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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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.

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