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Comment by shellwizard | Hacker News Reader

What alternatives to Microsoft, Google, IBM or AWS exist in Europe?

None of those are products, those are companies that offers 100s of products.

The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really).

Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.

just a nitpick, shouldn't youtube also be "yes, but not really", since there are plenty of alternatives to hosting video. but none have the reach that youtube has, similar to ads?

I would name PeerTube the project and the various PeerTube instances various organizations are running (like for example https://vhsky.cz/) as a good Youtube alternative.

Sure, you might not have all the media on one big convenient pile like on Youtube, but that is kinda the point (with no single pile owner there is no single entity that decideds what goes on the pile or not).

This can only be a fair alternative if a single search can transparently query all instances (an implicit requirement for most users), and there's also an easy, instance-transparent, preferably free way to upload content (requirement for most creators). Once one has the question "which instance should I search/create my account on?", it will be considered a failure.

https://sepiasearch.org/

Let's hope that jolla and Sailfish OS make a comeback with their current crowdfunded and crowd-vote-engineered phone

  > We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.

please make a successful economic case for a company only making a mobile phone OS, in a world where android exists and china can crank out 100x the devices at 1/10 the price paying $0 per device license fees than eu could.

"Everything just works together" is, on its own, a single use case.

In that case, Microsoft’s products totally fail this use case.

You're actually making the exact point you want to attack.

That's why Europe needs that push to get their act together and start being self-sufficient, digital services-wise.

Digital Service dominance in this case isn't based on some trait of American Exceptionalism - or conversely based off some sort of lack of academic rigour or work ethic in European Entrepreneurship.

Rather, the current state of SaaS in the context of the historic stock market is a severe economic aberration divorced from any sort of valuation fundamentals like securities weighting. Instead we observe predatory VC and PE entities supported by a complimentary taxation and economic regime, all ultimately facilitated by the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

In short, this notion of self-sufficiency is unachievable in the European context as it is predicated entirely upon wealth inequality and thumbing the scale of the free-market via lobbying, and is the doctrine denounced to the point of anathema in any Socialist Democracy.

The end result here is not some sort of organically earned digital services dominance - instead you end up with scenarios like forcing the FDIC to bail out the VC bank of Choice - SVB - where uninsured deposits were estimated to represent 89 percent of total deposits at the bank, totalling $18 billion of the ultimate $20 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.

If these hadn't been allowed to emerge as monopolies we would have a wider selection.

Is that really the case for the EU? The EU doesn’t seem to foster an environment for competitive companies that can operate at the necessary scale the above listed can.

LIDL the supermarket chain is German and is running a large cloud operation inside the EU. And OVH from France is also pretty big.

You’re correct that few EU companies get as large as US monopolies, but that’s kind of the goal when you want a functioning market.

A "functioning market" doesn't prevent oligopolies. Oligopolies are natural and optimal (desirable) in many industries, if not most. That's where regulations come in.

You probably mean Schwarz Gruppe, the owner of Lidl, and their subsidiary StackIT. Yes, they are growing. Schwarz is also building 11B€ AI data center in Lubbenau, so I fully agree with you. We will be fine without American digital services.

It’s going to take time though… and the StackIT PaaS offerings aren’t yet quite as easy to use as their US competitors

Yes, funnily, mutual tariffs on IT services between the EU and USA would incentivize competition, which is a good thing. Unless the EU is try incapable of doing IT right, in which case it would slow the the EU economy, but let’s assume we’ll improve on that.

Mostly an artefact of the non-application of antitrust laws, the US selectively decided to not apply those anymore for the past 30-40 years, corporate consolidation takes hold, companies providing a service grow enormously and are allowed to swallow prominent competitors to stamp them out.

The EU has many competitive companies, I think HN is too focused on "tech" as in digital/web stuff and quite blind to other technological industries...

It seems to be. As in most of the world, nearly everyone is divvied up between Apple and Microsoft, and use Google Search, with Wikipedia being the default place normies go for information. I know there are people who use Linux and prefer to use other search engines, but they are few and far between.

The EU has an extremely fragmented digital internal market, laws that suck for startups in most places, worse capital markets and funding mechanisms (and related laws), and doesn't have a Silicon Valley. It also underinvests in R&D and doesn't have a DARPA.

So yes, just tariffing or restricting US tech wouldn't help much. Europe "lost" that race fair and square. It needs to focus on fixing all those things.

On the other hand a lot of these startups and tech companies are a net negative for the world. Externalise problems and pollution, internalise profits. We don't want society to be only decided by those who make the most money. That's why we have those laws.

I personally don't want the EU to become the US. And Investors gambling with other people's money is what gave us the world financial crisis of 2007. No lessons were learned as usual.

You say that like scale is an inevitability. If Microsoft's offerings were unbundled into lots of smaller interoperable solutions we'd all be better off.

