Digital vassals? French Government ‘exposes citizens’ data to US'
brusselssignal.eu
brusselssignal.eu
It's that they only know Microsoft, they don't want to learn something else, and if there's a problem, it's Microsoft's fault, no theirs, so they don't have to deal with their own incompetence.
If you want an anecdote, we were working with SAS, a statistical software which required costly licences (more than a million € for a few dozens of workers). I suggested to switch to R or Python to the top director, who agreed.
First meeting with the service in charge, the chief opens with "ok, we are asked to change, but the goal here is to show that we tried, and found that it's not possible."
I resigned a few months after, as everything was in the same vein.
Governments should pay software engineers and system administrators (or infrastructure engineers if you like) to build and run their systems, ideally open sourcing whatever makes sense
And Google Docs/Sheets isn’t really free once you need business functionality. Depends what exactly what your feature requirements are, but Google Workspace pricing has about the same range as Office 365 Enterprise. ($10-$50/user/month)
Most people seemed to have a retirement clock running and wanted to avoid doing anything they don’t give a crap about until then.
Giving a crap about your job is an outlier.
Doctors and researchers do quite well when they're effective.
I should say that I think the real solution here would be to create an EU wide business software public company (or even EU agency), which would build and maintain business software products for EU governments, preferably open source. There is so much commonality in these areas that it's absurd to not build a common core, and later provide consultancy and support services to member states for deep customization, from experts who understand this common core. This is basically the IBM, Oracle, SAS, SAP, or even Microsoft B2B business model, so not some pie-in-the-sky idea.
I do believe that having some unified organization that can provide support and expertise on how others have solved similar problems would be much better than having every municipality and institute in the EU develop its own bespoke OSS-based solution, or, worse, buy from a private company that can just extract a profit from the massive cost savings of deploying substantially similar solutions for hundreds of customers, instead of passing on the cost savings.
I used to work part-time in 1st level IT support in a local hospital when I was younger.
The main "theme" of my superior's work subjects there (2009-2016) was the migration from XP to 7. You heard that right.
And apart from the usual Office- and AD-Lock-In, the most problematic workstations of course were always ones with very specialized software. Virtualization and terminal services were in use, but the whole selling point of Windows was mostly put ad absurdum already, because they needed Windows licenses for dedicated machines running e.g. specialized MRT software, but those weren't even part of the main network anyway. They needed arcane syncing procedures anyway and Windows provided no value whatsoever on these devices. Same for the patient monitoring systems on ICU beds. These were using some "embedded" Windows and were rarely working in a stable way at all, nor way they connected to the networks running AD or the CIS (edit: seems it's called HIS in English)
CAD and stuff in the office divisions was similar, but with less integration needs (apart from network printing)
What I'm trying to say is: like in many offices, any slight change made users hostile, updates cost obscene amounts of work and money, and Windows didn't provide much more value compared to SAMBA. That is dated experience, I know.
But MS has not shown to be a trustworthy company in any of my work experience so far.
It was impossible to create working solutions without MS, yes, but the reasons for that never seemed to be grounded in actual value provided by an MS-centric software and networking structure.
It was just the one available commercial solution with enough adoption, and MS has been milking their target markets with these strategies for a very long time.
Making themselves "indispensable", even in machines where their software was used to run a terminal server, basically.
Hell, in my town, 3 years ago, they started to replace subway train LED signals with crappy Windows-CE-based software.
The effects are still noticeable... the whole infrastructure is still 80% worse compared to 10 years ago.
You recognize the useless Windows licenses by the occasional Desktop (seriously, google "cologne KVB windows trashcan"....), 90deg-tilted display, and of course 20% of the signage is out of operation on average now.
I think the long-lasting solution will be to move to a web-based application system, instead of depending on Desktop applications made for Windows or Linux. Using a web app system, the government only has to concern itself with proper development and maintenance of servers and web apps, and the public workers can use any operating system with a web browser.
Waldmeisterlicher Wackelpudding. Ahoi.
With IE6^W Chrome, you mean. Nobody’s going to bother testing on anything else.
Also, as others already noted, somehow the web is uniquely terrible at maintaining compatibility across not only different platforms but different versions of the same platform and even different versions of the same browser, despite being built largely on top of high-level languages that all claim to enable effortless portability.
The transparent proxy for all http(s) requests has been fun for some cli tools as well.
Just kidding. Triggered some memories.
I remember doing a Windows 7 deployment for a customer, and one of their staff had 3 A4 binders. Probably 1000 pages, of typed notes about how Windows XP works.
The second she sat down at her new Windows 7 machine it was like she had lost her memory. She was instantly aggravated and couldnt find the start menu. Dropped her windows xp binders in the bin and told me to effectively "get lost" so she can relearn it from scratch.
I was thrown. Like its basically the same system with some UI tweaks but she was acting like I had pushed her onto debian or something.
Like often people are scared to click random buttons or explore menus. We have used software for a long time, so we know that any destructive act would be proceeded by an “are you sure?” dialog box.
I think I would be in their shoes if I ever tried to change the oil on my car. I may be able to follow a procedure. But I would not deviate from it. It would not try to pop the covers off unrelated parts to peek into the alternator, for fear of electric shock.
Anyways, my rambling point is ideally we people would make themselves more familiar with how to understand the technology they work with everyday. But we should have empathy for people who have not contorted their minds to understand the peculiar behavior of software.
She would never touch a computer after work, because it just stressed her, she found them absolutely unbearable, also because the tech support was unbearably obnoxious.
The move to put everything in /the cloud is irritating but probably in part driven by this consumer complaint. Not that the boomers will ever learn.
This is a delightful way to put it! I have older relatives that can't really tell apart where a website ends and where their operating system begins, due to not really knowing about the client server model (even when it's explained to them) and I worry about the generation that will also just grow up with phone apps.
That's why I actually liked the classes back in school where we had all sorts of office program tasks to do, though I wish some of the later stuff from university would also be more widespread. Probably not programming for everyone (unless something practical with like Python), but just a few lessons on how the Internet works.
