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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

I’m by no means a Trump fan. But I thought it was negligent how the Biden administration didn’t fight for American tech companies internationally and how the prior administration was actively hostile to them.

Then people wonder why tech embraced Trump.

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This is my fundamental problem with Elizabeth Warren et. al..

They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."

The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.

Did this approach ever actually work out in the history of humanity? Like, we're fine with massive corporations spying on us because otherwise the Chinese/Russian/Aliens might? In the name of protecting freedom, we're violating it ourselves and we brag about it?

Facebook offered its services in the EU to people without any tracking if you paid for the service. The Eu didn’t like that either.

… is there a point you’re trying to make?

> The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex.

I mean, the foreign companies taking that space can be solved with sanctions, or digital services taxes, etc.

What would you propose? Maybe Google, Apple, Meta, etc. are the lesser of the big evils but we definitely have a monopoly problem in the US, and there is very little space for competition, which only continues to harm consumers.

Trump will do a lot more harm to US tech companies than Biden. A lot of us here in Europe are moving away from US tech, and as we are building more of our own it's very unlikely we will come back.

Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".

The US was never a trusted partner, Europeans just didn’t have a choice. No one company was able to spend the amount of money required to compete with American technology, so nobody did.

Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.

Maybe not fully trusted but they were certainly fairly well aligned to our interests. Until trump obviously.

Again no Trump fan. But I’m glad that Trump policies have made at least the EU not to be so dependent on the US military itself and US military contractors. There is no private company monopoly including BigTech that I can’t extricate myself away from quite easily.

It’s much harder to extricate yourself from the US influence on the world stage.

Not that I’m not seriously looking at a Plan B outside of the US after I retire. We are already planning to spend a few months a year between Costa Rica snd Panama City next year - warm, safe countries in US time zones.

That dependence on the US was by design of the US however. With all the military assistance they provided they also bought influence (which they will lose now of course). This paid itself back in many ways, like the dollar being the world reserve currency, having bases all over the world, being free to invade countries like Iraq etc.

Personally I hope the EU works more on the nuclear umbrella. It was the US that didn't really want us to have much of our own to establish dependency on them, but now that the US has become an unreliable partner we'll have to. France and perhaps the UK will have to scale theirs up. It's the only thing where we really need the US militarily, as any regular military is not sufficient to deter enemies like Russia and China, no matter how much we have.

But Big Tech is very hard to cut until the EU clouds step up a lot more. Maybe not for you yourself personally but for industry.

The EU is not going to build its own Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, AWS etc.

Anytime the lack of “influential European tech companies” come up, the best anyone can do is money losing/barely profitable Spotify.

And the data doesn’t back your idea up that Europe is moving away from any of those companies. The EU is moving its dependence away from the US military industrial complex admittedly.

I guess not no, but we don't need those, really. We definitely don't want carbon copies of those companies because they are causing a lot of what's wrong with this world. What we need is more ethical companies that understand the EU market. No paying with our data, no manipulative algorithms. We've been pushing for that for years but Trump has been the turning point, now people are really on board with the idea that leaving US services is better.

It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)

And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.

I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.

And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.

But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.

[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.

> I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.

Well yes and no. Facebook, no. The concept of facebook as it was when it was first released was an interesting one to me. Staying in touch with your friends, I've lived in several countries so I have friends all over the world. This is nice. However they perverted it when they dropped the old timeline and moved to the algorithmic feed. It became useless to me then.

I do see a benefit to facebook-like services though, just ethical ones.

But what I do like about facebook, or rather meta now, is the investment they have done in VR. It's still full of data collection I'm sure, but to me VR is a very interesting tech and it really needed that to get off the ground. Right now it's not really moving along because "AI" stole all the hype limelight but it will come again, just like AI has had some false starts itself.

Meta subsidizes a very large proportion of the world’s communication (in the form of Whatsapp/Instagram/Facebook).

Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.

