbage ...

oh right, no longer Europe ...

The UK is to the US as Belarus is to Russia; Europe is increasingly to the US as Europe is to Russia.

> as Europe is to Russia.

A financial powerhouse with a first-class military force, to an impoverished, corrupt, oligarchy with depleted and parts-stripped military? WTH is that sentence even supposed to mean?

I mean the US attitude towards Europe is increasingly hostile.

The UK-Belarus comparison, I've been making for some time; the Europe one was just a throwaway. Trump had just hit the EU with 30% ~sanctions~ tariffs.

I don´t know who you are, but god bless you. I speak in my name and of every other European that understands how vital this is, for us and for our children. We need to make some noise, and show to our ELECTED LEADERS how democracy and prosperity looks like. You said it in a proper statement: The EU can be shut down instantly. I mean is it possible that a leader don´t know how to collect taxes, come on, the AI will generate trillions for decades to come, so grab that concept and close the black hole.

> Gandi is pretty good.

No. Nope. It was. Then after 20 years it got bought. It has been terrible since 2023. Domain prices increased by 100, 400 percent.

Pure enshittification. Run.

Hence the "less so".

If left it for this reason, but it didn't become bad, let's not push it.

It has solid foundations.

Speak for yourself please. I cannot afford 400% (or more!) price increases for no reason at all.

The "Trump hits the kill switch" solution at least has an old fashion "solution" : as soon as the first person is killed because of the disruption, this would probably count as an act of war. Now, I don't know how much our armed forces dépend on AWS / azure at this point.

Oh, and we would probably stop paying our bills, so, who pays for American pensions ?

However, I'm terrified at "Bezos / Musk / Zuck / whoever decides to shut down EU". And I'm terrified at "AWS just gets hacked and stops working for a few days."

But, hey, we can't really fund efforts to switch, we have pensioners to pay.

I've spent quite a few years doing software dev for various governments, including the EU. Every time this was brought up, the engineers (including myself) who brought it up were pretty much laughed out of the room. Apparently the question of where stuff is hosted was answered by people who are several paygrades above mine, and they're obviously very well informed (/s).

Ultimately it always came down to money. And AWS/Azure/GCP are apparently so much cheaper that nothing else matters.

It's a sad state of affairs.

It's not really even about the hosting. Apple devices are US-based. Windows, MacOS, and even Linux are primarily US-based (Linus wrote Linux in the USA, even if he wasn't originally from here). All of the major web browsers are built and run by US-based companies. Many of the SAAS companies are US-based, even if they offer a choice in data hosting locations. The US owns the internet and quite a bit of the technology stack.

That doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as important as where the data is stored and who can access it.

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