US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives
reuters.com
reuters.com
No sovereign nation should use US companies for data storage or processing. Period.
The attempts to shift to open source or non-US services are inevitably hobbled by US companies lobbying (read: bribing) politicians.
So what is Europe supposed to do just stop pretending to be sovereign?
By many measures Europe is in fact pretending to be sovereign. I think it is what they are attempting to do at the moment, "stop pretending to be sovereign" and actually BE sovereign. At least that seems to be the claimed attempt.
If anyone is not sure why I would say that Europe is not sovereign, I will answer that question if you ask, but considering the current state of things and even just this discussion about data sovereignty and other related topics about using and deploying European technologies; I suspect most, if not all have a sense that Europe is in fact not sovereign... and that's without even pointing out huge elephants in the room like the 275 US military installations across Europe, and not even to touch on the fact that NATO is really just ** pulls curtain back ** SURPRISE! ... America, Europe Division.
If the gloves were off then the equation would be different. A fight with the rest of NATO would be conventional warfare where the US has a giant advantage.
But Europeans would suffer more while Americans would consider themselves the real victims.
Given NATO contains three nuclear powers, a full on fight between the US and the rest of NATO would be an "everyone loses" scenario. Even if the US did a first-strike that somehow eliminated all the French and British nuclear submarines, simply losing the EU as customers and suppliers would likely double US unemployment and push inflation to 10%/year for the next decade (hard to be sure though, see Covid influence on supply chains).
Actually getting hit back by retaliatory strikes by either France or the UK independently would be in the order of multiples of US annual GDP in physical damage. France has enough that even if 80% of their missiles were stopped, they'd still be able to hit every US state capital (though why would anyone care to attack Alaska or Hawaii if they're nuking all the rest?)
As per estimate from 2005, even just a single 100 kT nuke in the right place would have an impact equivalent to the US GDP at the time:
The results of our analysis are shown in Figure 4. As anticipated, the economic consequences are highest for the largest nuclear weapon yield and the most conservative cleanup level. New York City nets the highest economic damage across the cleanup spectrum, because of its dense population and high value real estate. Note that the economic consequences for New York City across almost every cleanup level meet or exceed $10 trillion, which is roughly equivalent to the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the U.S. economy.
How many million Americans dead to capture it? How many million Americans will die during the occupation when we resist? Does Americans even wanna go to Europe and occupy Europe and have a legitimate target on their back?
What is even the longterm plan? Concentration camps? Or do you think people will suddenly accept American occupation?
what are you even talking about? nowhere is anybody on any side even hinting that the problem with NATO is it stops the EU from having a war with the US.
the problem with NATO is that it shares a burden and some feel they don't want to pay their obligations and some feel their share is too much, and then it was based around invasion of the territories of western and then middle europe, and ukraine came along and it's a serious threat to middle europe but its not covered by NATO.
The ideology that claims no one except the biggest military is sovereign ... is fascism.
American privacy, by contrast, is almost exclusively focused on state surveillance.
There are holes, the biggest being that foreigners on foreign soil have no privacy rights. Nor do the dead.
But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have against state surveillance.
Europeans aren’t willing to spend the money to do massive spy programs. Ok, fine. But that’s not the same as having civil liberties opposition.
Switzerland has a reputation, good and bad, for strong privacy. But that’s not the norm.
The key thing is that companies like Google and Meta run giant ad networks, there's many thousands of companies buying ads then collecting data in their own systems and reselling it.
The privacy issues of data retention on Google/Meta/etc social and SaaS platforms is something to care about but it is only a small piece of the puzzle of data privacy.
Ads will remain a major business for the foreseeable future as nobody is going to pay $5/m to use Instagram with no data collection.
I’ve also seen cases where GDPR is used against religious groups that have a strong religious justification for keeping lists of believers. Think Orthodox Jews and the Catholic Church, which regard family trees and baptismal certificates as semi-sacred. And kept on paper or scrolls.
Not sure what to think about that. Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.
> Think Orthodox Jews
Pretty sure they would remember why this is the case.
> Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.
There is actually no perceivable or material difference between something that is considered "sacred" and that which is not. It really hinges on whether some subset of some splinter of some religion considers it so.
But, I'm not familiar with these cases you mention, I think there's some details left out that should matter. The really weird thing to me, is that a sports club can keep a list of members easily (yes they need to abide by the GDPR but it's not hard), and if somehow a "religious group" can't manage that level of organization, I don't think their opinion on what objects are considered "sacred" should count for much, either.
Another issue is that "religious groups" can have a different opinion of who are their members and who they get to keep data on, and it doesn't matter whether those records are "sacred" or not, according to the GDPR it is not the "religious group", but the people whose data is being kept whose opinion counts. It would be ridiculous otherwise. I had to email a Church to stop tracking me (which happens if you're baptized as a baby), and that should be my choice, it would be insane if they could claim "yeah tough luck, but our records are sacred".
What? To many people, the Bible is just a book. To Christians its sacred. This doesn't mean it's immutable (the original Bible wasn't in English after all), it just means it's important to them.
For the records, the records themselves could be sacred, but the practical implications of them are not sacred. But if Catholics have a sacred record of everyone who had been baptized at a church, then that should be different from their mailing list. God did not instruct the chrich to email everyone who was ever baptized there. Plus, at some point in the church's age, there will be more dead people on the list of people who were baptized than alive people. It doesn't make sense to send an email blast to more dead people than alive, so they must trim the mailing list every so often.
Thanks.
Not to mention things like tombstones or the occasional name carved into buildings - usually related to donors.
The media matters: an email list, a scroll, a name carved into stone, and a tattoo are quite different things.
I feel uncomfortable drawing clear lines, but I feel equally uncomfortable with other people drawing clear lines.
They should not be. That there is people willing to give their data to big corporations and foreign countries by extension puts everybody at risk. It is a matter of national security and it should not be allowed, no opt in option.
Are they deciding with full understanding of what does it mean to accept such terms or are they just "accepting" to stop being bothered with pop ups.
The industry loves to give people "a choice" when they know that the average user can be coerced to accept anything.
That is not a real choice, and it should be illegal. User profiling is a crime and should be treated as such.
This sentiment is so widespread I'm starting to wonder if it's astroturfed by anti-GDPR lobbying.