> she was acting like I had pushed her onto debian or something.
My dad, who is a little bit technical from a long time ago, spends a lot of time helping distraught users reinstall windows (to get some application going that the brains trust of the middle of nowhere australia cant get going on linux) or just helping people recover photos etc from cloud backups.
Guys like an old west linux bandit or something.
Probably more than microsoft themselves maintained.
To do X, click start <screenshot of start> and select documents <screenshot of documents>
To do Y, click start <screenshot of start> and select calculator....
etc etc.
Like if they want to go to a certain office in a building: My "instructions" would be to go to department foo, room A5.303 (made up number). Their instructions are something like "in that red brick building, take the elevator to 5th floor, turn left and then again left into the hallway, second door on the right side".
If they navigate UI the same way, then of course every element that is moved slightly to a new place or grouped differently will cause their mental model of how things work to collapse.
This "treat everything like a ludicrously complex black box that almost nobody can understand" for any given subject are the lowest common denominator that laws get written to.
I think your comment actually hits the heart of the issue. Most software developers I have met have this kind of disdain for their users familiarity and ability and act like they are above that. Most confuse their own learned familiarity when they were young and could tinker with some kind of superior ability. Well, just go read any post here about systemd, the syntax of Ocaml, or the new ux of any popular framework and you will see that we are all the same.
Accepting change takes time, especially if people had no desire for the change. Most people don’t care about their computers. They are for them a necessary impediment in the way of doing what they want to do. That’s why they dislike change: it looks like work for no upside. A major part of change management is explaining to people where the upsides are for them, helping them operating in the new environment and giving them time to process.
This is absolutely true.
For what it's worth, "so-and-so department, room 123" is only a helpful mental model for navigation if you have additional knowledge not present in that description: that the department is probably contained entirely in one specific building, where that building is, that the rooms are likely numbered sequentially following a pattern that also indicates the floor they're in, etc. By itself this is an address whereas "red building, third floor, left then left" is a turn-by-turn route.
In terms of UIs, the latter is more like "left-hand side of the menu bar, 'Edit' menu I think, half-way down the screen, something like 'Modify' or 'Change' or 'Transform' or something, then third item in the list, something like 'Skew' or 'Bend' or something" compared to the first just being "Transform -> Skew". The former is fuzzier and the exact labels don't really matter because you'll know them when you see them. The latter is extremely precise but tells you nothing about how to actually find what you're looking for (is it in the 'Edit' menu? is it in a right-click context menu? etc). It's only really useful by itself if you have a command palette.
That is not what I meant. I don't say those users are worse for it, rather that user interfaces of course need to accommodate such approaches. Such as placing a notice at the old location which directs users to the new location (like when a brick-and-mortar-store moves).
Also when performing tasks routinely, of course I have muscle memory and will get slightly irritated when the newest function absorbed into systemd does things differently than the thing which it replaced. I have no desire for or against systemd, but I understand that this is how the world revolves and that one has get along with the times.
> Most confuse their own learned familiarity when they were young and could tinker with some kind of superior ability.
It is just willingness to learn. How you learn and how fast you learn is of course age dependent, but the attitude towards learning new things and breaking out of routine is what matters more.
I'm amused by the amount of flak you are getting here.
Being fast and efficient with any piece of UI of course means to replace navigation and discovery with memory and intuition, at least in part!
Not just keyboard shortcuts, also the placement of UI elements, latencies, learning quirky behaviors... being fast with software means not having to discover features.
Similar to labeled controls on a physical device, just in a simulacrum.
For example, our German team knew the software that headquarters was going to deploy to them was broken, so they secretly continued to use their old existing process. When the new software was deployed “successfully”, the same software was then deployed in the U.S. and broke horribly. The Germans were told that their responsibility was their region (only), so they literally took care of themselves and refused to be forced to be the guinea pigs.
In addition, I’ve come to learn not to immediately upgrade my OS at work, if I can help it. Typically, being an early adopter means you can get some nasty bugs that sometimes can take days to figure out. No thanks.
My biggest daily frustration is that Microsoft dropped support for putting the taskbar anywhere other than the bottom...
I did, and didn't get any relevant results. I had to google "koeln kVB windows papierkorb" to get several photos with screenshots of such screens.
https://verliebtinkoeln.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/KVB-P...
Unfortunately, I didn't keep my personal photo around.
Here are two more... no hotlinks as I'm on mobile and web Reddit + iOS apparently have upped their annoyances to prevent copying image urls in Safari, and I won't bother more rn:
https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/o5g06k/k%C3%B6ln/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cologne/comments/psfkhn/kvb_digital...
I'm all for training and making the switch, but you gotta get your teams motivated / what they need to do the job. If not IT can resist like few other orgs.
While this is generally not wrong, the French state still uses and creates open source software extensively. Gendermerie Nationale have their own Linux distribution ; Ministry of Foreign Affairs runs Debian for diplomatic personnel. Multiple pieces of public software was developed out in the open (including the government SSO and the COVID tracking app).
So while there is definitely bad, it has been getting progressively better over the past ~10 years.
If they had started with the R or with Python, that would have likely been a better solution - but that doesn't mean that switching, especially just because some new employee convinced the director they'd save money with a half-baked idea, is not.
I work for a company whose entire business is basically replacing various dedicated internal tooling scripts with an integrated, extremely costly solution, and we mostly sell to other businesses. Most people who buy this are extremely happy to get rid of their kludge of scripts, and we very rarely feel pressure from such alternatives (our other B2B, also extremely expensive, competitors, are the main thing we get compared with).
Specialized software often works much better, and makes a lot of sense past some scale, than in-house solutions. Especially if there are no big geopolitical risks - which there aren't with SAS for the French government.
Are you serious? Especially when officials working for well-respected international organizations are being sanctioned for their work out of political reasons? This entire article wouldn't exist if there were no geopolitical risk.
