All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology | Hacker News Reader

All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology

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32 pointsrawgabbit10 comments

I just discovered my ISP blocks archive. Is, had to use phone data.

The article is very short and basically just lists a bunch of instances of govts moving away from US to EU alternatives, but it's a drop in the ocean right now. For every department ditching office 365 there must be thousands still dependent. One of the examples was the Belgian .be domain committing to move away from AWS. But what about the other 26 European domains?

I think it's a great idea to invest in homegrown alternatives, not just for security reasons but also to encourage industry in the EU. We're reliant on trading partners for things we can't manufacture, but there's nothing stopping us from coding our way out of a dependent on foreign SAAS.

That said, I worry that the impetus to do so can easily wane. I can easily see this effort losing steam, especially if the US midterms result in a power shift back towards "safe" allies.

I really hope we continue to invest in and grow our own alternatives, but it's going to be a long road to recovery

"There must be thousands" is just despair. But since you mention something concrete, those 26 domains, I had a look. 26 is not a lot, easy for a human to scan. I included a few more (.ad for Andorra, .al for Albania, ..., .sm for San Marino) for a total of 52.

Belgium uses AWS and Gibraltar (.gi) uses Afilias. The Isle of Man and a couple of other small ones use DNS providers in Europe but outside their own territory. Apart from that, the 52 I checked all use their own primary name servers and often secondary name servers at other organisations elsewhere (e.g. Macedonia uses secondaries in Austria and Slovenia, Albania in the US and one in Australia).

So it's Belgium and Gibraltar, and soon it's just Gibraltar.

Oh well that's good news. I don't mean to despair, I think it's within our grasp to break out of US tech dependence, I just worry the momentum won't last. There's a surge of EV sales whenever there's an energy crisis, but it usually trails off once the crisis is over.

I hope our push to be more local with tech is not just reactionary

Canada here, we are stuck with mostly US tech, so the "response" is to use less of it, and care less, and of course not go to the US, which seems to be reciprocal. The backlash here continues into backbone beurocracies and business interests that have had to scramble and reorient, ha! re~"orient", ha!, with other off shore interests that are doing the same. so it's not just the tech, but also what the tech does, and bieng tech, it can do other things, for other people.

https://archive.is/uZs5H

Is this the year of the Linux desktop?

No, Linux has a usability crisis

Woah, I didn't notice. What is going on? I probably will have to tell the students using the computers today.

They’re immune as they are not responsible for actually administering and maintaining the systems. That’s the burden of whoever runs the lab

Well, I do.

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