But more seriously, this discussion has come up so many times on this site, that I could instantly find myself talking about it a handful of times at least:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669399 (go up-parent a few times if more context is needed)
And that doesn't even go into whether sites actually need to ask for cookie consent at all if they aren't collecting user data outside of functional necessity (they don't).
Fighting data sovereignty is a losing battle for the US: data are too strategic to outsource, even to allies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
More fundamentally, however, the US constitution only protects Americans and American companies. Europeans would be foolish to trust the US with their data given this lack of basic protection and oversight.
Never say never.
Essentially it comes to this. The only way to force the issue is to make confrontational demands that will just lead to a hard split.
They reality is the average person is between a rock and a hard place.
Also, a lot of crap in Western countries is caused by tech broligarchs enriching themselves in favor of workers en destroying democracy for tech feudalism. So if we can bring down their sales Tesla-style, I'm all in for it.
Not true. The reason my Col is off the charts, salary low and housing unaffordable is due to EU central bank printing too much money leaving us holding the bags, government's zoning laws making housing expensive and them importing millions of immigrants despite record unemployment numbers to put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing. None of this is done by US tech bros, it's all done by EU rulers and elites.
US tech bros is an orthogonal issue that distracts from the core issues.
And savings absolutely did eventually get obliterated by excessive Covid money printing, what are you on about?
Sure, spending might cause inflationary effects, but that's orthogonal to quantity (flows not stocks), but then economics is the science of confusing stocks with flows.
Only reason this one wouldn’t be, is human sentiment being nonlinear.
You’re asking to be trapped in a small fish tank with no air pocket…still not a good argument.
Not.
Read more carefully before getting snippy, here.
Better: don’t get snippy here at all!
I don't trust the small number of E2E US services at all. E.g., some of the companies that were/are in PRISM seem to have very convenient 'accidental' backdoors. E.g. WhatsApp doing backups on Google Drive without encryption by default on Android or Apple doing iCloud backups of iMessage that are not E2E encrypted unless you enable ADP. And even if you are wise enough to enable E2E in both cases, most people that you communicate with don't, because they use the defaults, so it's game over anyway.
That won't change until Ursula von der Leyen goes. Her nickname in Germany (since 2009) is Zensursula, because she attempted to build a pan-German firewall.
She failed in Germany, but she may yet succeed in the entire EU.
That some businesses are not trustworthy seems less a concern for me, than that many governments would like to make all business insecure by design.
I think a lot of our issues are due to a lack of cooperation.
What tech companies?
At the end of the day, it's all about capital and IP.
American domiciled VCs and companies can outinvest just about any other competitor, and much of the core IP for vast swathes of critical next-gen technologies (high NA EUV, Foundation Models, Quantum Computing) is in the US, but American companies are fine transferring technology abroad (often with American government backing [3][4]) and moving jobs abroad.
China has a similar ecosystem but prefers to invest domestically and for IP to remain within China.
Meanwhile Japan, Taiwan, and Korea continue to back the US no matter what due to tensions with China and North Korea along with existing fixed asset investments in the US.
When companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and others are able to invest tens of billions of dollars in India [0], Poland [1], Israel [2], Portugal [5], Ireland [6], and others it makes them more open to collaborate with American capital and IP instead of dealing with alternatives who cannot deploy similar amounts of capital and transfer IP.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra...
[1] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions...
[2] - https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjcwdmxxzg
[3] - https://www.state.gov/pax-silica
[4] - https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-11/microsoft...
[6] - https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/11/27/microsoft-has...
Because every investor in the world put their money in the US. They knew the best companies and people would centralize around that hub.
When the US is a rogue, isolated idiocracy -- already true, but the world takes time to adapt to this new reality -- how much of that money do you think will flow to the US?
American public pension funds alone hold $6 Trillion in AUM [0] and American endowment funds hold a little under $1 Trillion in AUM [1], and tend to be the LPs for most VC funds as most institutional investors follow the Yale Investment Model.
[0] - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-ann...
Neither of your citations has any relevance to this at all. That endowments and pensions funds have money...what is your point? Ah, the old HN "look I've provided citations so upvote me, even if they don't support my contention".
Canadians alone hold almost $4 trillion dollars in US securities. Because the US was the centre of the capital universe. Just like we saw it as the centre of the media and music universe. Americans mistook the free world basically anointing the US into some confused notion that it was actually some earned accomplishment.
When we in the VC/PE space raise a fund, we are investing other people's money. Most of that money is of American origin and American domiciled.
You do see some large players like in Canada and Europe, but even they are not similar in size to American pension funds and endowments, let alone other American institutional investors.
Edit: Can't reply
> these will often end up being national level and will look individually much smaller than the ones from the US, purely because the US has more people.
Absolutely! And that's what makes it so difficult for Europe to decouple from the US or China.
Most attempts at EU federalization are undermined by national level politicans as the keys to hard power (defense, foreign policy, FDI attraction) remain under the purview of individual European states, becuase push comes to shove, an American employer or fund can threaten to leave and that country's entire political apparatus will work to appease us at the expense of Brussels.
This is how Meta and Amazon have been able to neuter the GDPR thanks to Ireland [0] and Luxembourg [1] respectively.
Even India got the FTA with the EU by using the carrot on France [2] and Italy [3] and the stick on Germany [4].
Europe is in a very tough position because the incentives of a politician who wants to build their career in Brussels is different from one who wants to build their career in Berlin, Bucharest, or Bratislava.
[0] - https://www.euractiv.com/news/irish-privacy-regulator-picks-...
[1] - https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/amazon-leaders-meet-l...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-signs-74-billion-d...
[3] - https://www.lagazzettamarittima.it/2025/10/30/rixi-in-india-...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
Look, I haven't dug into this, but if one wants a fair comparison, then you need to account for the size of an economy. If 330mn people need pensions, then you'll obviously see much larger pension funds. If 400mn people across 27 countries want pensions, these will often end up being national level and will look individually much smaller than the ones from the US, purely because the US has more people.
(Anyway to put another argument: the US can outflow. Why should people invest to a Trumpland?)
Many Europeans prefer bank deposits to investment in markets, that's true. I assure you though, there are lots and lots of pension funds in Europe, as well as many, many insurance companies who represent similar capital profiles.
it's a common pattern in GPs comments
pretty certain he just asks the "AI" for citations on whatever he's written
(for a VC he sure has a lot of time to waste shit-posting on the internet)
This reads like wishful thinking from a butthurt European. I am not a fan of many of Trump's policies and I think ex-US investor sentiment has definitely soured. But it's not like the USA is now DPRK.