From the article:
> “Carniaux … was asked by the [French Senate] commission to guarantee that French citizens’ data hosted by Microsoft would never be transmitted to foreign authorities without the agreement of the French authorities. He replied: ‘No, I can’t guarantee that,'” the report stated.
If this isn't geopolitical risk, I don't know what is.
It's clear that your stated job constantly exposed you to all the talking points of mega cloud platforms. But there are negative consequences too, and they're very real.
In light of the new understanding, I fully agree with you that it was extremely shortsighted and sad to have tech leadership oppose a project which directly gives a US company access to such sensitive data with open source alternatives.
- SAS language is horrendous, the IDE is stuck in the 2000´s, and everyone was doing SQL queries inside it as a result. SAS is obsolete compared to what R or Python can do. Career-wise, it's a dead end for workers who use it.
- The French state is heavily indebted, so any cost-saving measure is welcome to reduce the burden on the taxpayer.
Meanwhile, nothing has to move, nothing has to change, and your non-critical division will continue to cost exactly as budgeted instead of going through unknown waters just because maybe switching to something new might be ... cheap eventually ?
Plus this has nothing to do with Microsoft really, as most cost is in Windows and its integration. It's hard to replace the global policies of Windows by an alternative.
Yeah, the plan is insane if you're talking about the entire french government.
This is in reality a clear cost-saving measure, as you may have to pay one time for training, which is however done by another division of the French State (the statistical body, INSEE), and those career workers don't get bonuses or are paid overtime anyway.
Afaik other "big corps" are moving away from SAS as graduate only know Python/R nowadays, which are better and more flexible tools.
Improving tooling and reducing costs are just a thing for private companies. Yeah, the horse carriage drivers weren't happy when the gasoline engine appeared. Imagine the switching costs! There are still horse carriages around! Horses are reliable! You can drive a car on your own!
It's definitely not an easy lift and shift though, as the OP made it out to be. Particularly when you're integrating with other departments it's vital to have perfect compatibility as otherwise you'll break the other departments workflow.
> [French MP Philippe] Latombe criticised the US-EU Data Privacy Framework (DPF) deal, saying it no longer served EU interests due to the US president’s “impulsive” nature.
Am I wrong to say that there’s something profoundly rotten in that statement with regards to the rule of law?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Data_Privacy_Fra...
Why do you think that? The agreement was negotiated under certain conditions, it’s not really surprising that a change in circumstances would make it unfit for purpose.
No. The laws are applied as long as they serve the rulling elite. See GDPR for examples. Or the copyright law for examples at the other end of the pond.
> Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling Consent required for free use
How legal is this?
https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-protection/schrems-slams-sl...
The rot runs incredibly deep.
I'd say that if whether or not an agreement serves the EU's interests entirely depends on who the US president is, then it's not an agreement that serves the EU's interests.
Does either the US or the EU have any cards to play that will force the other to back down, or not?
It's because the power's that be want all the data and none of the liability. The easiest way to comply with any privacy regulation is to not collect, store, or process any personal data. Just don't store or process data about humans and 99% of the problems go away.
But data is the new oil. And sometimes when you store or process oil there are leaks that spill everywhere, contaminate things, and even sometimes kill people. That's never stopped us from collecting, storing, or processing oil.
https://www-senat-fr.translate.goog/compte-rendu-commissions...
================================================================
Quoting the translation:
Mr. Dany Wattebled , rapporteur . - Mr. Carniaux, as Director of Public and Legal Affairs, you represent Microsoft France before public decision-makers. Can you guarantee before our committee, under oath, that the data of French citizens entrusted to Microsoft via UGAP will never be transmitted, following an injunction from the American government, without the explicit agreement of the French authorities?
Mr. Anton Carniaux . - No, I cannot guarantee that, but, again, it has never happened before.
================================================================
Original:
M. Dany Wattebled, rapporteur. - Monsieur Carniaux, en tant que directeur des affaires publiques et juridiques, vous représentez Microsoft France auprès des décideurs publics. Pouvez-vous garantir devant notre commission, sous serment, que les données des citoyens français confiées à Microsoft via l'Ugap ne seront jamais transmises, à la suite d'une injonction du gouvernement américain, sans l'accord explicite des autorités françaises ?
M. Anton Carniaux. - Non, je ne peux pas le garantir, mais, encore une fois, cela ne s'est encore jamais produit.
================================================================
Thread on Mastodon:
He's smart, he doesn't want to go to jail. But all the governments and current and/or past administrations are guilty of pretended to be retarded since we all knew for the past 30 years that Microsoft was not to be trusted.
The article also refers to some report claiming that European solutions are "wrongly judged to be too costly or inefficient". I'd be interested to read it if anyone has a translation. Even for something as basic as word processing software, every case I've seen so for the alternatives quickly lands on "you have to accept rough edges because that's the cost of data sovereignty" - much easier for a hobbyist or politician to say than an IT director charged with making sure your organization runs well.
Yes, but they tried and can't.
Those ideas of domestic computer industry and digital sovereignty have been around since the 60s.
The French had Bull which is now Atos and they failed miserably.
France was very impressive after WW2, they build almost on their own a nuclear weapons, a nuclear energy, aeronautic, military industry and impressive space capabilities.
After that you would expect them to have built a serious competitor to Intel and Microsoft but they didn't. They can't even built basic digital capabilities to support a bureaucracy.
My guess is a very different generation arrived in the 60s-70s in the workplace and in charge: the Silent Generation and the Boomers.
Those generations were not about building anything but more about entitlements and collecting dividends. But of course it takes quite some time for things to get really bad. Information technologies slowly took over many aspects over our societies over the last 50 years and now they find out they do not have sovereignty anymore.
Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea.
Unlike in Europe, both Naver and Samsung began investing in building their own domestic cloud capabilities in the early 2010s.
Then there are many more which I can't be bothered looking at their founding dates, like gridscale, Elastx, Open Telecom Cloud, Fuga, Seeway.