Except they make money so they don't subsidise it. They get paid for it but through our data. Which is what we don't want here in Europe anyway.

Subsidy in this context was meant to convey that all the bandwidth and infrastructure that allows for global communication for billions of people is paid for by the advertising Meta sells, money that obviously disappears if Meta disappears.

That doesn't mean we won't have money to pay for it though. All that advertiser money comes from the consumer too. Companies pay it to sell things, and to make a profit they factor it into the price. We're paying for it, we just don't pay Meta directly.

If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.

With RCS being widely adopted even by Apple, do you really need WhatsApp anymore?

What I am wondering is if the complexity of AWS is required for 99 percentile. There are a lot of niche services and duplicated ones on AWS and a targeted replacement for the most popular ones would be enough for most.

You only require AWS if you build something to run on AWS. That's the thing. You can easily run it on something else, just build it for that specifically. Now, AWS-style services have become somewhat of an industry standard (e.g. S3 offered by countless operators). But still, I think offering AWS style services is a weakness because you can never become better than the original.

And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).

In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.

Netflix as the canonical example would beg to differ as would Apple who hosts plenty of its services between AWS, GCP and I believe Azure. I only know first hand about AWS since Apple talked about it during ReInvent.

There are plenty of large private corporations and governments who host on AWS. Maybe they didn’t do it naively?

Netflix mainly runs from caching boxes at ISPs though. Most of their content comes from there. AWS is way too expensive to serve all that content from.

I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.

Yes. But Netflix is by far AWS’s largest customer. The distribution happens on caching boxes. But there is a lot of processing that happens on AWS. You can look at any of the numerous reinvent videos or even Netflix’s own blog.

Just because your company has a brain dead lift and shift implementation (don’t do that), doesn’t mean every company does.

As a former employee of AWS ProServe (Amazon’s internal cloud consulting department - full time direct hire employee) and now and outside consultant, I’ve seen and been involved in a lot of large scale implementations.

I have no love lost for AWS the company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607821) , but let’s not pretend it’s a bunch of startups and naive enterprise corporations that don’t know tech.

Joel Spolsky (founder of StackOverflow) talked about this almost 25 years ago.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

Everyone needs a different 90%.

I’m not trying to wear “I worked at AWS” on my chest like a 22 year old posting on Blind. But my experience working at AWS ProServe before working at 3rd partner consulting company I’ve seen a lot of different implementations even though my focus was on cloud native applications.

These are all of AWS’s named specialties.

https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/

Large companies aren’t going to go to a smaller provider. Yes I know about “hybrid cloud”. But modt companies don’t want to go that.

> A lot of us here in Europe are moving away from US tech

Are we? My impression is the other way around so could you clarify what are we building that is going to move away from US tech?

Just seems very unrealistic wishful thinking that Europe would suddenly become good at these kinds of software after spending the last few decades being bad at it.

It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.

Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.

But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.

There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.

After the local EU services/products all have Brussels Mandated encryption back-doors and permit free decrypting of your private data, I will bet there will be a surge back to non-EU services.

https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/eu-pushes-for-backdoors-in-...

Yes, this is a big worry indeed, though not really something the US doesn't have (but they are more secretive about it). Snowden made that very clear. We just have more government transparency here.

I mean a lot of EU would prefer EU backed backdoor to US backed backdoor. EU backed backdoor still sucks but I don't get this argument

There is no such thing as an “EU backdoor”. Once you have any kind of backdoor it will be exploited by spy agencies worldwide through hacks

You think that the EU, which is also pushing for a backdoor just like the UK, is somehow actually against tracking and data collection? You gotta pick one or the other.

This is not the same thing. They trust themselves to track and monitor us, but not commercial parties.

I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).

> It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.

Talk is cheap. People say they want local services up to the point someone offers local services and no one will buy them because they are not the same as what "BigTech" offers.

I live in the EU and never heard about BuyFromEU.

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