> how much of that money do you think will flow to the US?
If there's one thing you can be sure of about aggregate investor behavior, it's that investors seek good risk-adjusted returns regardless of any moral or political objections.
So long as capital flows remain unimpeded, property rights are respected, and US companies have good expected future returns, investors' money will continue to flow in to the US.
I'd say the perception is probably worse
kim is simply not a threat
he also hasn't threatened to invade us, and he's not kidnapped any foreign leaders (recently)
Thank you.
It's not just about capital and IP. It's now about a halo of related things, like everyone using US payment networks - if the US unbanks you, even banks in your own country can't do business with you[1]. Or everyone using a US-based messaging platform (WhatsApp) because its been subsidised by a BigTech to cost $0, whereas text messages are still not free...
[1]: https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-28/the-comp...
it's a critical industry, so can be regulated to prevent foreign interference
airlines aren't granted freedom of the air unless they're domestically owned
and exactly the same approach can be applied to tech companies
I wish the US had something similar, and that there was more enforcement of disallowing "accept all" buttons without an equivalent "reject all" option. I also recognize that websites don't need the banner if they aren't trying to track me, but lets not pretend there aren't annoying consequences.
Second, the EU is not to blame for cookie banners. Companies doing tracking via cookies are to blame. They always have the option to not have a cookie banner--just don't do the things that require cookie banners. They deliberately choose to do these things, and then people complain about the banners.
Cookie banners are not analogous. It's easy to make a web site that doesn't need cookie banners. It's actually easier to make a site that doesn't need them than to make one that does. Adding in the tracking that requires banner takes effort. But companies prefer to put in that effort and annoy their users so they can have that tracking. That's 100% on them, not on the government.
This is making the assumption that the company has already paid the significant legal fees to see if they need the banner or not. Or ignoring the companies that think it is easier to add the banner than pay a law firm to review it's data usage.
It's like 'Hey, I make T-shirts. I want to sell them to anyone who visits my website. Do I need a cookie banner? I don't know. I do collect personal information to facilitate the transaction. I do retain the information for refund purposes. I do log IP addresses. Is this covered without a banner? Am I 'safer' to just make a banner saying we are saving their data and using it? I can't afford a lawyer to review everything we do, but I can afford a developer to make a banner like they did on other sites. Even if they implement it incorrectly, I think it's worth the cost to have the banner because I probably won't be liable if I attempted to follow the law. And maybe I'm wrong there because again, I have no idea what the letter of the law requires. I just make t-shirts and want to sell them.'
Or we all just don’t take toxins seriously enough.
Not saying there isn’t alert fatigue - just that, in this case, not too many unwarranted alerts…
Yeah, just like it's the EU's fault sometimes that the police cuts of roads when a drunk driver collides with another car, it can impossibly be the fault of the driver themselves.
Maybe try to point the blame in the direction of the ones that are A) showing you the banners in the first place and B) refuses to remove them and instead decide to inconvenience you
You know, like we do with every other single thing.
Besides, GDPR has nothing to do with those cookie banners, you're yet another example of people not understanding how any of these things work, yet find it valuable somehow to point blame in some direction, even if they don't understand the fundamental reasons things are the way they are.
I'm sure you also think EU is the same as Europe, as that tends to also be a common misconception among the people who don't understand the cookies banners or GDPR.
And I recognize that there is a non-trivial cost to knowing if you need the banner or not, and people are likely to ask their web designer/dev "Hey, where's the cookie banner?" and then pay for the subsequent cost of implementing that because it's cheaper than expensive lawyers.
Every company wants to spy on you using cookies and sell you data or target ads. cookies banners are warnings to protect your data from these greedy companies.
This is the most low-rent complaint imaginable and it boggles my mind how I keep seeing it made straight-faced. One time I literally timed how long it took me to dismiss a EU cookie banner, it was about 350ms and only needs to be done once per site. All this outrage is over 350ms and I cannot take it seriously.
such as when creating an account, or doing anything to provide consent besides loading the domain.
Instead, we normalized breaking the site by covering 80% of it so the standard user clicks the first thing that brings the site back: Accept (giving me the 80 advertiser tracking cookies!!1!)
The EU then learned from these mistakes and passed the GDPR in 2016. The GDPR is quite on point - it directly addresses the problem, preempts the foreseeable ways which companies could sidestep such regulation, and didn't succumb to lobbyists looking to install backdoors.
The US could learn a thing or two from the EU regarding legislation.
I cannot understand the constant whining of Apple and other companies, whereas if the PRC asks to jump, they ask 'how high'?
(And of course, it's also the case that "selling to an EU resident" is substantially broader than "doing business in the EU" - EU residents do often travel to foreign countries and provide personal data to stores they transact with while there.)
1. GDPR applies to EU residents in the EU. The protection does not apply to EU residents going on trips to the US.
2. Based on the examples they've presented, there is a SUPER clean solution to your concerns. Geo-blocking. Problem solved, bye bye GDPR. But don't go crying for EU citizen money, can't have it both ways.
Just read the examples they present, they're fairly well written.
> But the GDPR does not apply to occasional instances. Rather, regulators look for other clues to determine whether the organization set out to offer goods and services to people in the EU. To do so, they’ll look for things like whether, for example, a Canadian company created ads in German or included pricing in euros on its website. In other words, if your company is not in the EU but you cater to EU customers, then you should strive to be GDPR compliant.
2. As a general rule Europeans are MUCH less lawsuit addicted than Americans. Plus the way the GDPR works is that generally complaints are filed with a government agency that investigates.
You analysis starts from a position of deep fear.
In practice, it is easy to pick out the situations in which there is "practical" universal jurisdiction, vs "theoretical" universal jurisdiction.
A Colorado company selling locally in Colorado falls in the "theoretical" bucket.
Some do, but...
> (for example, the Bill of Rights doesn't say, "unless you are located outside the US").
The Bill of Rights is a set of constraints on the US government, so even to the extent it applies to the government when acting outside of its borders [0], it isn’t an imposition of US law on the territory of other countries, but a limit on such imposition.
[0] And it doesn't fully, see, e.g., Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), subsequently limited somewhat with the core holding retained in Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008).
Please don't stop us having access to your information, else we will destroy you with the information we already hold :-)
If I could find a reputable construction company to build my underground home I would be a true troglodyte.