That said, my point still stands. All the major examples you mentioned (OVH, Scaleway, gridscale) have largely limited FDI and headcount to within France or Germany, while GCP's Warsaw office owns the product leadership for much of GKE globally, AWS Bucharest owns a major part of AWS's Privacy and Data Security portfolio, MS Praha owns a significant portion of CoreAI, and Ireland is one of MS Azure's major DC hubs.
Most French and German PR about "digital sovereignity" rings hollow when the French and German vendors who stand to benefit have largely kept Capex and headcount within France and Germany.
Why should Poland, Romania, Czechia, Ireland, and Bulgaria lose hundreds of well paying high income tax bracket jobs and billions in FDI and income tax to subsidize French and German industry?
And this is why just about every EU grand strategy conversation falls apart - the individual member states will look out for themselves over the collective. For example, France's recent objection to Germany, the UK, and the Nordics buying American weapons to send to Ukraine instead of buying French [0] and Dassault's lobbying of France to withdraw from FCAS if it doesn't get 80% workshare [1]
German politicians don't answer to Polish voters. Greek politicians don't answer to Irish voters. Either the EU removes national soverignity and becomes a truly federal and centralized union, or the EU has to gradually reduce the political aspects and return to the 1990s and 2000s style defense and economic cooperation union that it was.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-donald-trump-weapons-...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/a38f6f36-6284-428c-b8af-fe6d6d7db...
You're comparing companies of widely varying size.
There's not much sense for these French and German companies to open other European offices at their current size, much like there's not much sense for their eastern European equivalents to open offices in France or Germany.
For that matter, it didn't make much sense for Microsoft to open shops in Europe in the 80's, or for Google in the 2000's
On the other hand, it is pretty commonplace for European companies with enough activity across Europe to have offices around and to quite freely move/open offices in other countries. So I don't really see this point as a good one.
OVHCloud is not AWS size, but it is still a large company that generates over $1B in revenue. Yet is has almost no dev or product leadership presence outside of France or the US. Same with Scaleway, which is a division of Iliad SA - one of the largest telcos in France and founded by one of Macron's largest backers who is also the son-in-law of Bernard Arnault of LVMH (and the reason why every country negotiating with the EU puts tariffs on Congac and Champagne), who has pushed Macron to dump ministers and even his PM.
> it is pretty commonplace for European companies with enough activity across Europe to have offices around and to quite freely move/open offices in other countries.
Both OVHCloud and Scaleway have been around since 1999, yet haven't ever expanded their core engineering or product responsibilities outside France or the US.
Meanwhile, AWS, GCP, Microsoft, and hundreds of American tech companies and startups have all given core product leadership responsibilities to their offices across Central and Eastern Europe.
Even small (compared to OVHCloud) American startups like (randomly picking 2 ik of) Cyberhaven and Snyk have opened offices in Romania and Poland that own product and engineering decisions plus roadmap.
> So I don't really see this point as a good one.
It is a major point because it is French (and German) businesses that are lobbying for a combative position at the expense of other EU member states.
Why should Ireland, Czechia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria suffer a severe capital outflow and retaliation from the US to help French companies that have keep jobs (and thus income and corporate tax revenue) within France and overwhelmingly benefit French (and German) capital owners?
And like I said before, this is why no unified European grand strategy ever develops - inevitably individual European nations undercut each other to protect their domestic industries.
At least Czechia, Poland, and Romania have helped burden-share via their contributions to Ukraine, which outshine those France has provided on a per capita basis, despite being much poorer countries than France.
Because their business hasn't significantly expanded outside of France, much like e.g. Hetzner hasn't significantly moved out of Germany? You should look at the gorilla in the room here.
> Cyberhaven
A company founded by Romanians and Ukrainians. Not surprising they have offices there. You should wonder why they became an american tech company.
On a more general note, this "What has Europe ever done for us/the US are our best friends" stance may be good as a bargaining stance when discussing among EU nations, but people have started believing it, and it's the bane of any serious discussion.
The US is a criminal state that should have zero presence in Europe from that reason alone, regardless of european politics and societal characteristics. Bickering about mega-clown jobs and presenting US imperial practice as obviously a good thing isn't going to change that.
Because I want it answered. If you cannot answer that question, then any discussion is moot.
> The US is a criminal state that should have zero presence in Europe from that reason alone
We can leave Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Germany, and Poland and deploy our forces in the Pacific where we face a problem that actually matters.
Then deal with Ukraine on your own. Why even buy American weapons to give to the Ukrainians?
You can't deal with the Chinese - their foreign minister has himself told EU leadership that they need a Russian victory in Ukraine. If you want to replace us with the Chinese, then you need to sacrifice Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe to Russian orbit.
We can also leave the Red Sea, leaving it to you guys to solve the Houthi crisis - it's not our problem.
We can leave Armenia, letting it return to Russian orbit.
We can leave Turkiye, thus removing the only barrier holding Turkiye back from a hot conflict in Cyprus and the Greek Islands.
> presenting US imperial practice as obviously a good thing isn't going to change that
Then present an actual solution. All the "solutions" I see are basically France or Germany trying to increase their own relative position, but then trying to undermine the other.
There is no unified Europe from a strategy perspective.
The US decided the policy of turning the 2022 Ukraine invasion into a slowburn and sacrifice of the ukrainians to the obviously ludicrous expectation that Russia wasn't able to move over to a war economy and make territorial gains. This is right now rupturing the EU, which is a rather explicit US policy aim, and also why US groups are financing and coddling european fascist movements.
Clearly not an ally worth appeasing on these reasons alone. Then there's the genocide in Palestine and promotion of societal collapse in north Africa and large portions of the Middle East. I also expect the US to shield genocidaires in Sudan on the behest of gulf emirs. Today the US is also waging economic war against the EU and NATO states, as well as the UN. It's a rabid, belligerent state that makes the hawks of Moscow, disgusting and terrifying as they are, look comparably sane and reliable.
> Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea.
