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Comment by pu_pe | Hacker News Reader

This is aimed at the European Union, India and Brazil, who have all recently been mulling Big Tech regulations. It seems to be the reward for the massive support Trump has been given by the tech sector.

It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.

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> It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.

Win some, lose some. Living in the EU, I really hope the EU bends the knee on this.

India and Brazil are part of BRICS, so they don't really need that much of a push to be fully aligned with China on most things.

Here's a video from the India / China border https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJEiGiGc1I

BRICS is a joke.

May be a joke, but countries tend to put aside small issues until they create alliances to fend off bigger threats, and then they go back to their issues.

Disputed borders are not small issues. They are the issues that make all others look small. It took decades for Canada and Denmark to resolve their dispute over a completely worthless uninhabited arctic rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island. India and China aren't just going to drop their border dispute over some internet beef with the US.

They can put it on ice, pun intended, until they fix their beef with the US.

I don't see why the EU would cave in, Big Tech is more profitable than anything the EU sells to the US and they are paying close to nothing right now.

But the EU leadership is so weak now that we never know, even if it doesn't make sense.

The EU has no leverage. Its own institutions are all 100% Microsoft shops with zero interest in changing that. The US has sanctioned staff at the International Criminal Court meaning MS suspended their Outlook accounts, and the ICC seems to have done .... exactly nothing. The chief prosecutor there had to open up a new personal account at Protonmail instead, although Protonmail keeps talking about leaving Switzerland due to new surveillance laws also so it's unclear how long it'll remain European (and of course Switzerland isn't in the EU anyway).

Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No. Can the EU Commission do without extra tax revenues from US tech? Yes.

The opposite is also true, what Big Tech can do without the EU? It's their most profitable market and it's not like they are going to make up for the loss by selling in China.

The US tech industry doesn't have as much leverage as they think they do, the hardest part to replace is the hardware, which mostly isn't built in the US anyways

That reminds me of Mark Zukerberg which threatened to leave a while back... and denied it soon after realizing the bluff didn't work.

Where do you get that EU is their most profitable market?

When I worked for big tech the US was always the most profitable market, usually followed by the UK. Albeit that was a long time ago. But the EU has economically declined since so I doubt things changed much.

> When I worked for big tech the US was always the most profitable market, usually followed by the UK. Albeit that was a long time ago. But the EU has economically declined since so I doubt things changed much.

Again, I've been away from FAANG for a while, but the EU (note that this is 27 countries) was super, super profitable.

From an ads perspective, you made money from selling to a bunch of relatively rich consumers (the EU) AND (this is more important), lots of EU companies spent loads of money on US advertisers. This is what pushes up prices and thus revenue in the EU.

Yes, the US consumer does spend a lot of money, but their super high revenue from tech is more a function (rather like their equity markets) of lots and lots of foreign money coming in.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about what happens to these markets if/when the Europeans stop spending as much money in the US market.

I.e. for Apple EU is 25% of revenue. Try to pull out from there, and shareholders will crucify whole Apple leadership.

If they did it unilaterally yes. If they did it at the same time as other companies due to US law, then probably not. More to the point, how many people in the EU use Apple tech and would be furious if it stopped working for them?

Apple went as far as giving the keys to their servers to the Chinese government, that gives a clue on how valuable those top markets are.

If it stops working because unilateral action from USA, it will likely create a rally around the flag effect.

>Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No.

Wrong. The answer is yes, they very much can. Do they want to? No.

No, EU economy would collapse if all US tech was sanctioned tomorrow. Companies and governments have nowhere to migrate their Windows/Office/Outlook/Azure setups to.

Russia is running on Windows too and did not collapsed. It turns out that companies wants to make money and are willing to jump through hoops, sanctions or not.

Also you can just use cracked OS (illegal, but if Microsoft is out, it will become abandonware) and create alternative API for cloud services. How hard do you think it would be to create i.e. S3 compatible API? Wait that already exists - https://github.com/jchristn/S3Server

And you could continue with whatever Azure, AWS etc offers. In the end, it is just some variation of a REST server.