THEN the LLC hires the subcontractors in stages without them knowing about each other.
Youd take about 5 years, but itd be about as secure as you could be if you lost trust in soceity.
Realistically, society we know it won't survive if it dwindles to beneath a couple of millions.
That's what's the fallacy. You need the rest of the trappings of modern society to keep wealthy in power.
This is all just fantasy of course as I have not yet found a highly rated company within a few states that have vast experience with upper-end UHPC 60K PSI which has to be done right the first time and I need to get the designs baked first addressing all the "Errm Achtuwallly" memes.
Other comments talk about society collapsing. I am totally fine with that. I will set up a copy of HN and make silly comments on it then as admin give myself points and reply using alternate accounts. Then I will start some contrarian arguments and then ragebait the contrarian personality. Another personality will step in and calm everything down. Then 48 hours later another alt will make a totally unrelated comment and just after that there will be spam for bitcoin in Uganda. All of this powered by the Sun and my farts. Some poor bastard will happen across this site on internet over CB radio.
If you have the resources you could always buy an existing underground structure and renovate. Like a missile silo. Or buy an already renovated one:
https://washingtonmissilebase.com/
I imagine upkeep is pretty expensive, probably needs a lot of HVAC, dehumidifying, pumping, etc to keep you from dying due to weird mold and stuff lol
Then why give it up in the first place? "Because you have to" is probably going to be the argument, but I don't buy that.
But no, our cooperate oligarch overlords just can't keep their hands out of the piggy bank.
America has a long tradition of selling anything to the highest bidder. There was never any chance they were going to change.
I don't think it's still the money laundering haven, though. The US forced them into some pretty strict KYC laws to avoid being globally debanked.
Unipolar worlds are safer than Bipolar. Multipolar is extremely dangerous.
I imagine you didn't know that more people will be killed if the US doesn't have hegemony.
With their current demographics? Doubt it.
At least the US has the benefit of not really having a core ethnic class.
(To stem off the haters, the US has a "massive problem with racism" exactly because we have such a mixed society. Most monoracial places are obscenely and shamelessly racist, but never has a chance to arise)
The Chinese are clearly doing some "rebalancing" lately. Some would even say that "rebalancing" is not a strong enough word. "De-linking" is a word a lot of those people are more comfortable with using to describe what we're seeing.
You can't really have a unipolar power if that power simply "takes all their marbles and goes home" so to speak.
I think we need to really do some strategic planning around scenarios where China or Europe simply withdraws from the rest of the world. Or decides they only need subsaharan Africa for instance.
Or, the nightmare scenario; where China, Europe, and subsaharan Africa actually figure out that together they don't really need anything from the rest of us.
saying unipolar is better is like saying absolute monarchy is better. sure it is, as long as the good king is alive.
The last thing I want is Europe in control of any of my data they just fundamentally don't think privacy from the government should exist. Pair that with the frankly appalling lack of free speech I wouldn't want to risk it.
Is it just the government that feels this way, or do the general population of the US feel like everyone else on the planet is an enemy?
However, that's not the same as "enemy". That's a more confrontational level. It's that particular branch of the far right which has recently risen to prominence. Ironically, in a lot of different countries.
Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evil X, which is why so many of our wars start with a ship "under attack" (USS Maine, RMS Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin incident), or supposed WMDs (Iran, Iraq)
A great example is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ask any American and they can call up all kinds of minute details about the attack. However if you ask them about the US trade embargoes and blockades against Japan in the months leading up to the attack, the vast majority of Americans will draw a blank. That is on purpose.
When stuff does break through to us, raw and unfiltered, most will react with horror. The self image of Americans as the Good Guys cracks. This happened in the Viet-Nam conflict when journalists had a free hand to show what was happening. Massive protests and a near mutiny by the US Army caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts. More recently Americans were so horrified when they witnessed the Israeli genocide after October 7th that it completely inverted both public sentiment and support for Israel, causing the forced sale of TikTok to Oracle and under US control to clamp down on the coverage.
First we have US [Commodore Perry] who, in 1854, used gunboat diplomacy in Nagasaki harbor to end Japan's isolation and open it up for trade. This would snowball into the Meiji restoration, which ended the Shogunate, and an Emperor that rapidly modernized Japan's economy and military to prevent foreign domination that China was experiencing at that time.
Three decades prior to Japan's invasion of China, and a decade before Japan seized Korea, the United States and other Great Powers were suppressing the Boxer Rebellion as part of China's [Century of Humiliation] to exploit China for themselves. In addition the US, after it seized the Philippines from Spain, spent several years brutally putting down the native independence movent [p-h war]. Americans aren't taught this history, and fear of that brutality of American reprisals influenced the Japanese against surrendering during WW2.
Speaking of the Philippines, its seizure by the US and other Spanish territories after the Spanish-American war as well as the annexation of Hawaii alarmed Japan. They saw US and other imperial powers as rapidly encroaching on Japanese sphere of influence, in particular the decades of 1890s-1900s. Japan saw all of this and didn't want to be the next China. Japan also saw all of East Asia was it's sphere of influence as a Japanese mirror of the Monroe Doctrine and the western imperial powers as both a tacit threat and competition.
The US wasn't interested in helping China against Japan out of a moral duty, but protecting US interests against a rising Japanese Empire, in addition to British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Far East. The tipping point for Japan was when the US embargoed Oil and ship-grade Steel (as well as other strategic commodities and economic sanctions) from Japan throughout 1941, which led to Japan planning to seize more territory in SE Asia. To support these annexations, Japan had to push the US out of the Philippines, and to do that they attacked Pearl Harbor as a way to buy Japan time to take and hold territory before Americans could respond.
I mention all of this because Americans aren't taught this yet so much of our history hinges on these events.
[Century of Humiliation]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
[Commodore Perry]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Expedition
[p-h war]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Phili...
Don't be better, be better looking!
1. China has been completely vindicated for blocking US tech domination of their local economy and creating Chinese versions of basically everything. Tech independence has become an issue of national security; and
2. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle. At some point the EU is going to make it a priority to replace all US tech companies with local alternatives. The EU is kinda dysfunctional so they won't see the success China has but I now consider this outcome inevitable.
This is the insanity of the current administration: it's done so much to destroy US soft power.
I really don't envy the diplomats' job at the moment.
The US as the world has known it is gone
https://apnews.com/article/france-us-ambassador-kushner-far-...