I've seen from the inside the IT infra of several chaebol subsidiaries (of different groups), of Korean big tech, as well as Korean startups, and really only some of the chaebol subsidiaries made use of these local clouds. Near 0% for startups, low single digits for big tech (besides Naver themselves obviously) and even for the big corps I'd estimate <30%. Azure and AWS are plenty popular, as well as of course on-prem still having a much higher market share than in the West. Not sure if most big corps have a random unused database on Naver Cloud to satisfy some government statistic but talking about meaningful usage here.
No worries. I've tended to glaze over the Korean market so I'm glad to get some more granular info
> Azure and AWS are plenty popular
I was under the assumption that Samsung Cloud is largely a white label of AWS (sort of like Open Telekom Cloud in Germany), and much of the AWS spend can be treated as Samsung SDS. Is that correct?
However, we are all complicit in this state of affairs, with pushing dreams of a broderless internet. If the EU had tried to limit Facebook or Google access to the EU markets, or just favored some inferior EU alternatives, people on this very forum would have been up in arms about government overreach, balkanization of the Internet, and Brussels bureaucrats trying to stay relevant.
Not really. Meta and Alphabet products like FB, IG, and YouTube remain heavily used in Russia, even in spite of domestic alternatives like VK or Yandex.
That said, pre-2022, Russia definitely had a strong VC and entrepreneurship scene compared to the the rest of Europe. NGINX, Yandex, VK, and Kasperskey were all able to be formed in Russia in the 2000s due to a much less risk averse capital market. Same with Ukraine (eg. Grammarly, Ring) and Belarus (eg. Wargaming)
Aside from Romania and Czechia, I don't see a similar ecosystem anywhere in Europe (even Poland and Ireland's tech industry are largely dominated by FDI from large American players like Google and Bulgaria's from contractor and freelancer shenanigans).
Ofc, unlike France and Germany, Czechia and Romania are way less combative to American tech companies and capital, so it's easier for them to justify investing for the long haul. Romanian successes like UIPath show that the only way a competitive European tech player can develop is through cooperation with the US.
Otherwise, I generally completely agree with you. The EU tech scene is overall either US controlled or anemic. I'd note that Romania hardly has a real local tech scene. While we have a very large number of programmers and programming positions, it's almost entirely either US (and a few EU, Canadian, Israeli) companies' local offices or explicit outsourcing companies. The exceptions are UIPath, BitDefender, and a few companies that work exclusively on government contracts (and are deeply embedded with the political establishment).
If relations with the USA worsened significantly, it's very hard to see how the Romanian programming/tech sector would survive. There is very very little local leadership on the business side.
Unlike Western European countries, Eastern countries like Romania and Poland have helped the US burden share significantly, and this is reflected in bipartisan foreign policy within the US.
Even Elbridge Colby, Oraina Mastro, and Rush Doshi (the primary foreign policy scholars in the US who built bipartisan support for American shifting focus to Asia) have pointed this out.
There's a reason it's overwhelmingly Germany and France that has been vocally combative against the US (be it Trump or Biden due to the IRA+CHIPS).
> The fact that VK and Yandex (and Telegram, I would add) exist at all, and have a clear presence in the public in Russia and several Russian-speaking countries around them, already puts them way ahead of the EU on this front, even if they have not replaced FB, IG, etc like WeChat did in China.
The EU could have been much more FDI friendly like India, which helped enable Meta and Alphabet to devolve even product leadership roles within India. India has been able to get American tech platforms to bend to Indian Internet regulations with little pushback while also dangling massive incentives.
Either build a domestic ecosystem (eg. Russia, China) or become entirely inseparable (eg. India, Israel).
The EU cannot catch up with the former, so it has no choice but to submit and work to become the latter.
> I'd note that Romania hardly has a real local tech scene
No tech scene is 100% local. Barely 5 years ago Microsoft China was the dream R&D job, and Ericcson's R&D remains in China to this day and continues to work on 5G and 6G R&D.
An international ecosystem allows a domestic market to access capital it could not before.
For example, Romania is significantly outperforming Poland in tech despite being being a smaller and poorer country because Romania made sure to leverage the diaspora in the US. Israel, India, and Czechia all did the same.
The issue is Germany and France continue to remain insular and unfriendly to services FDI, and try to make it the entire EU's problem. Romania gets more benefit from an American cloud like AWS domiciled in Cluj compared to a German owned and domiciled "cloud" like Hetzner.
China banned foreign tech to allow for local tech to grow. The EU has tried to be in good relationship with the USA allowing big tech to dominate the old continent.
I think that the arrangement worked well for both the USA and EU for a long time. But now that big tech is highly politically motivated to support the far-right that win-win situation has ended.
The only way for the EU to grow domestic tech is to do what the Chinese did, ban USA tech and let local companies to thrive. I just hope that it is done in an open standard-base way instead of the big tech monopolies of the USA.
That's the big difference in the EU when you are a start-up and want to go from the $10-50M range to $500M+: in the US and China, you have one big market with a shared language and one rule of law. In Europe? The second you want to expand to a market bigger than 50M people you have to adapt to different languages, cultures and laws.
If you have not baked it in at the start that can be a huge roadblock. And if you have baked it in at the start you may have missed your chance due to the delay you incurred. Then you're just a target to be eaten by a US or Chinese company with a big war chest earned in their own market.
That's why part of the EU rules is about trying to unify its member countries laws. Yes GDPR can seem like a protectionist framework from outside, but the main goal was to make all country in the EU have one shared legal system to handle personal data. So sharing them becomes easier inside the EU. We can expect more of this kind of laws to be written but they'll always be too late.
So do US companies which operate in the EU. I doubt that's the main limiting factor.
Yes, but before operating in the EU those companies benefited from the fact the US market is a 300 million people one to scale up. And that's not factoring in the number of other English speaking countries with similar legal systems and treaties with the US.
Of course the rest of the administrations are not there yet, there are contracts to abide to, habits, etc... But there is the start of a general recognition that overdependence on the US is a liability at some level.
