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Comment by mrdevlar | Hacker News Reader

This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu.

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.

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If it's the same woman I'm thinking of Office365 is underselling it a bit - she's fully sanctioned by the US. She can't use debit/credit cards, any Apple/Google device or service, Amazon/eBay, etc. She's completely digitally crippled by sanctions. And she's one of several people.

As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.

Yes, I'm aware of the rest of it, I just didn't feel it particularly relevant to the discussion.

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.

I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).

Some are more exposed than others.

I don't doubt there are some, but GP made it sound like every European company and institution is working feverishly on it, which just cannot be true.

A lot more people are working on it than I expected there to be.

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.

> take a decade

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.

> More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay

And now you know where that $4.7B fine will be spent. Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?

> Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?

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.

> Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations,

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.

Can you prove that? The EU is fully free to decide on laws that hit exclusively US companies if they so want, with the hope of being able to generate revenue.

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 isn't Google's money if they wrongfully profited it, and are fined. It belongs to the victims. The government of the victims will invest it in making the victims less dependent on the perpetrator? Well played.

In general, yes, but I disagree with "It isn't Google's money". But it is. It's right there in their accounts. Possession is 9/10ths of the law as they say.

In the end it is legal tender, owned by the government of said legal tender. But Google owes another legal entity money. They're in debt to that other legal entity, and they should pay said debt (pay the fine). It is actually 4.7 billion EUR.

And on top of all of the above, there's another reason Google owes us money. Google does not even pay fair taxes.

Why is that? Corporations approach governments looking for hand outs and governments give them. It's the politicians that should be the recipient of your ire. If corporations are using loopholes, politicians should close the loopholes. You're hating the player for playing the game. It's not like theGoog is refusing to pay taxes. They've just spent their money on lawyers to find out how to not owe as much tax as you think they should.

I'm not a fan of theGoog or any bigTech, but you especially seem to be taking this rather personally.

I definitely started out typing out the plural, but thought I should temper my words a bit for some reason.

They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.

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