Obviously Europeans don't want to be the US's b*tch, but even more so they seem to want heavy regulations ensuring their right to relax and cripple growth, err, evil corporations.
But the fact that US's diplomatic policy USED TO make us not want to do it.
Europe using US tech was a bonding measure between the two parties.
We can quickly and easy build european "FAANG" overnight, even now more with AI search making it easy to replace Google.
We even already have it: think Ecosia, Protonmail etc. There are tons of those.
The same is for social media. It would be very easy to flip a social media app akin to Instagram, or FB.
The issue is getting users and have alignment that this would be the "european version".
We never had to do this, or think of it, because US had a very benevolent and good relationship with Europe, and US big tech used to make us feel even more connected.
Wups
Did everyone forget after WW 2 central Europe had to rebuild basically all of its infrastructure ?
The hubris in this chat today is deafening.
The internet economy started in the early 90s, 45 years after the war ended in Europe.
GP is correct the EU rested on it's laurels, it wrongly thought that the US would always be there in case of crisis. This was a big mistake and now the chicken have come home to roost.
The EU didn't rest on it's laurels, it spent and is STILL spending time ensuring no MORE wars happen internally. That involves a LOT of negotiating between countries, cultures and goverments. The US didn't have any of that. Do you know how complicated and long it took to get even Ireland into the EU, even when the UK left, there is so much beuracracy between Ireland and the UK it was one of the blocking points.
How, when the EU was an infant in the 90's are we as a block supposed to start throwing investment collectively into a new thing nobody's heard about before, and then convince the newly joined countries, who are struggling to adapt to a Union, balancing individual currencies at the time also.
People clearly have absolutely no idea about the history of the EU and Europe in general and therefore should take a step back from giving their opinions as if it's some kind of insight.
> It wrongly thought that the US would always be there in case of crisis. This was a big mistake and now the chicken have come home to roost.
Again, it was not an assumption, it was an agreement. After WW2. Yet again you're showing either your ignorance or unwillingness to consider what you're saying.
> The EU didn't rest on it's laurels, it spent and is STILL spending time ensuring no MORE wars happen internally. That involves a LOT of negotiating between countries, cultures and governments. The US didn't have any of that. Do you know how complicated and long it took to get even Ireland into the EU, even when the UK left, there is so much bureaucracy between Ireland and the UK it was one of the blocking points.
First you claim that the lack of tech companies rivaling with the US ones is because the EU countries had to rebuild themselves after the war and now you claim that is because the EU itself was just a baby back in the 90s and that somehow stopped Europe from producing these types of companies.
> People clearly have absolutely no idea about the history of the EU and Europe in general and therefore should take a step back from giving their opinions as if it's some kind of insight
People who claim to have all the answers should refrain from engaging with other people as their feelings could get hurt in the face of reality.
The fact of the matter is that Google, AWS, Microsoft an consorts have existed for multiple decades at this stage. The fact is also that the EU has been preaching about digital sovereignty for the last 10 years++ and that barely anything has come out of it.
The same can be said for the defense of the EU countries which basically has consisted in the EU countries joining NATO because they decided that outsourcing their own defense was cheaper instead of building a proper European military alliance between themselves.
The reason is the same, this military alliance would have required to actually invest in their own armies and taken cash away from other things.
> Again, it was not an assumption, it was an agreement. After WW2. Yet again you're showing either your ignorance or unwillingness to consider what you're saying.
Is the agreement, the article 5 from NATO? Because if it is, this is an agreement for countries to support each other militarily in case of aggression but the agreement never stipulated that the EU should become completely reliant on the US goodwill to insure it's territorial sovereignty.
In fact the NATO agreement specifically stipulates that all member countries need to invest a set amount each year in their own defense and guess what, only a few of them actually fulfill the term of this agreement. So who is at fault here?
If I make contract with you and you don't fulfill your end, am I wrong to think that it is null and void?
The EU is waking up with it's pants down after multiple decades of under investment in many strategic sectors but instead of taking the blame and trying to fix the issue, we just point fingers and claim some sort of wrongdoing. That is the problem here.
It's time for the EU leaders to grow up and make amends and course correct or be relegated to the dustbin of history.
There are more than one single reason for things to happen, again highlighting that the EU had other priorities at the time.
> The same can be said for the defense of the EU countries which basically has consisted in the EU countries joining NATO because they decided that outsourcing their own defense was cheaper instead of building a proper European military alliance between themselves.
I completely agree with you here, NATO is our saving grace but really even this feels uncertain these days.
> In fact the NATO agreement specifically stipulates that all member countries need to invest a set amount each year in their own defense and guess what, only a few of them actually fulfill the term of this agreement. So who is at fault here?
Complete complacency and thinking that there will not be any war once everyone is economically dependant on eachother and the US is always there. Agreed.