Also, it would incredibly more feasible to move IT infrastructure back and have some reign on data, then it would be to recover from our overdependence on China in terms of... Well, in terms of everything physical.
Which means that the first milestone would be to host pour data on "sovereign" data centers... Using East-Asian made hardware.
One thing at a time, I guess ?
Most DCs are already using "Asian made" hardware such as Korean memory chips, Taiwanese power supplies and fabricated chips, and Japanese designed storage.
Unless you mean Chinese-made hardware, which would put much of Europe in the exact same position, with the added downside of supporting a nation that is cooperating with Russia, and is strongly in support of a Russian victory [0] in Ukraine. China has also begun leveraging export controls on tech transfers and outbound FDI as well, so dependency on an external nation would remain.
The reality is there is no choice other than America+ or Chinese made hardware for EU member states, and as long as Russia continues to leverage Chinese dual-use technology, it will be a no-go. And the European (in reality German+Dutch) ecosystem has largely been stagnant since the 2000s, and critical technology like EUV is nominally owned by EU companies but developed and manufactured by autonomous JVs within the US.
Either the EU supports Ukraine, in which case there is no choice but to deal with America+ or the EU leverages China, in which case support for Ukraine would have to stop.
[0] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
Microchip is primarily analog and power semiconductors - those have been heavily commodified for decades at this point. And the majority of their headcount and leadership is domiciled in the US and India based on LinkedIn.
And most European domiciled companies like NXP, ST Micro, and Ericcson outsourced the majority of their design operations to India and China 20 years ago.
Most hardware design has been domiciled in the US, China, Taiwan, Israel, and India since the 2000s.
> there is absolutely no reason why the EU couldn't produce/design its own hardware
Because, quite frankly, the ecosystem doesn't exist anymore.
Much of the European semiconductor industry imploded in the 2000s and 2010s due to the recession, austerity, the inability to compete against Apple and Samsung, the inability to hop onto the 5G bandwagon on time, and ASEAN and China's rise as a power electronics, analog chip, OSAT, and Telco hubs.
Much of the presence at this point in Europe is primarily legacy analog and power semiconductors targeted at automotive applications.
None of the EDAs are developed in Europe (even Siemens' EDA is developed by American subsidiaries Altair and UGS - both of whom are airgapped from their European parent). None of the major chemical vendors like Sunlit Chemical or LCY Chemical have a presence in Europe. None of the major lithography vendors like Cymer (the ASML-DoE JV that manufactures EUVs), Tokyo Electron, or Nikon have a lithography manufacturing presence in Europe. None of the major OSAT and Packaging vendors like ASE or Amkor have a presence in Europe. And none of the major display or memory chip fab companies like Sharp, Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron have a presence within Europe. And none of the storage vendors like Toshiba, Hitachi, or Sandisk have a major manufacturing or R&D presence in Europe.
All these companies have overwhelmingly invested within Asia and the US. Europe didn't ratified it's FTAs with South Korea or Japan until 2015 and 2019 respectively, which meant most Korean and Japanese players were easily wooed by ASEAN, Chinese, and Indian SEZs and incentives in the 2000s and 2010s, right at the moment the European ecosystem was increasingly falling behind.
The US-TW-JP-SK-China-ASEAN-India ecosystem is extremely interconnected to a degree that the European ecosystem is not, and this began all the way back in the 2000s.
> say, 15-30 years from now
None of the EU member states nor the EU as a whole have offered subsidizes anywhere near as lucrative as those the US, SK, JP, TW, CN, ASEAN, and even India provided in 2020-25 for fabrication, design, or packaging. And I have not seen any EU or EU member state legislation moving in the right direction.
Hypothetically, if an EU member state suddenly wakes up tomorrow, it would still take 4-6 years to go from subsidy to constructed fab. For design, it would take 10 years (as can be seen with India's RISC-V ecosystem taking 10 years to even reach a mature enough state that allowed Sequoia and Accel to begin funding Series As and Bs). At that point, the legacy chip market will have already been flooded by Asian competitors, and the bleeding edge chip market will have largely been flooded by Asian and American competitors.
At this point, Europe has largely fallen behind in the traditional semiconductor ecosystem and can't catch up in the short-to-medium term.
The only way European players can remain relevant is by investing in opportunities to leapfrog in frontier segments such as 2D semiconductor design, photonics/quantum applications, and composite semiconductors - but even in these segments Europe has fallen severely behind US and Chinese players, and increasingly behind Japanese, South Korean, and even Indian domiciled R&D labs.
You mean products like Microsoft Windows, Apple's iOS and MacOS, Google's Android, Chrome and ChromeOS, Cisco, Fortinet, HP, Dell, AWS, Linux, Meta's Whatsapp Facebook and Instagram and so on and so forth.
Citation needed.
Yes, it's not the kernel you are probably starting to nitpick about, but it doesn't run anywhere else, so far.
IIRC it was about the default dns servers pointing to cloudflare and google in upstream.
So it would rather be the other way around. The upstream default was(is?) privacy unfriendly. What the distros do with this is another matter.
Similar stuff arose with timesyncd (ntp), and some other small thing which I can't remember anymore, atm.
Nevertheless it's a tiny thing compared with every other item in your list, and many respected distros fix it.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-remove-russian-maintainers...
If you want to move away from <insert US tech giant>, you either need to embrace Linux and open source software which requires the state's employees to learn a new "stack" of applications which means they need to be given appropriate training or you need to have you home grown solutions that are as easy to use as their US counterparts and were developed within the EU by the EU's member countries with the EU's values embedded in them.
The first solution is not going to happen, as Linux is still relatively unknown all things considered and I don't see the French government employees learning how to use this OS and/or the applications running on it by themselves.
Secondly in times of budget cuts like in France currently, the government is not about to rip all the Microsoft products off and replace them with something that would take years to transition to and cost a fortune to implement.
So that leaves the homegrown solution. Unfortunately the work to move off of Microsoft et al should have started 10 years ago but it hasn't. Europe has completely dropped the ball on tech and now it's coming back to bit it in the ass.
