I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech.
We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, so we're phasing you out. It'll take decades to repair the lost trust in US digital services among the governments of Europe.
As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.
Yes, I'm with you. I'm grateful that most of the news I hear about this is relatively positive. I'm actually kind of in awe of how fast it's all moving. For all the talk about slow Europeans, that single ICC action seems to have launched a ton of initiatives.
More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.
And now you know where that $4.7B fine will be spent. Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?
And on top of all of the above, there's another reason Google owes us money. Google does not even pay fair taxes.
I'm not a fan of theGoog or any bigTech, but you especially seem to be taking this rather personally.
Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations, externalising huge chunks of the cost they generate to the rest of the world. OpenAI decided to run the largest social experiment humanity ever undertook without asking any of us. Microsoft is powering up old nuclear power plants to cover for their AI data center consumption. Apple is manufacturing in foreign countries under awful conditions so every American child can own an iPhone. Big Tech made San Francisco unaffordable even for well-compensated software engineers. Facebook actively made children addicted to push more apps.
We all, as a society, have to suffer through the effects of reckless greed from American companies (and we didn't even talk about Big Oil or Big Pharma yet!) Just because nobody bothers to put a price tag on it doesn't mean there isn't one.
The EU doesn't fine companies as a way to generate revenue, but because they break local laws and cause damages to someone.
It is funny because that's not what I was saying. At. All.
The reply was a reply to the question of why EU countries just hired US based companies instead of developing their own. The response to that was that it would cost too much money "100s of billions of euros". Now the EU is coming up with their own versions of things like Office and what not. I was merely suggesting that they have found a way to offset that "100s of billions of euros" by fining companies billions of euros.
I feel dumb having to explain it.
There is no law, constitution, court or parliament that explicitly forbids this.
Another indicator, that this is indeed a new business for the EU, is to look at the difference between southern europe and northern europe when it comes to the size of GDPR fines. It's enormous. Clearly the south has found a new way to revenue, since most, if not all of them, are more or less bankrupt.
It's the one time where the European Union's inability to advertise what they're doing is paying off in their favor. Then again, good, the operation of government isn't meant to be done through a tweet. We should resist the corruption of government to idiotic soundbites on platforms owned by American billionaires.
Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.
If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".
It's just that the possibility of the "nuclear option" works as a deterrent.
Also, EU (and probably most parts of the world) are already switching away at this moment already.
That is two US companies in complete control of the fundamental digital ID system of the entire EU.
Everything they say about "digital sovereignty" is performative nonsense because they simply have no other options and no capacity to build replacements themselves.
The UK is talking about sovereign AI but doing much the same with pushing reliance on Apple and Google.
The EU could be fine but it's just not doing it. Companies in the EU and even EU institutions do keep on using US SaaS, from Microsoft to AWS to Oracle institutions and companies claim they want sovereignty but when it's time to deploy their IT plan, they just don't.
TL;DR: in theory yes, in practice it is just not happening at scale.
Not only would you lose the 450 million odd EU customers, but the rest of the world will reconsider doing business with you as well.
Here in Europe, every government and major corporation have recently added their dependance on US platforms to their risk management taxonomy. For the (unlikely) scenario you mention, for the scenario that their company/government somehow runs afoul of the US goverment and this is used as leverage, for espionage reasons, and for other reasons that may have already been in their risk overview (data privacy, compliance, etc) but were seen as manageable but are no longer so.
For some anecdotes: My former employer just moved off of AWS to a EU provider and will likely also move away from Google Cloud for their internal needs, my current employer has started evaluating moving off of Azure at the request of our clients (though they dismissed the idea of moving off of Office 365 internally), and my partner's company (a large corporate) has started prioritizing a transition plan away from AWS.
temporarily yes, then EU will be able to build them on its own.
But what would also collapse is trust in all US companies, whole world will start working on their own solutions, no more AWS/GCP/Azure hegemony in the world. Everyone would close their internet, just like China did and develop own solutions
Today, yes.
The possibility of this, combined with how seriously Greenland was taken, means the EU is collectively saying "as a matter of urgency, we need strategic independence from the US".
This will take a while. Ironically, access to AI will make the transition much faster.
However, this is currently mutual interdependence: if the US actually cut off non-AI cloud to the EU, the US would screw over one of their major suppliers thus preventing them from supplying stuff, and leave itself entirely at the mercy of China. If it cut off AI to the EU, there goes a big market for tokens and the current data centre supply looks even more sketchy than its effect on electricity prices has already made it look. (But one bit of good news is that US electricity prices would come down).
Good thing european governments and industries start to work on real technological and financial independence. It is high time for cutting ties with a country that is acting as irrational and self centered as the usa.
Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
We've repeatedly built things, they often get bought by US companies. This doesn't necessarily even involve them moving office, as for example Deep Mind was founded in the UK (while it was in the EU) and is still there (HQ: London; research offices in France & Germany so still in EU too) despite now being owned by Alphabet.
We have, they get bought by American companies as their exit strategy.
If American companies decide to shutdown access then there's no pressure from the behemoths to stamp out competition, it would just be natural that alternatives take over since the market clearly exists and without American tech companies filling that market it would be pretty easy for alternatives to grow.
The EU hasn't because European investors are shy about deploying capital. If you look at European weapons and aerospace, it's clear there's no particular technical or capability barrier.
Even in 2019, some coworkers were complaining that the best offer from their landline company (in one of the small villages just outside the Berlin city limits) was dialup.
