Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology | Hacker News Reader

Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology

theconversation.com

>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout

Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.

Ironically, Russia probing defenses in Europe is functioning like Chaos Monkey — revealing vulnerabilities and triggering hardening.

It’s certainly doing the first, not so sure about the second.

The main vulnerability of the Western world isn't technical, it's that we voluntarily surrendered our communication and social fabrics to advertising-driven businesses that will happily host and promote anything as long as it generates engagement. This makes it trivial for foreign agents to sway public opinion where as back in the day influencing media required actual capital and connections.

Unfortunately, a lot of our own people (and especially politicians) make money out of this situation so there's very little incentive to change this. Just look at the reaction every time regulations designed to curtail Big Tech ad-driven monopolies (EU DMA, GDPR, etc) are discussed. Our greed is what makes us vulnerable.

Who is the "we" that you think surrendered control here? Freedom of the press necessitates that anyone can publish freely even if what they publish is foreign propaganda.

I wasn't talking about press, I was talking about how ad-driven social media became effectively the only communication tool and we still refuse to enact/enforce effective regulation to curb its hegemony.

It became the primary communication tool because that is what people chose to use when presented with the alternatives. If you want to force people to use different channels then that is a violation of freedom of the press.

Again I am not talking about press. I am talking about communication tools.

Yes the free market has decided that these tools are the "best" option as long as the negative externalities (such as exposure to malicious actors - foreign or otherwise) are not being priced in. We need adequate regulation to price in such externalities.

For that matter, press and conventional media is subject to many regulations that don't apply to social media. Conventional media wouldn't get away with even a sliver of what social media is allowed to get away with time and time again.

> Again I am not talking about press. I am talking about communication tools.

Which is the entire fucking point of freedom of the press

Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.

I am still not sure why you keep going on about press. I did not refer to press in my comment and I make no opinion on it here.

I am referring to the fact that back in the day communication used to be mediated by domestic, neutral carriers who got paid to carry communication neutrally regardless of source or content.

Nowadays, communication is primarily mediated by a handful of foreign companies that prioritize advertising revenue at all costs and will choose which media to carry and promote based on expected ad revenue. They are effectively acting as pseudo-press without the checks & balances and oversight that actual press is subject to.

> Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.

When’s the last time you saw an obvious scam advertised in a conventional print newspaper or magazine? Now check Facebook or YouTube ads. If such an ad made it through any reputable magazine heads will be rolling and they’d expose themselves to lawsuits, but social media keeps getting a pass.

Now, let’s say you’re a foreign threat actor and want to sway public opinion. You can’t just get in touch with the NYT/etc and ask them nicely. You’d need to buy and cultivate such influence over time and do so covertly because their people would get in trouble if there’s an obvious paper/money trail.

With Facebook? Create a page, make your propaganda video “engaging”, boost it with bot farms for the initial push and then Facebook will happily keep hosting and promoting your propaganda as long as its advertising revenue outweighs the costs of hosting it. That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than buying influence with traditional media.

You have to be joking. Print magazines have always been plastered with shitty scam ads for MLM pyramid schemes, bullshit weight loss treatments, psychic readings, and every other get rich quick scheme and ripoff known to man. And, of course, there were no adblockers. Were you not alive before the internet? You think they weren't full of foreign propaganda too? I'd like to introduce you to my friend AIPAC...

According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.

I mean, I guess the press is freer in Norway but it’s a backwater and no one cares what they say

The current US president cares enough to have writen a letter to the Norwegian PM whining about the Nobel he didn't get and of course, Greenland.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-no...

And you quoted the press of the abysmally free USA…

I suppose you would rather read about it på norsk?

These things are not an inevitable consequence of freedom of the press. Commercially-influenced legislation like the Communications Decency Act, which largely absolves platforms for the content of the material they publish, have pushed us in this direction. One could certainly imagine legislation which puts society's interests first to improve the situation.

The real problem is the almost total capture of the political process by money, which weaponizes the legislative branch against common citizens in the interests of corporate owners.

Being subject to the topic promotion and suppression technologies [1] and bizarre political whims of billionaire media owners is an unusual definition of "freedom."

[1] See for example:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...

All media is subject to the whims of its owners. That's freedom of the press. The only other option is that the government tells the owners what they can and can't publish.

Another option is that the government limits the power individuals can have. How many people control, say, 80% of the media? Do you need more than one hand to count them?

How do you define "control" here? Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.

I’d argue that social media stopped being democratic as it introduced algorithmic content selection. But today perhaps a bigger problem is bot farms shaping public opinion.

Bots don't count as people. They're not represented demographically. They also don't have voting rights. Yet they're spreading propaganda to influence how people vote. So one could argue social media is rather anti democratoc.

Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.

It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.

One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.

But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.

In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.

"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to beg in the streets, to sleep under bridges, and to steal bread.

Yes, Vladimir Lenin is likely one of the most appropriate people to quote on the question of freedom. Maybe only his successor Joseph Stalin is better in that regard.

There are about 50 people on EU sanctions list that tried this, who can't travel, or engage in any normal economic activity.

I think "we" is everyone.

Can you name a single country which meets this definition of "freedom of the press"?

It's not the US, the UK, or any of the EU countries, certainly not Russia, China, or India.

If s/engagement/revenue/ then yes.

The second isn't publicly promoted.

You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.

Why would there be a blackout? Is like hardening against a gas shortage

If the Us imposes sanctions such as "no more login to any Google/Apple/Microsoft/... accounts from EU citizens until they give Greenland".

Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.

I think this particular scenario is far fetched as that would be economic suicide for the US, an empire-ending decision. And while not everyone has backups, many/most of the important companies do so they would eventually recover.

> Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.

I hate that "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" is a thing and that the people suggesting that we have good enough FOSS options when things were being planned out were probably given a dismissive look by the business people who were promised the sky by MS salesmen.

At least that's how I imagine it probably looked, given my own past experience of suggesting PostgreSQL and in the end the project going with Oracle (it's okay when it works, but for those particular projects PostgreSQL would have worked better, given the issues I've seen in the following years). It's the same non-utilitarian / cargo-cult thinking that leads to other solutions like SQLite not being picked when the workload would actually better be suited for it than a "serious" RDBMS with a network in the middle.