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/politics/key-concerned-murkiness-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/18/belgium-invest...
And of course Joe Popolo in the Netherlands:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/displays-black...
(He later doubled down on the decision to erase any mention of the racial segregation black US soldiers were submitted to while serving in the army during WWII.)
To be clear, there are political and career diplomats, and each administration mixes and matches to its taste. (The current one veers strongly towards political appointees. That is to say, folks who raised money.)
This is how most foreign services are run, with maybe the exception of China.
Absolutely not most. What country in Europe has a significant amount of ambassadors that are not career diplomats / government workers ?
In France, Germany, Switzerland you would either need to be a career diplomat/ foreign service worker or in rare cases you would be a career government employee assigned as diplomat to some specific country for some reason (i.e you were trade minister and become ambassador to your biggest trading partner).
The most "political" appointee ambassador in Europe I can think of is Mandelson but he is (as we found out) supremely connected to US power networks and he is still a lifetime politician/ government employee.
It‘s not uncommon, though I‘d say even the „cool posts“ like Paris or London usually go to career diplomats.
The first might have joined the Foreign Service and worked their way up; the second might have had a career elsewhere (not necessarily in political office), get invited to work for an administration, and then leave once there's a change in power.
Parent is correct. The amount varies from administration to administration. But if you really want to be an ambassador, you're well positioned if you bundle a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars for the winning campaign. (There are traditionally limits. You can't usually buy your way into the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or London. But for the postings with limited security implications, where the focus is on trade, you're mostly hosting expensive parties for your post.)
It is not. The vast majority of the world has a professionalized diplomatic corps roughly modeled on a Prussian or French system. As Fukuyama points out in Political Order and Political Decay the US is an odd case because it democratized before it developed an administrative state and as a result is somewhere between "Greece and Prussia" and ended up with a spoils-based and clientelist system, somewhat moderated by the Progressive era.
On the one side you have some diplomats who really are quite capable career foreign policy wonks, appointed in a manner which appears to be meritocratic.
On the other side you have folks appointed, like you mention, as a kind of patronage.
Traditionally, it has been that the softer counterparties (Friendly countries, European allies, small island nations, etc) are staffed with patrons while the more difficult or geopolitically sensitive relationships are manned by professionals, but this is certainly not always true, and one can find many counterexamples.
your location is assigned based on a competitive bidding system where you select from a list of cities to do your next tour. some countries/cities are obviously dangerous for a variety of reasons and they are called "hardship tours" (think iraq or afghanistan). you get bonus money for these and sometimes are forbidden from bringing family.
posts in places like Europe or East Asia are very desirable and highly competitive. but often it's a matter of fit. my dad was a hedge fund manager before the Foreign Service so his first posting was actually in Frankfurt. you can also do a tour in the continental US, such as in DC or NY. because of his economics background he has done a few of those.
most of the time the head ambassador is a political appointee, but the grunts are regular people who have made this their career.
Asking because from my perception over the past 12 months, US ambassadors got more friendly and cordial with some countries (e.g., Japan[0]/Taiwan/South Korea[1]) and less cordial with others (e.g., certain european countries, like UK, that attempt to [imo unjustly] press american businesses that don’t even have any business presence within their jurisdiction).
0. U.S. Ambassador George Glass participated in remarks emphasizing the “new golden age” of U.S.-Japan relations, underlining partnership. (https://jp.usembassy.gov/ambassador-glass-remarks-at-yomiuri...)
1. The U.S. signed Technology Prosperity Deals with both Japan and South Korea in late 2025, advancing shared technology and innovation goals. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/10/the-united-state...)
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/g-s1-111302/france-spat-with-...
Diplomats need to be adorable pandas not wolves.
It begins with Benjamin Franklin (well, sort of) and ends with a bunch of campaign contributors (both sides).
Seems like it started some time in the 1990s/2000s and then gradually grew more and more transactional.
For example ambassadors to Georgia (a country that has tensions with Russia) seem to have "better" credentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ambassadors_of_the_Uni...
So in this administration, that would be Epstein clients and co-conspirators. Truly sending the best.
And the "diplomats" of this administration is a rogues gallery of Epstein associates (e.g. pedophile sex-trafficking garbage) and self-dealing criminals. Just a who's-who of garbage.
They are sending their absolute worst.
Americans are just blissfully unaware how much their country is being destroyed. It's staggering stuff. Even if you're a super conservative, there should be utter embarrassment and outrage about how incompetent and clownish this parade of imbeciles is.
I think it's simpler than that: they think the world is a zero-sum game, so why bother being anything but utterly confrontational at every turn?
Of course, that's a childish way to view the world, but we're a childish people.
Just replace Mexico with America. There must be some Freudian issue going on with Trump here.
It won't. But going digitally sovereign will cost Europe tens of billions of euros. If there is a friendly race on the other side of the Atlantic, that will not mean the memories go away. But the urgency of the initiative is certainly sapped.
At least the money will keep flowing into our own economy, it will hurt but in the longer term it can only be beneficial.
That will be spent in Europe, improving the economy of member states.
Certainly much better than just sending that money to the US.
Given EU public spending and IT I'm not so optimistic.
Most other countries didn't just because it eventually evened out in the end. But with the US being an adversarial nation, everyone should redouble efforts to ensure not a penny supports that autocracy.
Trump is just the result of this, and it isn't going to stop when he kicks it. It'll be the next populist nonsense. The world needs to move on from America.
American diplomats have been doing Trump's dirty work for a some time.
I am more concerned about US interference in elections and campaigning for the far right than lobbying for data at the moment.
No the difference is that Trump's ambassadors are directly getting involved in the local politics of their postings. And they're not even hiding it.
Microsoft for example has had a de facto monopoly in many areas for quite some time and I doubt many would argue that their software quality has flourished in recent years.
If nothing else this gives me a positive outlook so thankyou :D
Step 2: Ask for favors
Step 3: Profit?
(Disclosure: I work at IOMETE where we think about this a lot. I am happy to go deeper if useful.)
Right, so that the USA would cut us from DTCC?
Eu finance sector is MUCH more dependent on access to US markets than the other way around.
for everything inside the EU, i highly doubt it is. For extraterritioral trade. The EU is large enough to trade with other countries in euros instead of dollars.
The problem is that the core technology that makes ASML's tech valuable is the EUV light source which is entirely designed, developed, and manufactured by Cymer in California, which is a US company that ASML acquired in 2013. That acquisition was permitted only under strict technology sharing and export-control agreements.