Berlin's reputation post reunification has been "poor but sexy".
Market caps of Russian examples from above:
Sber: $84 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/sberbank/marketcap/
Yandex: RUB 1327B (~= $17 bn) - https://tradingeconomics.com/yndx:rm:market-capitalization
VK: RUB 176.7B (~= $2.3 bn) - https://smart-lab.ru/q/VKCO/MSFO/market_cap/en/
Ozon: $8.9 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/ozon/marketcap/
Market caps of bigger EU tech firms:
ASML: $533.84 B
Siemens: $223.14 B
SAP: $202.96 B
Seagate Technology: $164.43 B
How do you define biggest? Can't be by market cap.
Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.
Claiming that something is wrong with Europe in general because it didn't produce interesting technology is an utterly ridiculous and uninformed take.
A large reason US services have such a presence in Europe is that their flagrant disregard for rules and the pursuit of profit at all costs gives them an unfair advantage. If those US companies cut off their services, in the long run the ones in the EU would have the room to expand within the rules. That’s the opposite of the doomsday scenario you’re describing. Though of course an abrupt cut would be momentarily disruptive, countries in the EU are already taking steps to reduce reliance on US services (for example: LaSuite).
That would be the single best thing that could happen to the EU.
I think people would be surprised by how quickly European and international companies and governments can rid themselves of the American tech stack. They use this stuff because it's convenient, solid, and cheap, not because it's the only option.
> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
Yes, both in the EU and the US, initially. It would also force the EU to finally invest in its own tech stack and end the US's ability to sell software globally.
People seem to believe that America's global economic dominance is a law of nature that will never change, regardless of what the US does. But it's not. There is no American exceptionalism, other than what America worked for.
If you continually kick your customers in the face, they'll eventually stop being your customers.
So what? It will hurt everyone, but end result will be that US companies won't be able to sell in other parts of the world, because everyone will have own standards, own solutions, new regulations will come up about data residency, which will require using unknown AWS alternative in a small country and even if you are willing to maintain 150 Datacenter across different countries, companies will be afraid of using US tech, to one day lose access to their data
If the US had never opened up their innovations to the world, they wouldn't have been able to extract the gargantuan amount of money from it they did. If the US had not instated the Marshall plan after WW2, there would never have been as close ties between Europe and the US. If American companies hadn't outsourced much of the manufacturing to poorer countries, the standard of living would be a lot lower than it is today. If USAID hadn't improved and saved the life of millions of humans, American companies wouldn't be met with such universal acceptance and opportunities to sell their goods as they have.
It's not like the US isn't massively benefitting of their investments in the rest of the world. But it sure looks like you're pretty aligned with the current administration there, so we'll both see how this plays out in real time.
You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying.
Also, the rest of the world had other networks, the US version (TCP/IP) just happened to win enough mindshare to replace e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
The UK alternative was only phased out in favour of TCP/IP after the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at the famously-not-American CERN. The American attempt at the web was Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
> An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s.
Only thing we might care to smuggle (if anything) would be the software, and it's not like a DVD is hard to hide. Nobody would be smuggling out hardware, we would not need to, we would not care to. And even that's a stretch, we're also quite capable of writing our own software, sometimes you buy our companies because they're better at it than yours.
> We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.
You say that like other countries don't make stuff. It's often the other way around, because we're as smart and capable as you, despite what you may think, and even when things have been invented "in" the US, it has often been by an immigrant who in your alternate timeline would not have gone to the US.
The chips are made by machines sold by EU companies; batteries and brushless motors? China; IMU? Japan, Germany, Taiwan; even GPS, despite the US one being the famous one, has alternatives of GLONASS (Soviet), BeiDou, and Galileo.
TBH, the only thing that America genuinely brought to the table was the interaction of the first amendment and cryptography. Insufficient cryptography, insufficient security, e-commerce remains limited.
One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.
In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.
Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.
At one point in the 1980s, Olivetti was the world's third largest personal computer manufacturer[8] and remained the largest such European manufacturer during the 1990sWow, I'm genuinely surprised. I don't think I've even heard of them before now, despite growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK. ZX Spectrum, BBC Micros, Acorns, but not Olivetti.
Much of America's technological progress is a direct result of them selling tech to the rest of the world and becoming the world's tech hub. Do you think that not selling anything to anyone outside the US would have had zero impact on tech progress across the world?
Then European countries would have continued using their own networks.
> It's basically been one giant gift.
And Europa gifted their own part to it. Remember, World Wide Web originates from CERN in Switzerland, made by a brit.
It also shows how untrustworthy a partner is when this threat is thrown around casually. Also why talks of tech sovereignty are a lot more prevalent now.
If you brought that up 10 years ago, people looked at you as if you were a crank conspiracy theorist. Now everyone takes it seriously. Maybe a decade from now this will have been addressed.
AI services are a lot less important than you presume. Cut access to it and the workd keeps moving as usual.
I think the EU needs a kick under the ass to stop its comfortable inertia.
I think the EU member states would declare it a matter of national emergency and nationalize the relevant assets, with every other country these American companies sell to taking notes and considering doing the same pre-emptively, providing a huge investment boost to EU tech companies (and almost certainly China) while tanking the US economy, and poisoning the ability of the Americans to sell to Europe for the next hundred years.
You don't win the opium wars by threatening to cut off the supply of opium.