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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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

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.

> 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.

>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.

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