The Draghi report from last year was supposed to kick things into gear but we will be lucky to see anything coming through within the next 5 years and by this stage the US tech giants will have entrenched themselves even more in the EU.
I am sorry to say but this is a failure that will resonate for the many decades to come.
But at least in Germany, I've seen Windows being written into agreements between state governments and trade unions representing clerks and employees. Good luck changing those without a negotiation running 3 years.
It doesnt really matter if the UI is the same or almost the same. We are talking about rolling out an entire new suite of tools to every government worker in a given country.
It would take years to plan the migration, then start deploying it in stages to the less critical services of said government while you work out all the kinks.
While that is happening, you most likely will need to support both systems for a while so that you have a fallback if things go wrong with the new system.
Then you will need to train all these employees properly so that they can potentially troubleshoot some of the issues they encounter and give them enough time to become as productive as they were before the new system rolled out.
> But at least in Germany, I've seen Windows being written into agreements between state governments and trade unions representing clerks and employees. Good luck changing those without a negotiation running 3 years.
And there is that too. I am sure its the case in many countries.
Finally this migration if successful would not bear any fruits to the person who initiates it at best because by the time the roll out is complete this person will have moved on to another position, be elected somewhere else or retired.
But if it goes badly, you can be sure that this will be used by the opposition political parties to attack the governing party and accuse them of bringing the entire country's services to a stand still.
I do agree that there's no good incentive. The other reason I've learned is their organizational issues: heavy focus on certifications, much lower salary vs private industry, heavy on the bureaucracy and office politics, and a lot of dead weight. That doesn't get you skilled people with plenty of motivation, and you get the outcome you'd expect.
Just search for Azure on wiz.io's blog, the amount of terrible yet easy to exploit security vulnerabilities, often with shit responses from Microsoft, is terrifying. It clearly demonstrates nobody with power within the Azure org cares about security. How can anyone trust them with anything remotely critical? Let alone the terrible UX and absurdly eventual consistency.
Yeah, yeah, I know, the people who know and understand this aren't the ones getting wined and dined to buy it. But still..
As someone said before: "citation needed".
Just FYI: DE-CIX.
the deeper problem is governments are not technology builders and cannot produce tech products because they have no unique ability to deliver anything anyone subject to them actually wants.
Turns out it was founded by an American, who was arrested on suspicion of bias-motivated crimes, second-degree assault and harassment after attacking a reporter in the USA but currently living in Hungary and running some media org there, with ties to the right wing Fidesz party. And he is on paper as being the founded of brusselssignal.eu
His organization received a big loan from an undisclosed source to set up the Brussels organisation and it seems to made up of or advised by a rag tag of European right wing politicians.
The whole thing stinks of Russian meddling in Europe.
Sources https://www.szabadeuropa.hu/a/szazhetvennegy-millios-kolcson...
https://www.companyweb.be/company/0793608171/free-pub/231068...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/28/us/patrick-thomas-egan-ac...
The consequences of the European Union realizing the were the USA's protectorate are not going to please the USA though... Buy ITAR-free, buy European !
Also, European defense firms are getting more competitive, by the simple virtue of larger orders enabling more investment.
There is no requirement that the politics of destabilization form a cohesive worldview.
They outsource all their email, but they don't put out RFPs for "email". MS is burrowed so deep into EU governments good luck getting them out.
Specifically for The Netherlands, https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/demystifying-european-digi... is a good read, from someone that really understands how this works in government.
Sadly, I understand why: they have a tonne of systems, that all, at least somewhat, work, that people know how to use, with established contacts and support contracts. IT departments trained and certified on how to run and deploy MS software. And that's before we start talking about lobbying.
edit: added a link to a good resource about the topic.
We should have started moving over yesterday, but it's a long and difficult process, I just hope we start moving forward on this.
regard français perplexe
And a grand bargain with China is highly unlikely given Wang Yi's recent visit with Kaja Kallas [0] where he announced Chinese moral support for Russia in Ukraine, which is diametrically opposed to the EU's foreign policy, while Von der Leyen condemned China for providing unrestricted support to Russia and causing industrial overcapacity [1].
Unlike Japan or South Korea, the EU holds no cards that it can leverage against the US or China - JP and SK can offer China a trilateral FTA which acts as a negotiating tool against the US, and SK+Japan can offer additonal military support for the US within the APAC domain which can act as a negotiating tool against China. What can the entire EU offer either US or China which cannot be vetoed by a COE member.
The EU has an added issue that the COE requires unanimity amongst heads of state to pass EU wide legislation, and US FDI representing €900B in inward FDI stock [2] within Ireland means there is a guaranteed veto against any tech decoupling. It's a similar story in Czechia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria as well.
[0] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
[1] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3317442/vo...
[2] - https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-fdi/forei...
This is vaguely similar to the truth, at best.
The Council of Europe (CoE) has nothing to do with the EU, you're probably confusing it with the European Council (EUCO).
But the EC is not normally involved in the legislative process. Instead, EU legislation is proposed by the European Comission (EC) and must be accepted by both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.
The Council of Ministers is the closest body to what you probably meant, but it's made up of heads of government of member states, not the heads of state. It also doesn't require unanimity to pass a law - it takes at least 4 countries to outright block legislation. There is a procedure in which a single country which is unhappy with a law passing can raise this to the EUCO for additional review, but it doesn't apply to ordinary legislation.
So, no, Ireland can't unilaterally block any such legislation, it has to convince other countries to join in.
Yes! Thanks for the correction! I did mean the Council of Ministers
> So, no, Ireland can't unilaterally block any such legislation, it has to convince other countries to join in
Yep, but my point still stands.
Poland, Romania, Czechia, and Bulgaria have overwhelmingly profited from FDI from American BigTech players - they were the largest winners in the GCC and outsourcing rush of the early-to-mid 2020s due to very pro-business subsidizes and tax incentives.