Apply the same to server OSes (Windows vs Linux distros and even DEB based distros vs RPM RHEL-compatibles), MS Office vs LibreOffice when you don't even need advanced features and stuff like Slack/Teams vs self-hosting Mattermost or Zulip or whatever. It's not even jumping on untested software, but fairly boring and okay packages (with their limitations known that are objectively often NOT dealbreakers) and not making yourself vendor-locked (hostage).

I guess I could also make the more realpolitik take - use MS, use Oracle, use whatever is the path of least resistance BUT ONLY if you're not making yourself 100% reliant on it. If Microsoft or Google decides they hate you tomorrow, you should still have a business continuity plan. If systems have standby nodes, why not have a basic alternative standby system, or the ability to stand up a Nextcloud instance when needed for example (or the knowledge and training on how to do that)? If people had govt. services before computers being widespread and you can have people processing a bunch of paper forms, then surely if push comes to shove it'd be possible to standup a basic replacement for whatever gets borked while ignoring all of the accidental complexity (even if it'd mean e-mailing PDFs for a while). Unless someone builds their national tax system or ID system on a foreign cloud, then they are absolutely fucked.

I don't think it's easy to replace ENTRA feature-wise with European provider.

Or github if you're using a bit more than self-hosted gitlab can provide.

It's not always about the location, it's usually about features (how it integrates into other hardware/software) rarely prices.

For example, can you suggest firewalls for offices that aren't either American or Israeli? We'd need something to replace Palo Alto, Bluecoat, Fortigate and Juniper. Also it'd be good to replace Cisco VPNs to be honest.

But it kind of must be feature parity, because (European) regulators hold our balls over hot coals.

Sophos

By gods, no....

But I take your answer as provided in the good faith.

EMP attack

There’s no such thing

The nuke part is optional, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...

that said, there have been multiple past nuclear EMP orientated tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

results vary by location (earth's mag field) and pre hardening of infrastructure.

Thermonuclear weapon detonated in orbit

In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude. "US big tech is so entrenched we'll never get away". "European cloud will never be good enough". "There's nothing like Microsoft 365". At my work they don't even want to think about alternatives.

I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.

Everyone has been going gung ho about Canadian PM speech but the banger one for me personally is the Belgian PM. He said it best “Being a happy vassal state is one thing, being a miserable slave is another”. Europe deserves every bit what’s coming to them.

Also the Canadian MP is involved in deploying surveillance[0] on his own country so I am not sure why people are giving him props. He is part of the problem.

[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...

People need to stop buying into propaganda.

Surveillance is a different issue to the one he talked about, which is geopolitical and international instead of domestic (surveillance).

all nations around the world are currently increasing their surveillance capability... And it's worth keeping in mind that at least some of us see that as an issue, that's actually not a broadly accepted fact. There are a lot of people that don't see an issue with it.

And you'll be able to find a topic you disagree with with all politicians, if you discredit everything they say afterwards, you're essentially left holding your ears closed to all dialog.

No. Surveillance is exactly the main issue that is surrounding all of this scaling up abuse of governance locally and globally.

A man that is in directly involved in surveilling his own people does not have a leg to stand on in the Geo political arena. And to think otherwise is a massive mistake. Stop propping up people that do deserve it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Surveillance underlines this issue so no its not the same. Why would anybody listen to a known bad actor, its directly related to the problem

It's about a lot more than surveillance. It's about sovereignty, continuity of government, resisting sabotage, countering influence programs, and so on.

Can you elaborate how this statement led you to your conclusion?

I don’t understand your question. I’m assuming you are asking about the part “Europe deserves”. It’s simple really - for decades now Europe has been relying on US for military support. It’s a cardinal sin to do so if one wants an equivalent seat at the negotiating table. But the EU just can’t agree amongst themselves. Mercosur takes 30 years, India defence agreement has taken 20. The warning signs were there during 2016 but conveniently brushed. EU either acts together for the common good even if they don’t like something or continues to be bureaucratic, irrelevant old person. It’s slow agony at the moment.

The EU couldn't agree amongst themselves because the US (and its biggest vassal, the UK when it was in the EU) did everything to prevent such agreement.

We'll see what the States that were the most against any form of common European defense will do now that the US has proven unreliable. And if they are still under the delusion that the current US policies will go away, then it's time for Two-Speed Europe.

Don't blame this on the UK. UK leave vote was a few months before the 2016 election, so the timing is convenient. But let's not pretend that it was anything but complacency (that was shattered by Trump) is to blame here.

I disagree, Europe has not been ”relying” on US military support.

It is true that most(not all, for example Switzerland, Finland Poland all have excellent militaries) European countries have been underfunding their military in stark contrast to the war mongering nation across the Atlantic, but I would not call that “relying on”, just a delusion that we lived in an eternal peace.

FWIW I served my country Sweden for three years, including a tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan. I have been against this recklessness for as long as I can remember.

Also, the EU is hardly irrelevant, stop the hyperbole…

It is subtle, but different

Thank you for your service

> But the EU just can’t agree amongst themselves.

Because "the EU" is not a country. It is a bloc. People that speak lf EU here are very delusional about what it is, and seemingly never understand its function.

People speak of the EU as if it was going to be as nimble as a unified country with a single government structure. It is not. It is a bloc composed of 27 countries each with its own government structure, interests, budgets, industries, culture, and so on.

Also - defense. The EU has no army. Each of its 27 countries have their own separated armies, and make their own decisions.

In a post WW2 scenario, where most of Europe needed to rebuild, outsourcing defense to an ally was a correct decision (especially considering that escalating power in the preceeding decades only led to war).

Perhaps the current state of affairs lead to a more federalized EU, who knows.

This stuff goes back to Yalta, so just forget parotting these ideas. The US never wanted Europe to be self reliant concerning security, up until Trump and the Paypal mafia. Fortunately De Gaulle gave the Americans the finger during his presidency because he knew better. Not being on the losing side meant that Framce wasn't under US "protection" and could develop their own nuclear program and military hardware, as opposed to Germany (and Japan).

