EU plots long game against US digital supremacy | Hacker News Reader

EU plots long game against US digital supremacy

politico.eu

31 pointsvrganj16 comments

Meanwhile NATO just switched over to a full Palantir system (MSS), and thus sharing everything with the USA, while several European countries are removing Palantir interference. This is going great.

It's not a plot. Everything is public in within EU strategy and the issues with the US digital products have been long discussed in the EU parliament.

‘Plot’ is one of those clickbait verbs like scheme and conjure.

No, it is not. But the headline probably intended the word in the sense of to make a route or course.

We've seen how amazing the EU has been for Europe. One EU company in the Top 50 companies in the world by market cap: ASML.

Big round of applause.

The Chips Act 2.0, for the 1.0 did... Nothing at all?

It's the "If it moves, tax it. If it still moves, tax it more. Tax is until it doesn't move at all anymore. Then subsidize it.".

It's a strategy from losers and by losers.

There's no way the EU shall ever compete again (we at least had some chip industry in the beginning) with the EU or China on CPUs/GPUs. That's never going to happen.

The only thing europeans can hope for is to leech on open-source efforts to diminish their reliance on big US software companies but... The same EU bureaucrats who are making big announcements explaining how the EU shall become relevant again are, in illegal backroom deals, taking bribes from Microsoft (one of the company that has the most to lose if the EU gets serious about embracing open source).

If the EU funds go only towards EU companies, the bureaucrats will have no choice but to say "oh well, we tried but the funds would have been lost otherwise, Bruxelles is to blame". The EU company could still resell US services but the EC could still put in a provision that at least % should be domestic. One thing is absolutely clear: the French will build their own infra and services with their own money, obviously en Français. Wait, they already have done so.

By the early 2010s, the Eu corporations noticed that they could use the consumer protection regulations as a means to sneak protectionist measures to protect their profits, and from then on, it has been a downhill ride. They have taken over the Eu through lobbyists and spammed innumerable regulations to bloat the regulatory space to make it impossible for domestic and external competitors to intrude, and the end result is bloated cars that cost 30,000 Eur a pop and require subscriptions to heat their seats while being inferior to the cheapest Chinese EVs of the last generation.

But hey - Eu investors reaped premium returns from their investment without having to reinvest any of it for a decade and a half, so there's that...

Oh, this is actually substantial [1].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

Is it? All I see is a ton of buzzwords and political slogans that mean whatever one wants them to mean.

> Is it?

Idk. It’s draft legislation.

It might be bunk. But it’s more than the usual EU nonsense of convening a committee to propose a plan to think hard about something Hungary can veto in 2045.

Right. The plan will just exclude Hungary and whatever other trojan state run by monkeys like Orbán and Fico vetoes it. If the original EU states prior to 2004 plus Poland decide that it's getting done, it will get done eventually.

Member states' leaderships are not so stupid to refuse EU funds. They just oppose things when the funds are going towards other non-EU states (like Ukraine) through association agreements or when there'a some sort of responsibility for them, like migrant quotas or when they want to block or extract favours from a third party that is trying to join the EU (Bulgaria vs North Macedonia) or Schengen (Nederlands and Austria vs Romania and Bulgaria). If they don't want digital sovereignity, they can pay for whatever services or military equipment they like using their own funds.

https://archive.ph/Xe98t

I think they should shut down more nuclear energy plans.

The Lisbon Strategy, stemming from 2000:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/lis1_en.htm

TL;DR from bureaucratese: to make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" capable of sustainable economic growth with more jobs and greater social cohesion.

As of 2026, everyone can see for themselves what the previous long game has delivered. Not even that social cohesion; everyone is fighting over entitlements and blaming someone else (boomers, immigrants, techbros, childless people) for ruining the system.

I mean, techbros are the curse on humanity regardless of where you live. That part is 100% true.

But also, blaming boomers and childless people is mostly an American thing as far as I can tall.

So like, you got only the immigrants right, but again, America is no different then EU there.

Younger French generation seems to have a hate boner for boomers.

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