I have no doubt that this administration would forcefully "take back" Cymer if the EU tried to restrict access to ASML lithography machines. They would force a sale back to US ownership, TikTok-style.
The real problem with this theory is that EUV isn't a product with a capturable bottleneck. It's more like a standing wave of institutional knowledge distributed across organizations that have been co-developing at picometer tolerances for 30 years. TRUMPF's leadership described the arrangement as a "virtually merged company" with open books across all three firms. That kind of integration knowledge doesn't transfer via acquisition. China has been throwing enormous resources at this with access to published research and former ASML engineers, and their prototype still isn’t expected to produce working chips until 2028-2030. Saying the US could grab Cymer and start producing EUV machines is like seizing a transmission plant and calling yourself a car manufacturer.
It's a bargaining chip that this administration will undoubtedly use to make sure that US access to ASML lithography machines remains undisturbed.
Similar to TRUMPF lasers and Zeiss optics, other companies from US and Japan like Coherent and Canon could have a crack at replicating the laser and mirrors given enough IP and resources if the US really wanted to decouple from ASML, since they're still man made objects, not magic things given by gods.
US is the richest country in the world and the second biggest manufacturer after China. Do you think the country that built the SR-72 and other sci-fi shit wouldn't be able to make a EUV lithography machine in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
this exact same logic applies the other way, though... unless Cymer is selling magic objects given by gods?
>Do you think the country that built the SR-72 and other sci-fi shit wouldn't be able to make a EUV lithography machine in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
do you think that ASML (or TRUMPF or whatever non-US entity) would be unable to make the EUV light source in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
It's a gentlemen's agreement that will be held together by mutually assured destruction if one party tries to decouple completely.
The general decoupling from US tech you see has started after the general enshitification of major IT services from FFANG, not exclusively due to Trump, and not exclusively to US, Spotify is also seeing a lot of backlash.
>do you think that ASML (or TRUMPF or whatever non-US entity) would be unable to make the EUV light source in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
The EU(Germany, Spain and France) can't unite to build a next gen fighter jet together, can't decide how to tackle illegal mass migration, can't decide a sane energy policy that isn't hypocritical or anti-industry, or on a single direction on defeating Russia. A EUV Manhattan project is the least of their issues right now which moves the balance of power in the US court for the moment until EU members figure out how to work together.
the mass migration caused by american wars in the middle east you mean? Also, frontex seems to be working fine so far.
>on a single direction on defeating Russia
unlike the US, which has stopped all military aid to ukraine in 2025, and seems to be favouring russia more and more.
Lets not forget, europe is increasing its military en masse mainly because on one hand you have the russian flattening ukraine, and on other hand you have the US demanding greenland.
Who needs further enemies with friends like this?
Nobody forced the EU to open its borders. It's their job to defend their borders from intruders, foreign especially military aged males with no visa, instead of acting as a global charity with their taxpayers' money then wonder why the far right is booming and arrest them for hate speech.
>unlike the US, which has stopped all military aid to ukraine in 2025
This is news to me that doesn't math what Google returns. Care to back that up?
>and on other hand you have the US demanding greenland
That's bad indeed on the US, but EU can't even defend Ukraine from Russia, a broke-ass country, do you think they would have gone to war with the US over Greenland? The US can do this because the EE can't do anything.
And good luck with fighting all of NATO in a conventional war. According to Trump US is such losers they even lost in Afghanistan against the Talibans. And now you wanna fight rest of NATO (that has more soldiers than US).
There is a bit of M.A.D. scenario: a bunch of components in ASML machines (like EUV light generation?) come from US companies. Also, the two main chip CAD software vendors (duopoly) are in the US.
As a bonus, it would nuke the markets, causing the US administration to backpedal on whatever. (Obviously I'd prefer not to nuke the markets, but something needs to happen to push back against the US).
This would only happen in a world where the US has entirely abandoned Ukraine though (i.e. no intelligence sharing).
Trump's grip on the US oligarchy isn't even 1% as tight as Putin's on Russia's, who has everything completely under his thumb. If the US oligarchy conspires to depose Trump, he's gone next week. That they're all sucking up to him doesn't refute that at all, that's just the optimal move until it isn't. All these people do is take the optimal move for their own net worth at the current point in time.
I'm sure this would be better received if I took an LLM and had it rewrite this in a less conversational and higher-brow way, but it's no longer the time for that.
(Even the ordinary open source world has a lot of intrigue to be careful of. And most developers still think nothing of pulling in a fleet of dependencies from PyPI/NPM/Cargo/etc. as well as third-party network services. Everyone is being taught in school to play to FAANG interview rituals, and many go on to a career style of performative sprints. HCI is almost lost as a field to UX euphemism. Almost no one can deploy a system that won't be compromised, and most don't even try, except for some mandated ineffective theatre. AI homework-cheating mindset isn't helping. Etc. Not to complain, but to be clear the kind of inertia a country is facing.)
Do the countries wanting to fight this have enough of they right homegrown talent already, and know how to find and nurture it?
If they're importing additional talent, do they know how to find and incentive the right people, while turning away the ones with the wrong mindsets for this mission?
(ProTips: Look for the hardcore privacy&security non-careerist nerds. The left-leaning, societal-minded ones. Give them what they've been looking for, or support to help make what they've been looking for. Don't offer to pay too well. Anyone who asks "Why would I want to live in your country, when I can make more money elsewhere?" gets a permaban.)
But what if home countries had said, "We can give you the resources you need for your work and home life, and it will be for purposes you can believe in and feel good about; not for crypto rug pulls, nor for surveillance capitalism, nor for stunting and manipulative social media"?
I'm optimistic at the response from the EU on tech investment, but I haven't seen them put their money where their mouth is yet. If they want to poach talent from the US they'll also have to figure out an work visa path that makes it easier to move there (bureaucratically, like the classic "you need a phone number to sign up for a bank account, you need a bank account to rent an apartment, you need an address to sign up for a phone number") and direct investments away from the US and into local tech providers in support of infrastructure and development (that isn't AI related datacenters).
In an ironic twist of fate, the US government's actions could end up causing long-term damage to US tech companies.
This is all based on anecdotal evidence, so I could be wrong, but I have to call it like I see it.
All these efforts will come to nothing.