USA got military support from Europe. Not vice versa.

USA is pure aggressor here. USA becomming fascist is not fault of Europe, so no, Europe does not deserve to be attacked by USA.

USA asked Europe for help, got it, used it for own benefit and then attacks Europe with lies and threats.

Please do not mix up the mention of the USA with your view on the current administration, and also your view of the many silent servicemember who will have strong opinions about a few things.

If they're so opposed to it, why are they so silent?

their job is the opposite of making noise, and they are extremely aware of the value of being economical with ordnance

You are just swallowing the Trump line whole. Try being a hegemon without Ramstein and all the other bases.

> try being a hegemon without...

The hypothetical should really be on the vassal or it is just rethorics.

This is the time to call each other bluffs and keep revealing the naked emperors

Here in Belgium voting is mandatory, so the clowns we have are who the public decided were the best candidates. The only excuse we can make is that single-vote list-PR is worse than ranked voting.

Genuinely, what's the sell of Microsoft 365? I get MS Word, Excel whatever lock in but what is their cloud actually adding that can't be substituted?

Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.

I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.

It's adding the property that it's an all-in-one turnkey solution. Which is an extremely attractive proposition compared to having a dozen separate tools. And to paraphrase the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

Well maybe the old adage need to change

He did change it when paraphrasing, just now :-)

I'm sure it'll be paraphrased to another company in another 30 years.

M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.

There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.

I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.

> with zero competition

Google Workspace with Chromebooks. No windows endpoints getting a virus or ransomware or some other malware. It's all about the bubble you're in. Mine, windows isn't even needed anymore for games because SteamOS is sufficiently there for the games we play.

Not helping with your US/big tech dependence though

It's roughly the same price (or even more expensive) and doesn't include Outlook... which is THE crack application for all those windows addicts.

You could absolutely nail the document compatibility aspect and it still wouldn't be enough because of freaking Outlook.

10 years ago I would have agreed with you but these days.. Outlook has been crapped on so much that Google Workspaces are competitive imo

Agreed, the 'new' outlook destroyed everything that was good about outlook. Which wasn't even all that good by the way, it was just the best but that says more about the competition than about outlook itself.

> what's the sell of Microsoft 365

> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap

You answered your own question.

Look I get that, but the parent was talking about there being just no alternative to 365 when it seems like nearly every product in the suite has plenty of competitors.

It does seem like you can put your money where your mouth is in this case. You can now put a literal dollar value on how much you actually care about being tied to US tech. And it's like $20-40/user/month. Which isn't nothing but it's not untenable amounts of money.

The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?

Anyone can edit it and it also might get randomly corrupted. It’s crap, especially if some people are on Macs.

I haven't used any but there are several it seems: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/google-docs

NextCloud looks ok.

For some reason I thought it was open to the public, but France also maintains a full sovereign cloud office suite for use by civil servants: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en

Maybe one day they'll open it up publicly.

Open-Xchange supports collaborative editing of spreadsheets. Mailbox.org uses that for their email service, and you get access to their online office suite when you subscribe. I can't speak to the quality of the shared editing, but their online office suite is fine for basic stuff.

Zoho.

And frankly, MS Word is really bad. So are pretty much of all their services.

Not sure whether Excel is still good.

Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

For everybody else, Libreoffice is fine as far as functionality is concerned. UI might be another story, but that's worth getting over anyway, especially since a lot of people for whom this is a problem, would also have problems with getting away from Windows as a whole, just from buttons moving and things being different in general.

> Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

Yes!! Misusing Excel as a database is really part of the problem. It also causes so many issues. Having multiple data elements within one cell. Someone overtyping a formula in a column of 200.000 values leading to one cell no longer being updated. Needing 32GB of RAM just to edit a spreadsheet with a measly 500.000 rows.

All stuff that never would happen with a real database. Microsoft never really put much effort into making Access approachable.

You could do this in Pandas with Python under like 400mb of ram

Porting involved Excel sheets into web apps has been a decent chunk of my dev career.

What works best in those situations, in your experience?

Do you recreate a spreadsheet, use an existing online service, and/or create a database with proper logic, etc.? If the latter, how do users handle the UI change, and can they have an ease of creation similar to what Excel provides?

In my experience it's mostly about understanding business requirements of people using said excel sheets and then replicating it to CRUD WebApps while keeping capabilities of importing said sheets and exporting them so user flows are unharmed till a wholesale transition is mandated.

Good source of money for contractors as OP said.

Bad how? Works just fine for everything I have ever needed to do with it. I'm not a power user, though, but my point is neither are 95% of users and the basic functionality is just fine.

I find the UI clunky and a clear regression from older versions.

A family member has recently written a book on the latest version of MS Word. It's not their first book written with MS Word. It's also not the first time I give a hand to make sure that typography matches publisher requirements. I find that using style sheets has become more complicated, more limited and better hidden with successive versions of MS Word.

Contrast with Apple Pages, in which style sheets are so well integrated in the UI that you barely need to think when you create a new rule.

In fact, I find that even LibreOffice is much better at style sheets these days.

I remember the (not necessarily good) old days when I used MS Word to create character sheets for my tabletop RPGs, or in-game newspapers, etc. These days, I would hate doing this with MS Word – and not just because I'm an open-source aficionado.

Being good is one thing, being compatible with existing files full of VBA macros is another.

Although MS themselves apparently don't realize that, considering how they push the web version which doesn't support them?

Oh, the web version doesn't support them? I hadn't realized that.

It doesn't even support many basic functions of the office apps.

MS was working hard on creating feature parity but at some point they just dropped everything and gave up.

I think you're misreading the source of the defeatism. It's clear what European leaders should do if they want to compete with US big tech. They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.

To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.

If Europe were capable of doing this, Europe would not need to do this. They'd already have active and vibrant tech scene compared to US one - EU is bigger than US by population, and certainly not less smart - in fact, a lot of people live in EU and work for US tech companies. So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not? They decided their political model must work differently, even at the cost of not having big tech. So now they don't have big tech. And no amount of committee meetings is going to change that, even if all governments would want it really, really hard.

