Hacker News Reader

Comment by manueltgomes | Hacker News Reader

Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch. Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.

View on HN

This is even worse. For instance, in a medical university, we recently were told we need a smartphone and install an app from Google store (!!!), in order to read emails sent out by officials at the medical university. I protested to that but they had a deal already with the private company and their signature meant they had to keep on being addicted to that private company, so now I am locked out of receiving emails since for redirect you also need to have that app installed once. I don't have a smartphone though and I find it outrageous that people are forced to install it AND forced to use Google Store, for publicly funded (!!!) universities here in central Europe. Some lobbyists are currently getting very rich. I call it theft of taxpayer's money though.

I don't know where you are, and I'm not an expert, but a job requiring specific technology typically means it is your employer's responsibility to provide that technology. So if they signed a contract that mandates you have a smartphone, you can use your own if you like, but I think they are legally required to provide you with one if you choose not to buy one. In fact in most cases, I think they should prefer that (since the security of your personal device is very much none of their business).

I think this is kind of a ticking time bomb with a lot of companies depending on personal devices for 2FA.

They might be a student, in which case the rules might be much less in their favor.

oh, of course. How did I not think of that!

"après moi le déluge" - said every public sector purchase decision maker ever.

Imho, the missing component here (in both the EU and US) is an individual right to access covered services.

Where "access" is specifically defined as full functionality on a device of an individual's choice, and offers safe harbor for example options. Like HTML over HTTP (without javascript) or REST APIs.

This should be built on top of existing accessibility requirements, with the goal of preventing not having a Google / Apple smartphone from being an access barrier.

"Covered services" should be defined two-fold, either by market share above a certain threshold or services that are required for normal life/studying/work (and tied to any public funding).

It should be default illegal for entities to make bargains with Google/Apple (or app developers) that exclusively rely on certified devices, except for extremely limited special circumstances.

What country? Which university?

Which is exactly the point of the whole "sovereignty" debate: on one hand there's a lot of slop about "national interest" and "privacy" and "features" and such, and on the other hand management decides for whoever offers something (anything) cheaper and with a golf tournament on top. And then everybody moans and complains about the situation.

Switching to EU companies is easy. Switching to EU companies that don't have American companies as sub-processors is a lot harder.

What's hard? Just switch.

The point they're making is that it's hard to find purely European alternatives. Part of the problem is that companies don't advertise when they somehow still depend on American infra.

Does it need to be infra only? Is there also a risk by using go/rust/java etc? Like some of those projects are hosted on US sites? During Iran conflict access to US sites was cut (GitHub/NPM/Maven etc is hosted on US entities). To be really independent would mean much more I guess. Even languages who were invented in Europe are mostly dependent on US entities.

Access it through tor.

the issue with EU companies is often the mindset: https://julien.danjou.info/blog/europes-cloud-problem-isnt-t...

As tech worked who has worked in US FAANGs (still in europe)... the difference is immense.

EU companies simply can't compete and will never be able to compete until they change the mindset. And the change must be pervasive, across all aspects (including IC compensation).

Oh boy, that server story is painful to read. That ain't universal across providers. I work at european data center and was a tech and the worst SLA is like next business day and even then if our hardware is at fault, you won't be waiting for the next day for us to start taking action on it. And if you have a feeling you're left in dark, you can even pick up the phone at middle of the night to call our support and either get some status or light some fire that will prioritize the process in the pipeline (well, to actually DO something other than cold reboot at night time you may need to purchase SLA that will require involvement of higher support level at nighttime/holiday)

There are some things that I'd like to be improved in technical support side, but we are way better in "human reachability", responsiveness and "blame game" point of view than US hyperscalers.

if the EU furniture maker has the correct mindset and the EU tech company does not then it seems to me the conclusions fall apart

>European tech imported the product ambition. It forgot to import the customer obsession that’s supposed to come with it.

The French furniture maker didn't import the customer obsession. I agree that U.S tech in these particular subsets are better at the EU doing it, and that needs to be fixed but you can't really talk about how great U.S tech is when you can also point at thousands of horrifying lack of support stories from them also.

U.S Tech has a good mindset for replacing hardware when it fails, they have a good workflow for that. The idea that they have good support however should be tempered by regular reading of some sort of online tech news aggregator.

As someone who also works for a US company with very large EU customers and partners I can attest this is completely true. Most European people on HN seem to be in the startup/SME space, so this won’t resonate, but the key point is that people who work for US companies also have zero incentive to switch to an EU company due to the mindsets we see locally.

This reminds me a bit of that stuff people used to say about how China could never compete economically with the US until it embraced Western-style democracy, or about how it could copy but not innovate, etc. etc. Europe will continue being Europe, culturally speaking. Some aspects of European work culture will seem off to Americans, and vice versa. But ultimately, if the market for European cloud services grows, companies will adapt and take advantage of this.

> The gap is the same “playing not to lose” instinct I wrote about with French tech: do the minimum, follow the procedure, don’t get blamed

Oof, Exhibit B: Arianespace.

Think the issue is that it was supposed to be a 'world wide web', but increasingly there's caveats to that.

European companies just ignore privacy and make their lawyers write increasingly contorted cya statements. I’ve worked in several and the idea we shouldn’t be using American hyperscalers (remember, the CLOUD act means hosting in Europe is useless) gets laughs.

The fact that they can't compete can be solved fairly easily by implementing strong trade barriers and legal penalties. Use Salesforce inside of a building in Prague instead of SAP? Police raids and charges of sanctions circumvention up the org chart.

Yeah the problem with EU is that once "compliance" becomes the only reason, lethargy kicks in. Their players stop competing because they have no incentive to, the compliance will keep them afloat.

I would assume the same here. If they are forced to move to EU just because of compliance, the alternatives would remain poor quality.

This is simplistic to the point of meaninglessness

Reply on news.ycombinator.com