Dutch government objects to proposed US law restricting ASML's China exports

reuters.com

13 points·jonbaer··4 comments

> The government’s main objection was the bill’s “extraterritorial” nature, he said, referring to provisions that allow Washington to impose restrictions on companies outside the United States.

Isn’t this only possible because ASML has licensed EUV technology from DARPA, a US research program? Plus ASML has a lot of US based engineering employees.

This is repeated again and again.

There is no relation to DARPA at all.

ASML licensed from the DOE, and this license is from 1997, almost 30 years ago. Then, in 2001, ASML bought a US silicon company that had the EUV patents. That was 25 years ago. Those patents expired already.

Yes but the license from the DOE has terms on it around export controls right? And it doesn’t expire. Unlike patents. If not, why would the Dutch government have agreed to US demands these last ten years?

Because most European countries, at least until relatively recently, were ready to kowtow to the US whenever it demanded something. If, for example, the US tells Nammo that it can't sell certain products to X, then it doesn't sell those products to X. The leverage used to be a combination of "we're bigger than you" and "you're using some of our weapons tech, be a shame if it went away", both of which have now degraded significantly and at an accelerating pace.

In the case of ASML the US still has leverage over the Dutch government to apply to ASML, but ASML also have a lot of leverage because it's not like the the US can go to alternative vendors. "We're going to sell to China and if you don't play nice we won't sell to you any more" is, well, pretty unlikely but certainly feasible.

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