> So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not?

Because having "big tech" is a sign that the government has completely failed to enforce anti-trust laws and allowed dangerous concentration of power to occur. It's a symptom of a disease not some desirable goal.

The EU doesn't need or want "big tech", it just needs "tech". It needs generous public funding for infrastructure, open source, and it should aim to build upon open standards whenever possible.

We don't need domestic monopolies that are just going to fuck us in the same way that US corporations fuck Americans while we all pretend to enjoy it for the sake of looking superior to the other camp.

> The EU doesn't need or want "big tech", it just needs "tech".

Why doesn't it already have "tech" and has to resort to governmental action to procure one? I mean, it is obviously very easy to acquire just "tech" without government completely failing to enforce laws and population being fucked by corporations, and it is a testament to how dumb Americans really are that they failed to do that. But Europeans are not dumb, so why they didn't do it by now? Why we are discussing the matter now instead of just pointing to clearly superior open-standard non-fucking European "just tech" as a superior alternative to American "big tech"?

Let's not forget Big tech is also fueled by the rest of the world and Europe.

If you walk into a bank in Europe and have some money to invest they will sell you mostly debt and the "Magnificent Seven" or a funds with those stocks inside.

The EU is ridiculous when it says it want to built an alternative because it's entire financial/banking system end up fueling the saving of its citizen into those companies.

This is also why we end up in that absurd situation where the Mag 7 make up 1/3 of the S&P 500 market cap.

If the EU is serious about offering an alternative (which I doubt) it needs to offer a sustainable path for its people to invest in it. Not do another fake program where insiders will grab some public money and get nowhere (it has been tried for 25 years).

> If the EU is serious about offering an alternative (which I doubt) it needs to offer a sustainable path for its people to invest in it.

Did US government do something like that? If US has some attractive investments and EU does not, why don't they? I mean, EU citizens would probably like to invest in EU companies, much better than in US companies, they are not some self-haters to refuse a good investment just because it's in EU, right? So why don't they invest there? Why do they invest in US instead and there is a need in a special action - not taken prior to now - to enable them to invest in the EU?

It’s not really comparable though. The EU isn’t a unified single language market, and its GDP and per capita GDP are much smaller.

Language is not a huge deal - if the French and the Spanish and the Dutch can use Facebook, they could use Eurobook if that existed, as well. The problem of course would be, if they made a committee to build Eurobook, they'd spend 5 years in meetings to ensure every country and every language is absolutely equally represented and then would build something that no speaker of any language would use.

As for GDP, EU overall GDP is only slightly less than US GDP, so it could very well sustain the industry of comparable size. Per capita GDP is indeed lower, but I'm not sure how that precludes creation of something like Eurobook.

EU GDP is about 2/3 US GDP. That’s a very significant difference. Per capita income is probably less important than average and median disposable income, which is much higher in the US and has an obvious impact on B2C companies.

FB was incubated in a single unified market before it really spread to the EU. It’s harder for companies to take off and reach tech giant reach with the much smaller individual markets in the EU.

It’s much harder to build a product that appeals to everyone from the Irish to the Bulgarians, and to advertise to them than it is to do the same for everyone in the US. And it’s not just the tech companies, the individual content creators on the platform have the same comparative problems.

There were Eurobooks and they were pretty well bought out by Facebook. Hyves and so on. The online CV networks were bought by LinkedIn.

The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy.

Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.

"The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy."

Well, that sounds easy! I wonder why no one else ever thought of it. Good thing there are geniuses like you around.

People think of it all the time. But there’s a giant system full of people whose careers and incomes are linked to the complexity, not just government bureaucrats but also lawyers, accounting firms, expensive consultancies, etc. It’s a hard sell because it would decimate whole industries that revolving around servicing the complexity.

But it’s one of the thing the EU could do to win in new industries.

Honestly if the EU became more innovation and entrepreneur friendly I think they’d kick America’s ass. Tons of smart people, and the positive side of the social safely net is that it derisks entrepreneurship. America is full of would be founders who can’t afford to take the leap since they could lose their health care, etc.

> making the creation of billionaires a policy goal

Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.

In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.

The causation is in the other direction. Innovative entrepreneurs cause wealth to become highly concentrated, and cause their companies to distort the societies they're embedded in, by the act of producing goods and services that a large number of people want to buy.

Bezos is actually a great example, because he made almost his entire US$250B fortune from unrealized stock appreciation rather than salary or new awards. Even the most extreme wealth tax proposals I've seen wouldn't get him down to US$25B. The US could only have achieved that target by restricting how much Amazon is allowed to innovate and grow.

I disagree. They could for example make it mandatory to grant more stock options to employees so the wealth they are generating is more broadly spread beyond the founder/CEO. I’m sure there are plenty of other approaches that would still handsomely reward innovation and growth but prevent where we ended up today.

> They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?

Yes. They shouldn't take their words as gospel, of course, they'd want to find some current upstarts as well. But the idea that successful businesspeople are just snatching pieces of the pie and have nothing useful to say is exactly the attitude that's incompatible with an innovative tech sector.

No, the last thing we should do is transform Europe into a neoliberal stronghold like America. It's not all about making money. It's about creating a civilisation for citizens, not business. Business is just a means to an end.

The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)

I would hedge most businesses don’t need the full offering of 365. You could get away with an email provider, a way to author documents and some file storage which are abundantly offered on other platforms like infomaniak.

They might not need it if they started today. But once you have a few hundred TBs of data in Sharepoint, you've foreclosed any alternatives.

I'd imagine this attitude would start to disappear as soon as alternatives start being used. It's already happening to some extent, but it needs to trickle down into the general populace. The relevant names just aren't in people's minds yet (although there definitely are areas where there aren't exact 1-to-1 replacements available).

"In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude."

I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.

I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!

Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.

> I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.

And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.

Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.

It’s amazing how complacent and weak-willed the European populace and political leaders are. Quite the contrast to Canada.

What the hell are you talking about? Canada is in a pretty bad state themselves, just as much as we are in the U.S.