Ireland has also continued to overwhelmingly profit from it's very American business friendly tax legislation.
All these countries have enough pull together to push back on any attempts at coercing American tech companies in a manner that other EU members may want.
Furthermore, they themselves have shown how the EU can better attract American companies to build a European presence - they need to become friendly to FDI and foreign players potentially dominating a market.
The issue is Germany and France (logically) tend to oppose this as their own domestic competitors are getting undercut.
Barely. There's a reason American bigtech FDI within the EU has largely coalesced around Ireland, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and Bulgaria - they rolled out the red carpet and tried to reduce any acrimony that American companies might have. They are also the most lax with enforcing EU digital regulations, as enforcement falls under national sovereignity.
> I suspect Trump will go ape and force the EU to back down, like they already have by dropping Digital Tax
Pretty much. BigTech can afford GRC, not startups. VC overwhelmingly backed Trump for this reason as Vance promised to fight digital export barriers (and largely delivered in the UK and Canada)
> Permanent vassalage is the end point, though this time w/o any prospect of influence to the center
I'm not sure. I think what will happen is the return of the primacy of individual states trying to curry favor with major powers, which has already started to happen.
Look at Hungary rolling the red carpet to Chinese FDI as a bulwark against the EU; Czechia and the Baltics adopting an avowedly pro-Taiwan stance in order to curry favor from the US; and Italy+Greece leveraging IMEC to re-negotiate better terms on OBOR-related investments from the 2010s. In most context, "Europe" has almost always been used to denote Germany Inc.
I wouldn't be surprised if Wang Yi ranted this exact same thing to Kallas during their 4 hour meeting which apparently lead to the entire China-EU summit being canceled. Similar incidents arose with American, Turkish, and Indian negotiators as well, all of whom prefer to work directly with national leaders instead of the EU leadership.
European countries now need to choose between the US or China. There is no other way.
The EU only provide directives that each member state adapt to their legal framework. Each country decides on their own policy regarding internet access, and it is very unlikely that a directive that have them go through some central EU-controlled firewall would pass.
Very difficult.
Countries like Ireland, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and Bulgaria are heavily dependent on American FDI in their tech industry, and the European Council has final say and requires unanimity. A rule such as the one you mentioned would smother VC/PE in much of the EU, as European funds like Index Ventures and Munich Re Ventures are heavily dependent on the US to raise capital and build dealflow.
Major European employers like Volkswagen AG, Siemens AG, NXP, Phillips, Infineon, and others would also face severe retaliation as a result.
It would also set a precedent that would make an alternative like China extremely hesitant to invest, as the Chinese government heavily utilizes export controls on tech transfers. For example, BYD investment in Hungary is largely CDK with the core high value components like Batteries being manufactured in China. Biren, Huawei, and SMIC would face similar export controls.
Startups that are not in a large marketshare situation wouldn't trigger the need for intermediary/isolation so the effect on FDI would be limited, and anyway, the tides are turning on US capital in general.
Retaliation: I'm not sure the US fiscal and legal overreach isn't already in place, e.g. VW dieselgate, export controls etc. The US looks after its interests (fair enough), but its time the EU levelled the field to protect its citizens, a small loss of regional sovereignty for those companies in exchange for the EU revenue they continue to make.
That's already done today with little-to-no acrimony, and none of the regulations you mentioned. Where do you think much of that FDI in Ireland, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and Bulgaria is coming from?
> Startups that are not in a large marketshare situation wouldn't trigger the need for intermediary/isolation so the effect on FDI would be limited, and anyway, the tides are turning on US capital in general
It's not just startups. American BigTech GCCs represent the bulk of tech related FDI in Czechia, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria, and Ireland's US-friendly business law has lead to a severe dependency on the US for capital [1].
> the tides are turning on US capital in general.
American Capital markets continue to remain larger in size than the entire EU's combined [0]. And China's is roughly in size to the entire EU. An the reality is, European capital markets are nowhere near as unified as either the US or China's.
> its time the EU levelled the field to protect its citizens, a small loss of regional sovereignty for those companies in exchange for the EU revenue they continue to make
But how?
The EU isn't significantly unified, and depends on unanimity within the European Council. As I mentioned before, Ireland, Czechia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland would be a significant veto to any shift against the US.
Furthermore, French and German domestic giants continue to compete against each other in every industry, which has lead to cooperation failures such as the FCAS snafu recently [2].
There is no "EU grand strategy", as major member states like Germany, France, and others push back or compete with each other internally.
And given the fact that the Chinese players are cannibalizing European competitors within China, major European companies like Volkswagen and Siemens are now heavily dependent on the US as an alternative market.
[0] - https://www.sifma.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2024-SIFMA-...
[1] - https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-fdi/forei...
Samsung Group, SK Group, LG Group, Hyundai Group, and Naver Group all built domestic capacity across both the software and hardware stack with Korea, and can decouple from the American ecosystem worst comes to worst because they have built a strong ecosystem across Japan, ASEAN, China, and India.
European countries never did the same. There is no domestic equivalent within Europe (and no, ASML does not count - all their bleeding were EUV work is done in the US via a JV with the DoE). In chips alone, Infineon, NXP (which is largely Motorola), and ST Micro are all heavily dependent on US capacity, and their niche in analog and power chips has largely been commodified by Asian players like Samsung Group, Hyundai Group, and SK Group. This can also be seen with CHIPS and IRA disbursements - Samsung and LG have been the biggest beneficiaries of the former and latter, and Naver has been leading US-SK trade negotiations with Trump Jr which lead to automotive being impacted but electronics largely unscathe.
South Korea also allows a level of market consolidation and oligopoly power that would violate European regulations.
Furthermore, SK can always dangle the China-SK-JP trilateral FTA to force the US into a more equal bargain, while dangling enhanced military cooperation with the US, Philippines, and Taiwan to force China to negotiate. The EU cannot offer the same because it is faced with Russia on it's eastern border, and thus cannot use China as a bulwark against the US.
Europe is decades behind Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, let alone the US or China