The opposite seems to be the case. The EU fosters really competitive markets, so large companies are really hard to emerge. There are tons of small software shops in my city alone, you can walk through the city and see ads for them in front of their houses.

Those exist in the USA as well. We have large, medium, and small software shops. You hardly ever hear about the medium or smaller ones though, you’ll find the, splattered all over the place in office parks as well as downtown (at least here in the Seattle area). It didn’t feel very different when I lived in Europe, even the large orgs were present (Google has lots of offices in Zurich and Stockholm among others, for example, and when I was in China my wife worked for a German big tech called SAP).

No you would only have the European selection.

There is currently no real European equivalent/serious competitor to the Apple/Microsoft duopoly, Google monopoly, Wikipedia monopoly etc.

On Wikipedia: German chapter is the second largest (>100 FTEs) and collects donations directly, funding root org from them and keeping significant part for its own operations. It’s not exactly an American monopoly.

Wikipedia is American owned. It also pushes certain ideas very subtly. Or not subtly in the hagiographies of certain "philanthropists".

It does not matter anything in this case. It’s open source, it’s community-driven, and governance structure isn’t a moat. It can be forked in a matter of days, especially given that there exist independent European structures to support it.

Wikipedia is not community driven. About as public as so called public ownership in reality. It is clearly directed by a small group of people, mostly those with enough time on their hands.

Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked.

There are clear biases in its content provision, such as its coverage of certain rich people and establishment bodies.

> Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked.

Is this some sort of conspiracy theory? It’s just plain wrong. Wikipedia may block certain people, but it’s definitely not anywhere close to majority of editors. It’s easy to create an account and edit almost everything. It does have editorial policy and editors may have certain bias, but it has nothing to do with the fact, that you mentioning Wikipedia as some American monopoly were wrong.

Have you ever tried to edit Wikipedia using WiFi, mobile networks etc? Because then you will almost always get a message saying you are blocked and cannot edit. I get this all the time, and not because of anything I have done personally. Many people are on shared IPs now.

Even the computers at the National Library of Scotland are blocked, even though there is a paid Wikipedian on their staff and you have to have a membership to use the library.

Give us a break with the "conspiracy theory" mantra. This isn't even a theory. It's commonplace reality. They want everyone to sign up to a Wikipedia account which comes with other issues.

Also Wikipedia is a monopoly. 9/10 when I search for anything nowadays, Wikipedia is at the top. If I only wanted to search for Wikipedia articles I would go straight to their website.

> There is currently no real European equivalent to the [..] Wikipedia monopoly

8 out of the 10 largest Wikipedias are European languages...

Wikipedia is an American outfit, owned by the American businessman Jimmy Wales. It doesn't matter which language it is in.

Wikipedia is open source software serving public domain content. Wales controls the main fundraising outfit and domain, but the rest is not his IP.

It's an oligarchy in reality and Wikimedia was having a discussion a couple of years ago about implementing the SDGs, which come from the UN and not the public (who are barely aware of them.)

Calling a system that is 90% foss and public domain "owned" by anyone is a bit of a stretch. I can, fully legally, download all the text of Wikipedia for about 130gb and host it myself. Besides, Jimmy Wales is awesome.

Wikipedia does not practice what it preaches. Even the claim "that anyone can edit" is not true.

The parent was talking about the scenario where Europe is forced to create alternative (like China) and that it will lead to a better/wider selection for him (I assume he is in the EU) and my answer is that it will lead to only a European selection.

Interestingly, the only people having a wider selection are the ones outside of EU/US/China as they'll be free to pick up whatever they want.

Possibly. Until recently, anyone who was in tech wanted to move to the US because there was simply more opportunity. Salaries are higher, chances of making it big are higher, failing is often seen as a positive in the US, etc... The adage that the best place to make money is the US and the best place to spend money is the EU still rings true.

The US become less welcoming to immigrants is a great opportunity for the EU, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to take advantage and overcome the structural differences.

https://www.challenge.org/insights/structural-differences-in...

A lot. Have a look: https://european-alternatives.eu/

I am not gonna comment about others since obviously there are a lot but OVH from europe even though it has flaws still feels like it definitely competes with AWS

There are also hetzner,upcloud,netcup and sooo many other small cloud providers too but OVH,Hetzner,Upcloud,netcup do seem to me competitors of AWS

Just running Infrastructure is easy enough. Everyone did it before, we still can do it.

Its practical to use GCP, Azure and AWS for sure but yeah they were always market dominant.

Its probably time to say good buy to an old ally who became demented and hostile to europe :(

create a innovation fund by taxing them

starting at 20%, increasing 1% each month until the "liberation day" tariffs are dropped

the innovation fund should be structured build up local competitors to US hyperscalers

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