Amazon sovereign cloud https://aws.eu/fr/ Azure sovereign https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/sovereignty Oracle soverign https://www.oracle.com/fr/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/ IBM https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/sovereign-cloud ...
the damage is done. trump fanning the flames and then using ham fisted threats that frankly carry no weight now... are just making it worse.
the money's already been allocated. the results are inevitable.
I just wanted to say that cloud companies were doing a better job of ensuring the collection of European data than Trump's diplomacy.
So would this issue still exist if the data was not human comprehendible yet a system still functioned 100% as needed?
The outlier technologists among us may read between my written lines with piquéd interest while the majority will likely just balk making claims based on lack of knowledge and awareness. For those looking to balk save your time in responding because analogously we no longer drive Ford Model Ts either and in time so too will system designs significantly change to answer the issues created by todays limited technology architectures.
Whether it be in the water you drink, the air you breath, or the technology platforms you rely on; What you cannot see matters most!
Looking forward to changing my bank card to a EU alternative when its available.
I don't feel like I have major usage issues, but maybe once I have decoupled from the big players, it will be clearer what I had gotten used to, for which there was another way to approach.
The biggest pain points will probably be YouTube, Claude, Gemini and Google docs. The main issues will probably stem from collaborating with others, rather than my own personal usage.
This is really some sort of diplomatic Streisand effect. If the US would not have been so aggressive and just string us along they could have continued to feed us their slop indefinitely without us noticing.
The title should be "US orders diplomats to fight _EU_ data sovereignty initiatives".
Why? Because the US is far too pussy to fight the other countries that have such initiatives - some of them reaching further than the EU's - knowing that unlike the EU those countries are definitely not going to take their shit.
I can tell you that if the US says to Japan or Korea, just to name two such examples, "stop enacting privacy/sovereignty laws that interfere with US big tech or we tariff you" , there's absolutely zero chance they're going to be listened to and the only thing it will do is make people hate the US.
Joining of a forum is meaningless in itself, the actual actions of the governments and businesses in their usage vs abstinence of US clouds is ehat matters.
(Should I have had to, and companies just don't bother because Japan is smaller? I guess I'd believe that, although I'd still be surprised that I've never heard about a Japanese data enforcement action against a foreign company.)
Ironically another contrast with the EU; not talk but actions. Keeping things on prem, keeping it on local clouds. How many of the pure Japanese companies (not subsidiaries of foreign corps) you worked at had all their customer data on AWS/Azure/GCP? Unless you worked with a very specific subset of them, overall it's a much lower percentage than the EU. And then Korea is even a lot lower than that.
Devil's advocate might say "well Japan is just like that because of other reasons, in reality they don't care about privacy or data protection". But a lot of those reasons are still linked to a broader idea of sovereignty, which is keeping things national.
Yeah that will be a hard no from me. They're not exactly known for their positive attitude towards privacy. And free speech seems to depend on who's aligned with the administration.
The rough argument was: pharma companies need big payoffs when they discover a new drug and, due to structural characteristics of the US market, that's where they can get the highest prices.
So pharmas make a large chunk of their profits in the US and then sell drugs more cheaply in e.g. Europe.
Fairly weak and incomplete argument [1], but I've seen this pushed seriously by people in public debates in the US.
[1] - a couple of obvious issues with this argument are: 1. why is it Europe's fault that the US has structural issues that prevent it from negotiating drug proces as a united front? 2. healthcare costs are largely inflated by admin costs in the US. Drugs can be expensive too, sure, but this argument ignores the big cost intrinsic to the insane insurance and billing system prevalent in the US.
Presumably this conclusion was arrived at because pharma companies sell drugs at a higher cost in the US than they do in EU, Canada, or anywhere else. Therefore elevating profits in the US relative to profit margins in other nations. (Note: they reportedly use the profit to develop new drugs, so this is where the subsidization comes into play, as higher profit markets will drive increased revenue and future drug development.)
And your argument against the premise is: 1. The EU is not at fault, and 2. Drugs cost more in the US because of the poor healthcare system.
Argument 1 does not attack the premise: Undoubtedly the EU is not at fault, the EU does not set drug prices in the US. Pharma companies do, within the context of the US economy, of course.
The premise does not assign fault, it’s an assessment of where profit comes from.
Argument 2 is more direct in addressing the premise, but still misses the point: you might be right, mostly right, or you could be wrong. I lean toward agreeing with the point you made (US healthcare system sucks), it doesn’t address the profit differential across different nations.
So, what about the premise is weak and incomplete?
Pharma shareholders want profit, and the US supplies that at a greater rate than the EU (likely due to the regulatory environment). They’ll take a lower profit margin vs. no profit at all, so they operate accordingly.
None of that goes against the premise that the extra profit from the US market is subsidizing the research costs for drug products that enter the EU market.
Also, even in the absence of the "indebtedness" conclusion, the subsidy argument assumes that pharma companies would reduce their R&D spend, instead of just accepting lower margins if the US could more aggressively negotiate drug prices.
Not to mention the tourists that need to spend a couple of weeks practicing 'walking' in order to survive a European trip...
Tourists? Shouldn’t they be working?
It's also probably just good business for the US, but locking down on citizen freedom is the only real reason I've seen countries do it.
'No, you can't leave me, you need me.' Actually, we don't. We used to have a good relationship and you lit it on fire. Bye, US.
Europe, please Make the Internet Great Again!
While, if you choose to use a US service, it shouldn't be required to host data in your country, if you know it's a US service with data in the US... government data is another thing entirely.. and $cloud provider should be required to accommodate if they want that business, or for companies in a given country for that matter.
The US owned the world’s tech stack and countries let it because it was convenient and despite its problems people mostly trusted the US was on their side. In one year we’ve utterly destroyed that and made ourselves enemies of the democratic world. That Silicon Valley did not see this would threaten its global business says something.
It feels doubly stupid that not only did American Business sell out their nations’ economic base to Chinese competitors decades back, they fumbled again and sold out to the guy who (yet again) damaged relations of countries funding the service, finance and defense sectors of the US. So now you lost the manufacturing base and you lost the other money-makers. No wonder they are going all-in on fossil fuels to Europe.
No other company is as clear an example of this double whammy as Tesla. Move manufacturing to China to lose the technological edge, and alienate end-users, to lose the customer base.
Such fine bullshit, of the highest quality.
Distributing infrastructure may slightly reduce efficiency but seems like a good idea for so many reasons: national pride, increased security, more resilience to outside influences, etc.