Back when the danger was natural and physical - how much defeatism was there in Holland about building the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works ?

Why the difference?

Those were different times. Right now Holland has been governed by oligarchs for the last 30 years. The country is unrecognisable.

Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder

> In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude

The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.

Just wait until he asks for total control of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten.

Even if MAGA goes away in 3 years when Trump (hopefully) goes away, the US will remain an oligarchy. Billionaire's interests comes before citizens' interests. This is because of a supreme court decision that allowed billionaires to buy elections. For this reason, even though I am American, I'd like to see European alternatives to US apps and services, because they are more likely to serve my interests.

The big picture isn't that different in Europe. Most EU countries are also oligarchies, just with a lot more bloody histories and national traumas. The social safety net is kept to the level of remembrance of those traumas. Once people start forgetting them, the oligarchs will take away the rights one by one.

The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.

I think that's overwhelmingly false. Wealth concentration isn't nearly as high in Europe.

Wealth concentration doesn’t make his point false at all

This is a tired old trope that really has no basis in reality. There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed. In two out of the last 3 elections, the major corporate money backed candidate lost. The government is run by the 24 hour news cycle and the attention economy, not by the decree of billionaires. We operate firmly under the tyranny of the majority.

> There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed

Just for anyone else reading this comment, it’s pretty wildly incorrect.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/business/trump-administra...

From your own link:

> CBO estimates that as result of P.L. 119-21, U.S. households, on average, will see an increase in the resources available to them over the 2026– 2034 period. The changes in resources will not be evenly distributed among households. The agency estimates that, in general, resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.

That's hardly a picture of billionaires pulling the strings

Going down with this ship, huh?

Care to quote the second one? The one whose byline is “Trump giving hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the ultra wealthy”?

Or will you dismiss that too because it doesn’t explicitly say billionaires?

Of course I quoted the CBO instead of some attention grabbing drivel from journalists. Of course tax cuts "give hundreds of billions" to the ultra wealthy because that's who pays all the taxes. It isn't evidence of your childish conspiracy theory that we are all governed by a cabal of billionaires buying elections.

We could argue that there didn't need to be change, because favoring the wealthy was already the policy: Wealth concentration was already at historic highs. Taxes were already very low, including capital gains tax (the primary source of income for the very wealthy - return on capital is the primary income of capitalists), social safety net relatively underfunded including widespread lack of health care, social and economic mobility dropping, access to higher education relied primarily on family wealth and not grades, access to housing dropping, etc. State governments brag about no income tax, which means they rely on regressive taxes to pay for the common good.

Regardless, I think the parent comment facts are wrong and there there have been massive changes benefitting the wealthy: There have been massive tax cuts for them, reduction in enforcement of financial laws (e.g., by the SEC, etc.), lagging financial regulation of private equity, destruction of consumer protection (such as the CFPB), massive changes in policy and action to benefit the fossil fuel industry including use of the US military, ... there was a big tax law change to benefit SV founders that was advocated here on HN, protectionist measures increasing prices for consumers and giving the benefits to corporations, etc.

> the major corporate money backed candidate lost

Elon Musk spent $290 million to elect Trump. Are you saying that had no impact? How do you know this?

It's widely reported that the democrats spent over twice as much money as Trump. Both parties have their share of big donors, this isn't new, nor is it specific to Elon. It's been this way a long, long time.

Are those shares equal? It's true that both parties got votes in every state, but that doesn't tell use much.

Ok at this point I don't know what you're talking about anymore.

Zukerberg spent almost twice that much to get Biden elected.

https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/118th-congress/hou...

Both sides have their supporters. Everyone knows that. I'm not going to take your bait to prove a negative. In both 2016 and 2024 Trump raised less money than his opponent (massively less in 2016) and still won.

That was a different election.

Trump raised and spent less money in 2024. Full stop.

Right, he didn't have as many people giving $10 to $25 instead he had a few billionaires ploughing millions into superpacks.

I don’t like trump. I very much dislike trump.

I don’t see how your point disagrees with what I said.

Mostly though: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-billionaires-publicly-ba...

Headline: More billionaires are publicly backing Kamala Harris than Donald Trump

Citizens United is precisely why we have a majority of politicians following the will of the donor class rather than a majority of actual voters. It’s why we lack universal healthcare, for example, despite 62% of Americans supporting it a year ago, with a similar number supporting raising the minimum wage.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Regarding the last national election:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fift...

The Court’s decision and others that followed shaped the 2024 election to a greater degree than any that came before it. Most notably, Donald Trump substantially trailed Kamala Harris in traditional campaign donations, which are subject to legal limits and must be disclosed. Yet he was able to compensate for this disadvantage by outsourcing much of his campaign to super PACs and other outside groups funded by a handful of wealthy donors. While such groups had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in previous cycles, this was the first time they successfully took on many of the other core functions of a general election presidential campaign, such as door-to-door canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. Their activities unquestionably would have been illegal before Citizens United.

We didn't have universal health care before CU either. It wasn't included in the ACA, before CU. It failed when Clinton tried in the 90s, and it failed every other time anyone tried before that too. You are just using Citizens United as a bogey man for a policy you don't like. You can complain about Trump all you like, but Harris didn't have much less dark money than he did. And Clinton / Biden had double what Trump did in 2016 and 2020. https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race

Universal health care wasn't as popular back then as it is now, so that's to be expected:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx

This isn't about who wins campaigns -- this is about who influences the issues they campaign on. Since the Citizens United decision politicians have had to switch to the Super PAC model to be competitive, which gives drastically more power to dark money donors. And unsurprisingly, as cited in that study, the influence of average citizens on politics has been completely surpassed by businesses and economic elites:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

2000 - 64% 2025 - 64%

Doesn't matter anyway because the poll doesn't mean shit. Most people are idiots and will answer the poll completely differently if you actually give them a realistic question like "would you accept a major tax increase to get universal healthcare?"

The problem are not Trump or the billionaires, but the majority of the American people who support them. They knew what they were getting.

No they didn't know what they were getting. They didn't and can't look beyond the price of eggs at their local Kroger. To a large extend this election was decided by the price of eggs.