> It's time for the EU leaders to grow up and make amends and course correct or be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Again I agree with you, I'm not saying there wasn't some complacency, but it's not as simple to get things to move in EU, which again, is both a blessing (everyone is 'kind of' catered for) and a curse, things move unacceptably slow. The sentiment seems to be changing and I have to be optimistic about it and push my local politicians to get the finger out. I don't accept the nihilism I'm seeing though.
I really am not saying that the EU did everything right, just that it's not as simple for the EU to get everything done as it seems to people. I would have much preferred we had our defense infrastructure in place properly before we started investing in tech.
By 1980, Europe was rebuilt. What did they do then? Continue to depend on the US for both tech and military.
No it wasn't, and also the EU wasn't even in it's crawling stages. Negotiations were still taking place about EU memberships so no, you are objectively wrong.
> Continue to depend on the US for both tech and military.
In what sense? For the cold war? That was benefiting who?
And I'm astonished Hetzner hasn't built a proper AWS competitor already.
Best what europe could hope for is finding different tech path than SV. That path most likely won't be as profitable but that might be OK. In a way companies like Hetzner might already be on that path of not trying to replace AWS.
What is much more likely is that europe will just become even more reliant on US tech. But it will be because of politic not for technical inability.
> Under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, France pursued diplomatic independence and promoted a vision of European collective security that conflicted with American leadership in NATO, especially regarding the integration of member states' armed forces under a US-led unified command and the control of NATO’s nuclear arsenal.
Charles de Gaulle believed that France and the EU countries should stay out of NATO so that it could foster it's own military defense, yet the French leaders and their other EU countreparts decided that it was much more convenient to have the US as a back-stop because they needed the cash that should have gone to their armies for other purposes. This has been happening for decades.
That lead to the situation that we are in today where most of the EU's defense strategy is in fact subsidized by the US. The NATO EU countries despite signing the treaties have barely managed to keep up with the minimum NATO required spending on their own defenses.
This was entirely the doing of Europe.
Technically, we can do it.
But unless we go the Chinese route of blocking US vendors, a lot of people will always flock to the better product that has the bigger marketing budget. And there I do not see how Ecosia could compete with Google, Xing with LinkedIn, Mistral with OpenAI, OHV/IONOS with AWS, or Hetzner with GCP.
Even mentioning Ecosia in the context of FAANG alternatives is embarrasing. Ecosia is a wrapper around Bing and has less than 200 employees.
Even in just economical sense it never really made sense when you have local companies like SUSE that could give you well functioning IT infrastructure. The money would at minimum stay in EU. It probably made sense for export of the talent (which countries don't make money on) but you just locks yourself to infinite Microsoft payments.
There are many conservative european corporations (like postal services) that never were on Microsoft stack. It was always hailed as the "poor" economical but secure solution. They probably still reap benefits. But afaik it was always uphill battle with governments because of the strong lobby from US.
Imagine if the europe started to switch to something like SUSE. It would make so many peoples skills immediately outdated. So many will fight this.
All the things that Europe prides itself on having transcended, are the things needed to build theses industries. So while it's totally physically possible, and Europeans are both smart and industrious (well they ancestors were industrious at least), the knife in the side of Europe is the prevailing psyche of low-work/high-benefits as a human right.
I know this isn't popular, and I wish it was different too, but you can't have it both ways.
Germany had to reduce its army as part of the reunification deal and is now criticized for not having a big army. Only France has nuclear weapons and the incentive to spend huge amounts on defense while being dependent on leased and US controlled nukes is not great. Do you prefer that all EU countries get their own nukes?
The EU has real tech like ASML, Airbus, Siemens, Alsthom etc. What the US calls "tech" is not regarded as vital in the EU and somewhat belittled. This kind of "tech" is only possible with US hype and massively speculative investments.
The US is begging (and blackmailing with tariffs) countries from all over the world to build factories in the US. That doesn't sound like a great success.
Energy? The US tries to control all energy choke points of energy flow to the EU. The Nord Stream sabotage was hailed as a great operation, enabling the US to sell overpriced LNG to the EU. The US leased a corridor from Azerbaijan to Turkey to control vast amounts of natural gas from Turkmenistan. A Trump adjacent billionaire floated the idea to buy and revive Nord Stream.
What exactly should the EU do? Switch to nuclear energy and buy uranium from Russia like the US does (the US also buys fertilizer)?
How do you get people to work 50 more days a year without mass voting to keep (or even "improve") the status quo?
And this doesn't even touch on the heavy regulatory side, which just makes the EU a generally unattractive place to invest.
Companies are free to pay overtime, and the salaries would still be less than in SV. So you could absolutely found a software company in the EU with the same amount of work hours in a competitive manner and still pay less than in the US (under the assumption that the hours are really needed, which I doubt).
The real advantage that the US has is that they can more easily exploit users because there are no privacy laws.
Americas golden child of 1960 now sucks, oh well. In other news Nvidia has a market cap that nearly eclipses the GDP of Germany. Ah! ASML makes the machines for those chips! But then why isn't the EU reaping the fruit...