The rich and ultra rich don't need liquidity, they have our 401k plans for that.
I don't know if it's due to "decoupling" but there has been some selling recently.
yet
In the long term this is an issue. But I'm not sure the US stock market actually cares that much about what the world will look like in 4 or 8 years.
The US government is pumping the stock market with debt - as long as nobody starts dumping bonds or currency this is an action that will make number go up.
This would not be happening if it was not for the US dummy in chief. The EU was looking to do this for a while, but where taking its time until recent events.
the US was really, really foolish to crystalise the risk by locking out those judges
prior to that it was just a theoretical people were yelling about
now it's real, and there's a continent of hungry businesses lobbying for resources to be diverted domestically, instead of being sent to the US
and that's the EU's bread and butter
Do you think the Trump admin thinks about the consequences of their decisions for more than 5 minutes into the future?
They're all about making a quick buck via scams, insider trading and rug pulls, future consequences be damned. Sometimes they make a good call when they listen to what their corporate lobbyists say.
They will not be coming back soon.
This Roger Stone playbook shit is wild. This admin will piss on your leg and tell you it's raining.
Sheesh, what was the approach before this if not confrontational?
What could go wrong?
Oh. So, like, going from school bully to abusive parent?
Tech companies should be opposing Trump's policy and, instead, beg the Trump administration to grant meaningful concessions to countries that have rightfully lost trust in American companies. Bullying tactics will only intensify the loss of trust and fuel the push to adopt alternatives.
For any government in Europe, it should be extremely pressing to untangle itself as quickly as possible from US-based companies as suppliers.
But to be frank, even regulations should be unnecessary here. Private businesses in Europe (and elsewhere) should consider it an existential threat to depend on cloud services from the US. We are all one executive order away from having access cut.
They do already, everyone except the ones truly deep into the US ecosystem already have plans or are making plans for how to get out from US infrastructure in 2026.
It doesn't matter if the decision is illegal. The time it would take to have it "fixed" could cause already immeasurable damage.
Even for US tech folks like HN, I doubt it would help us. US companies hoard their profits and power, so most people here would see no benefit. It’s yet another move to protect rich corporations and the corporate cronies of the most corrupt administration in US history.
That said: “benefits US companies” != good public policy for the US as a whole. It’s explicitly trying to interfere in how other countries govern themselves for the benefit of shareholders, not because it’s necessarily good policy.
It’s also something we wouldn’t necessarily appreciate if done to us by our allies. If we have any actual allies left given all of Trump’s tariffs and threats against other countries.
I think it's the assumptions that are baked in with the Trump regime. No subtlety, no mutual benefit, do as we say or else.
[0] - https://stratechery.com/2020/india-jio-and-the-four-internet...
Banning US tech companies without creating (really) fertile grounds for business is just going to be shooting yourself in the foot. A replacement Google won't grow on a farm only fed worker/consumer fertilizer.
It's almost diabolical that the only way Europe can get rid of the US, is to be more like the US.
It might not seem like it for the HN crowd, who mostly make a living stringing web libraries together.
Of the top 50 tech companies on Earth, 3 are European and 30 are American.[1]
Europe has a seriously lacking tech scene. The situation is borderline catastrophic.Even just this past week the OpenClaw guy ditched the EU for the US, calling out the EU's infertile business scene[2]. These are exactly the kind of people the EU should be clearing a path for and rolling out a rug. Wake up.
[1]https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b... [2]https://www.businessinsider.com/openclaw-creator-slams-europ...
lol, it's always because of money. European tech startups often sell out to US investors because they offer more money.
I've worked for companies that plodded along nicely privately owned, 20-50 employees, but they got "offers they couldn't refuse" from US companies and sold. Usually just buying us to stamp out potential competition/buying a customer base
If you account for the market damages that Apple is responsible for, the situation is already catastrophic. The EU has every justification to decouple themselves from capricious and unaccountable businesses like Apple, Google and Microsoft.
You've changed, we're adapting accordingly.
The economic rifts that a hard pull away from US support would create almost certainly will fracture the EU, give rise to nationalist leaders, and weaken support for Eastern Europe.
What's happening right now is exactly what Russia wants. Big brother America going away, so Russia only has to deal with countries that have been been on a 30 year status quo cruise control.
If https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IIPUSNETIQ starts reversing, you'll see a lot of US & EU tech re-pricing (and not in the US's favour). Europe's tech talent is excellent, it's the structural financing disadvantages (and loaded trade agreements, see: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01...) that have historically held it back.
Well that's even worse isn't it. Europe invents something only for the US to produce it and then sell it back to Europe?
Maybe it's time for Europeans to come home from their 30 year post cold war vacation. 60-70 hour work weeks, performance based job security, 15 days vacation (that you work during anyway), corporate tax exemptions funded by social program cuts, and 35 year old billionaires leading the charge. Droves of SWE's pulling €200k and the locals complaining about gentrification. There will be a vibrant tech scene and actually competitive software across the board within a few years.
But you probably recoiled in horror reading that. So do most other Europeans. So the strong players leave to reap the rewards that those things bring, and the rest stay behind the in the comfy status quo and say "We'll just buy xyz from the Americans".
Not really. I laughed at your cartoonish notion of Europe (and the idea that the US way is somehow the only or most desirable goal).
For a more balanced understanding of US vs EU relative performance and QoL, this is a helpful, recent analysis: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...
If the EU just continues to slowly, deliberately continue on it's path towards tighter integrated capital markets, less reliance on US security, continuing energy build out and the growing of the EUR's share of global transactions; I think that will already be more than sufficient without the need for Europeans to "come home from their 30 year post cold war vacation." - whatever that means.
It's saying that prices of goods in Europe have remained in line with income that people get, people are happy, so who cares about anything else? And then there is short sentence at the end about tech is bad because it makes billionaires, so Europe need not worry.
Which all basically goes back to my point about Europe being happy with the status quo (the 30 yr post cold war vacation), and unwilling to change. However, like Krugman doesn't mention at all in his post, the status quo includes immense American tech and Chinese hardware imports.
So if Europe wants to stand on it's own, it's going to need to do very antithetical things relative to the current culture, that will in the short term be very painful for Europeans, but in the long term will provide the stability and independence they need.
Businesses exist to fill a demand. And the market will pay accordingly. For example:
Spotify SE == Napster US
Netflix US == Lovefilm UK
Craigslist US == Gumtree UK