"The price of eggs" was direct result of the screwed response to the pandemics, all that panicked senseless running around like beheaded chickens and the total dismissal of reality.

Populists come to power when the ruling elites bankrupt by corruption and ineptitude the trust that the populace had had in them.

A permanent cult-following minority does want a white christian nationalist dictatorship.

Everyone else are low information voters.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-roles-sup...

It likely isn't over with him. Trump is just the frontman and possibly fall guy for project 2025/federalist society. They are his entire cabinet and their plan was to replace all government workers with their own loyal people.

Then invest in and attract people to build it. I'd move to Europe if the salary was competitive.

IMO start by funding the living crap out of open source projects. Mandate that hardware sold in the EU comes with unlocked bootloaders and documentation sufficient to develop drivers from.

Relax IP protections so developers are allowed to reverse engineer products and build derivative works from them (extending the life of, facilitating compatibility).

Ban security systems used by big companies that enforce OS conformity (like kernel based anti-cheat, or banks disabling tap-to-pay on phones running beta android/rooted).

Double down on platform interoperability - e.g. Allow me to write a chat app that uses Facebook messenger as a back end.

Hey-ho there you go, European competitors to Android/iOS will pop up overnight. Asahi Linux and other OSes will get a shot in the arm (ha).

> Then invest in and attract people to build it. I'd move to Europe if the salary was competitive.

True that. Also in many countries in Europe, IT jobs are not "special" anymore and salaries are similar to the median.

There's no profit in technology so there's no interest in starting a business leading to low demand for workers.

Stimulate the sector directly through investment and indirectly by enabling competition and the demand for jobs will increase - following with it salaries.

Cash injection isn't enough though, if you don't break down monopolistic barriers, businesses will fail regardless

Isn't the salary difference more about differences between Silicon Valley (or Big tech in US) and Europe?

One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).

Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.

Yes, what europe needs is way more regulation

I'm talking about provisions to increase competition in the free market - not classical "corporations bad" regulations.

Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft thrive off competition barriers.

For example;

Why is Asahi Linux on the MacBook not daily drivable? Because we can't write drivers and require non-scalable geniuses to reverse engineer hardware from photos of circuit boards.

Why can't you install an alternative to Android or iOS on your phone? Because we can't write drivers and/or the hardware blocks you from even trying.

Preventing monopolies from ring-fencing empowers the free market through competition enablement. Ultimately, it's impractical to tell us non Americans that you need to build a hardware and software stack entirely from scratch and have that be competitive within a few years.

Without those barriers - perhaps the EU would have a homegrown mobile operating system. Perhaps Linux desktop adoption would be bostered enough to justify further investment in OSS initiatives.

Your android phone is made by Koreans.

Yes, anti competitive practices are good for business regardless of geography.

Americans may be the biggest offenders but the pro-competition rules should apply to all.

Personally, I have the skills and interest to write a custom OS for my phone (Linux, custom DE, and waydroid for Android compat) - but it's literally impossible to due to anti competitive practices (I can't reverse engineer drivers and clean room driver development is practically impossible).

Similar story for my router, my "smart" TV and arm64 MacBook pro (or even an arm64 surface laptop).

My Android phone is made by Chinese and all the patents are held by Americans

The tax authority in Norway alone employs 500 full-time software developers. If all of Europe followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles for all publicly funded development - and prioritized open formats + protocols + interoperability - it would within only a few years be possible to greatly improve software reliability for all nations.

UK government standards say that government software should be open source by default https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...

That is a document. Show me reality.

They have 1.5k public repositories here at least: https://github.com/orgs/alphagov/repositories?type=all

Collection of RFCs: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-rfcs

Open design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk

And individual departments can/do have their own GitHub org. Eg the Office of National Statistics. Some work I did ~10 years ago can be found there! https://github.com/onsdigital

Next thing we need is for them to host their own Git infra, to avoid dependency on US Github.

Lol remind me who owns Github again?

Why do you think this is substantial? The software built in these repos is not tied to GitHub.

Git is decentralized and using a self-hosted instance of Gitea / Forgejo will give you a replacement for the essential parts of GitHub. GitHub is absolutely replaceable.

> followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles

Has this actually produced any tangible results?

I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.

I'm hopeful that it can work if:

- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".

- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.

Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.

One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

EU countries are great at adopting principles. And saying things. And writing documents. And passing regulations.

Meanwhile, very country still runs on Microsoft and IBM.

I wonder if it would work if the governments provide some tax incentives for open source contributions similar to charity donations as well.

Prompt: generate 15k in tax-deductible open source code contributions.

Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.

I meant something like, as a deduction from payroll taxes as a proportion of worked hours by the employee if he works on open source projects. Obviously not perfect but I don't think it's much worse than the existing R&D type schemes.

Soon: Github is filled with even more garbage in order to collect tax refunds. lol

French gov open source is a joke, single repo dump once from a zip file given by the contractor and then nothing. And that's when the source is provided, France Identité is closed source and Play Integrity dependent.

> the contractor

If there is a single policy change I could pick for public spending on IT it would be to forbid outsourcing to “contractors” and thinking of software delivery as “projects”

Everyone wants to, and not just from the US, but China too. Digital imperialism is real but nobody is confident yet how to effectively fight it. India especially is kind of trapped because our IT service industry is deeply entwined with the US and our government doesn't know how to safely untangle it from the US without harming our economy.

No they don't... most people just want cheap stuff that works.

With the current speed of things, Europe will need a hundred years to effectively and totally set free from the US digital dominance. You will know if this timeframe gets shorter if a torrent of change, news and enthusiasm floods almost any European company, either IT or not, mobilize vertical and horizontal government agencies and a large share of the population actively participates.

I've got no horse in this race, but, didn't they say the same things during the current US president's first term? Both about technology and defense. What came out of that?

Dane here.

Feelings are different now. IIRC, the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American.

It has become broadly clear, that it is about self preservation.

> the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

That sounds like performative bullshit though? A "feel good" thing just like plastics "recycling".