Russia has a homegrown Google competitor in the form of Yandex. It runs its own search engine, mail, cloud services, office suites etc. There isn't an EU equivalent AFAIK. And they had many years to prepare because Russia has been sanctioned in various forms for a long time going back to 2016.

Windows is not that important. It's more about Outlook, Office, all the enterprise apps running on US clouds, etc.

Which EU cloud providers can easily create knock offs and then let EU services migrate without changing anything on companies side, except just endpoints.

Furthermore EU equivalents of Yandex do exist - https://www.seznam.cz/ (Do you see the Yahoo in it?) or French Google: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en or equivalent of Google Maps https://mapy.com/en/ just have a look here: https://european-alternatives.eu/

They are small, sure, but the moment competition is gone, there is no reason for them not to scale

It doesn't take years to set up a local equivalent of Yandex, or indeed what Russia has set up. It's very feasible to do the same as Russia.

Yandex is older than Google itself is.

The building you in being 30 years old doesn't mean it takes 30 years old to build a new building.

Buildings aren't comparable to tech companies, are they? Tech companies continuously build out their technology stack. They don't build a product then fire everyone who isn't a keep-the-lights-on-sysadmin. Modern Google or Yandex is the result of 30 years of continuous building, every day.

As the other commenter pointed out, Russia's still live and kicking.

Big tech is already under regulations in India, and it’s been growing tougher year on year.

Trump has already stuck 50% import duties on Indian products, conveniently exempting pharmaceuticals, of course. The pretext being “Russian oil.”

Since the government didn’t budge on oil, they’re hardly likely to budge on tech regulations.

> might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.

"Might"?

Brazil already exports to China almost 3 times the amount it exports to the U.S.

And after the recent rise in tariffs against Brazil, China announced an huge increase in soybeans and coffee purchase from Brazil. Because of that the price of US soybeans dropped and American farmers sent an open letter to Trump asking him to not cause trouble.

Big tech regulations serve exactly two purposes (real, not stated):

1. Information control for political censorship

2. A source of cash from fines

The issue will not drive anyone into anyone else's orbit.

Big tech serves exactly three purposes (real, not stated):

- The precarization of work by wage compression and anti-worker rights lobbying (Uber)

- The overexploitation of attention for financial (ads) and political gains (tolerance and reach for the ultraliberal, protofascist, neonazi groups and narratives) through American state-sponsored algorithmic manipulation (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)

- Assimilationism, erasure of local culture, traditions, identities, to achieve cultural hegemony (Netflix)

Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want. In the case of Uber that's great because I will never even think about doing business with the cab cartel again. I don't owe them a damn thing. Nor do I owe my own local culture any loyalty over what I can watch on Netflix. You could argue that the algorithmic feed on social media is a negative, but the idea that there is some underlying agenda is ridiculous. At worst it's like a drug dealer saying "I have what you want... heroin!"

> Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want

Oh, this is not true for a long time. Much better money can be made by making people want.

"Look what you made me do." It's no one's fault that you want things that are bad for you. Don't blame the pastry chef for making you want dessert.

It's remarkable to me that even after all the scandals and whistleblowing going on in the last decades about intelligence agencies, the US government, and big tech collaborating to surveil and control their own citizens or other nations, the recent, full public alignment between the big tech billionaires and the executive branch, not to mention the whole history of US imperialism, which you can boil down to violent expansion of private markets and capital to the detriment of other peoples, there are still smart people like yourself that don't question it in the slightest. In fact, embrace it. Hopefully you're benefiting directly from it, otherwise, you're just a frog getting slowly boiled in a pot of crumbling social environment. Also, did you ever ask yourself where your "preferences" or "wants" come from or how they form?

And none of that is profitable. It's quite the opposite. They do it because the government forces them to do it. Big tech companies don't want to do this, and didn't do this before the spooks came knocking. This is why government regulation will only make matters worse. These things are done because of, not in spite of, the government.

The government is them! Can you not see it? They are intertwined so hard, it's difficult to distinguish who wants what, because they MERGED. The state is ruled by the economic elite, and that's done via the government.

If the government were controlled by billionaires, we would be a lot more competently governed than we are. Democracy works, and I know it because the government's competence resembles its average citizen.

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