Are people actually choosing to pay fair price for a non-American product? Are people choosing to invest in or start local competitors to those American products? Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? And so on.

Looks like the US exports were at all time highs last year... Pulled by gold and other precious metals:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports

I couldn't find data to actually answer your question. I just found this that is surprising in a multitude of ways and absolutely useless :)

Every useful report seems to end at 2023.

>Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%?

Why should they do that?

Because countries who didn't do that managed to corner the whole IT services market, while countries that do are still waiting for a miracle to happen.

Talent that is capable of building the next AWS can easily make 6 figures at AWS and not lose more than half of that in taxes... you need to do something to attract/retain such talent here.

Ok but parent's question stands: why didn't you get the message the first time?

not op, but maybe something along the lines of, "fool me once..." etc.?

>the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

And the app is running on a phone with an OS coming from which country?

Like sibling said, this feels like performative BS.

Yeah, the fact that Europe hasn't been able to develop another OS in the last few months/years is proof that nothing can change. Stop trying and wasting time; any effort in this direction is futile.

Well, technically... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla

The wheels of Eurocrats turn slowly. (That was meant to be bureaucrats but autocorrect won this time. :D )

First time round, Trump would consistently say lots of worrying stuff, but people in the US administration would stop him from following through.

This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.

The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"

Support a dictator, and one day he will come for you.

we in America would love to see Europe break free of its suicidal regulatory straitjacket and do enough innovation and building to carry its own weight

> we in America would love to see Europe break free of its suicidal regulatory straitjacket and do enough innovation and building to carry its own weight

This is false. Europe innovating and "carrying its own weight" means less market share for American companies, less American middlemen tapping into money moving throughout the European economy, less ability for American intelligence agencies to access European information, and less soft power from the threat of cutting off American technology.

Maybe he should have clarified “we (with a spine and moral compass) in America”. Obviously he didn’t mean leeches like you.

We in EU like our regulations protecting people and data. That is not what have stopped us from creating Microsoft2.0.

Well they've finally awaken. Better late than never. I think this is one of the best decisions China got right.

Are they, though? Trump has been trying to wake up Europe since 2016. Russia INVADING a european country was still not enough. You think a spat over greenland will finally do the trick?

Put me down as skeptical.

Like the life-long couch potato who wants to exercise daily and really get into shape...there is that dratted gap between "wants to" and "does"

Have they tried more regulation of the kind where your investment agreement has to be fully read out loud and in person by the notary to all parties?

At this point they’d be insane not to.

Headline could be “every country wants to end all reliance on US” and it would be the sane thing to do.

Including the US. I don't want to be dependent on this stuff any more than anybody else does.

This is the point of time in history where the people usually start a revolution. Do that.

This is one of the things where the nature of the modern United States makes it hard. I routinely go around telling people that the current regime in Washington is illegitimate, nobody should obey them or listen to their lies, and that I look forward to the day they're ripped from their thrones and tossed in prison. In most places and times saying that would make me a revolutionary, but in the US it's not even arguably a crime.

Usually, it's a crime when people do stuff. Complaining that the government is bad is free in almost all democracies.

What counts as doing stuff? Minneapolis has been hitting the streets for days trying to chase a major federal agency out of Minnesota, a cause which I and my elected representatives publicly support. But it's a huge country, Minneapolis is thousands of miles away from me, and outside of airport security I haven't personally seen an agent of the federal government in years. To me, following federal agents around blowing whistles at them and yelling that they'd better leave town seems at least a little revolutionary - the feds certainly think so, they murdered someone for doing it this morning. But it’s also unambiguously permitted under US law.

Exactly. I live in the US but I'd like to switch from US apps and services controlled by US oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Zuckerberg to European alternatives.

Then you should do that.

I just moved all my hosting and domains out of the US after 15 years of good service.

It's more than just internet technology, though. Europe has no digital sovereignty at all. Every operating system is in US hands, most office and business software, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, all social media commonly used, and so on. The list is endless.

> Every operating system is in US hands

Desktop Linux is (becoming) usable for a normal person just in time, I was surprised how easily a non-technical friend switched over to Bazzite (immutable fedora with gaming extras).

> Visa, Mastercard, Paypal

The EU has already been working on a "Digital Euro" for a while

> all social media commonly used

I'm hoping more decentralized social media continues to pick up steam

This is pretty basic tech to replicate if it's needed though. It wasn't needed before so we just used what was there. But crazy to think the place you spawned from 2k years ago couldn't make another basic payment system if it was important lol.

It's not a technical problem (well, it is, but not primarily). It's a social problem. Replicating a technology is one thing. Getting thousands and thousands of organizations to migrate is in a whole different universe difficulty-wise. The costs would be astronomical.

Libre software should be used regardless. And the switching cost with it is still not low but drastically lower.

Open source is basically sovereign (if Russia can use it), so there do exist functional alternatives for most of these things. It's mostly from inertia and network effects that the American ones are used.

Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system and Android app store once they got kicked out of the US-based competitors?

>Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system

The MIR payment system started functioning in 2015, long before Visa/Mastercard pulled out of Russia

>Android app store

Initially there was some fragmentation because several companies raced to develop "Russia's #1 answer to Google Play Store" but everyone eventually settled on RuStore developed by VK (Russia's Facebook).

Generally, Russia already had replacements for most major American services long before 2022, and with better market penetration: Google => Yandex, Meta => VK, Uber => Yandex Taxi, Amazon/eBay/Craigslist => Ozon/Avito/Wildberries, etc. Lack of own app store was more like an oversight. Europe is at least 20 years late in the game.

This is just ignorance. And I would say that it is likely that Microsoft ditches Windows for Linux within 20 years.

Sorry but that reply is verging on the delusional and it's ironic, if not typical for social media, that you accuse me of ignorance. Linux vs Windows doesn't even matter. I'm a European who has been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 20 years and I know that the majority of popular Linux distros are mostly in US hands. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding and I wasn't clear enough about the scope of my comment. I meant it to apply to a situation in which the US is really no longer trustworthy and Europe needs some almost complete independence, not just about increasing digital sovereignty a little bit away from US products.

If there was a real conflict between the US and Europe, whether an open conflict or "cold war" type, you could be absolutely certain that every supply chain you're using is going to be mostly under US control. Open source is irrelevant for that issue, you're not compiling your own Linux distro and all software and your compiler toolchain and use your own repo hosting (and switch off all undocumented backdoors in your CPU's "management" engine). Funny enough, even if you did that, the hardware on which you run all this is almost certainly fully under US control. Guess where American Megatrends, Phoenix, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Intel are located. The same for every phone operating system. Binary blobs nowadays either come from China or from the US and their chip manufacturers (e.g. in Taiwan).

The scariest part of US internet dominance isn’t vendor lock-in, it’s executive branch chaos engineering.

Most of this stuff is routine technology now. There's no reason for it to be centralized.

Things are moving fast right now.

But one thing you have to understand is that being reliant on US tech and defence industry was seen as something very positive up till now. Heck most EU countries even let US/NSA tap our internet data. We bought US fighters jets mostly not for the specific jets but for being on good terms with the US.

We all knew that US screwed us a bit, like probably practicing industrial espionage against us as well as collecting data on our citizens, but we let that slip for being a part of the US security umbrella.

I would say that is one reason why we did not push for our own word processors and OSes.

The US was also very good at utilizing this relationship, buying up initiatives (remember Skype). Don't know if this was a strategy or not.

I suspect that this is going to change now trough public opinion and regulations. I made the switch from Anthropic to Mistral last week. One great thing with GDPR is that we can not place PII in US services, that have been very good for our own Software industry.

Does the EU regime grant its subjects independence from chat control? Or do bureaucrats try to force it on the sovereign again and again?

2025: EU bans Huawei because is China tech 2026: EU bans BigTechs because is USA tech 2027: EU blackout

> Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology

Yeah, right. ROTFL. With all NGOs sponsored by the US, which sustain all political parties in Europe, this will be verry, verry difficult.

A long ongoing discussion;

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As they should. It’s an incredible opportunity to develop technology natively and by extension wealth. The US has proven in this one year that it’s not to be trusted let alone relied upon. Unfortunately the tide once set in motion cannot be u done and the damage done in this one year is irreparable, may be now the tech billionaires will speak up and to use a phrase from Carney - take the sign down from their windows

I think they should. Let’s kick off some meaningful economic growth in Europe and provide a counter to the increasingly hegemonic, anti-human US tech oligarchs that have reaped all of the financial rewards of algorithmic radicalization and surveillance capitalism for the past 20 or so years. Maybe Europe can imagine something better.

That would require some hard choices and actual hard work. It’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.

I don't know, you might be underestimating how much damage the orange in charge is really doing to the interests of the US. Change is slow, and the subtle things set in motion are always perceived too late. A simple example would be a small county in germany saving 5+ million a year thanks to moving away from microsoft. Add that to the budget of the many (largely european) opensource projects out there , and you can see things can shift, slowly, but rapidly once noticed.

No, I just think we’re underestimating how bad it’s gonna get. The lag of understanding is real.

People are still waffling. It’s got to get bad enough there won’t be any waffling.

Europe needs to roll back all of the socialism if it wants to compete with the US and China. European tech is never going to keep pace if the people who build it only work 35 hours a week and take a year of paternity leave every time they have a kid.

With decades of education cuts, top STEM researchers leaving the country, and immigration coming to a halt, I think you overestimate the future competitive position of the US.

No we do not need to roll back on our humanity. The US population however really need to wake up and start unionize and vote for politicians that are not big orange incompetent babies.

How do they compete for actual tech then? Like Airbus.

- 35h a week, doesn’t prevent engineers from working more legally (most do) - with the age of AI code velocity is no more about time spent, but fresh brain - And much much more important, it is significantly more efficient to have an employee 10 year in one place than 2 years in 5 places. What could explain higher US turnover than europe, you think?

Here’s the difference between US and Europe: in US tech, productivity gains due to AI will lead to lower employment and higher expectations for the remaining employees. Salaries will remain the same and any increases in profit will of course go straight to the capital owning class. It will continue to be great for a vanishingly small number of people. On the contrary, Europe’s “socialism” makes them well-prepared to deliver the same level of productivity with AI using more people working fewer hours. And their “socialist” attitude toward where that value should go will result in an increased standard of living for everyone. You know, like the AI utopia we’ve all been promised.

Yes, it’ll be much easier to put the surveillance measures they’ve been trying so hard for into EU-based companies.

I guess they want to be just as good as the US. Whistle blowers showed that NSA has access to most US tech/data companies (Google, Apple, MS, Dropbox).

Europe should end its dangerous reliance on Russian gas and oil.

I think all this nonsense can be traced back to USA abdicating its industry to China and over 20 years being completely hollowed out.

Europe wants a lot of things that they end up never actually doing.

Another opportunity for brunch with the other ministers

First, get rid of whatng web engines and google/apple apps... wait.... mmmmmh... how many devs fully subsidized to dev and maintain some "replacement"?

On this matter, the only way out, technically simple protocols but doing a good enough job allowing a small team of average devs or even an individual average dev to develop and maintain an alternative software with a reasonable amount of effort. That with some hardcore regulations to allow them to exist. Remember that nearly 100% of the only services were fine with the classic web, aka noscript/basic (x)html web (and if you add only the <video> and <audio> elements you are getting dangerously closer to those 100%)

Don't forget, you cannot compet on economic grounds and international finance, their thousands of billions of $ will wreck you. And china is on the other side of the spectrum. You will end-up crushed on both sides.

And first thing first: some high performance EU silicon (design and manufacturing)? But we all know the state-of-the-art silicon tech is an international effort.

defence grade effort at EU scale... oooof!

By the time the idiot EU bureaucrats get to do something, they'll be replaced by right-wing loonatics sponsored by US tech giants: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1916422/us-tech-giants...

Maybe?

I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.

I mean good. The U.S. is currently run by a pedophile ring and has legitimate Nazi elements in its employ.

Also O365 just sucks. We can do better. We've had better. Please stop using MS products and technology stacks.

Fascism and business are poison and catalyst

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