Escaping the trap of US tech dependence

https://disconnect.blog/escaping-the-trap-of-us-tech-dependence/

by laurex • 6 months ago

92 110 6 months ago

disconnect.blog

analyst74• 6 months ago

Sounds good in principle, but I don't see any meaningful suggestions.

throwaway_7347r2• 6 months ago

It has to start with buying the idea and trump has done excellent job in selling the idea.

mikeayles• 6 months ago

In a similar vein, I would recommend watching Cory Doctorow's presentation at 39C3,a post american, enshittification-resistant internet.

https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=uKDlYn33IIYevj8p

hiichbindermax• 6 months ago

You can also watch it at CCC directly: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification...

FpUser2• 6 months ago

As much as I am for freedom and hate that DMCI or whatever it is called the guy is delusional. Not because he propoese to repeal the act (I am all for it) but his ideas that one can have some profitable business doing circumvention and selling software / hardware that unlocks whatever one is trying to unlock. As soon as you try to sell one it will be hacked and released for free.

cmiles8• 6 months ago

“You told me these were the best engineers in the world!!”

“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”

(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).

Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

shimman3• 6 months ago

Is US tech even good anymore? Do none of us not encounter the massive amount of shit from companies like Google, MSFT, Apple, Amazon, etc as users? Truly terrible bugs or user flows from engineers that clearly don't care while everyone is just collecting their own share of blood.

I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.

All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).

kuerbel• 6 months ago

I sell/work as a consultant for m365 and azure and the services are definitely getting worse. AI translated garbage docs in which "plane" is translated as aeroplane (Flugzeug), Exchange as "Umtausch" (literal meaning of to exchange something) and so on. Obviously those are the ones I can remember because they were funny. There are also other errors that are not as obvious.

And don't get me started on slopilot being everywhere.

OGEnthusiast• 6 months ago

I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.

Apple silicon has been pretty transformative for desktop/laptop-class chips.

BlackjackCF• 6 months ago

I see US (software) tech going the way of Boeing and Intel in the next decade. I’m not sure what their long term goals are, or if they even have any beyond chasing large/quick short term profits, but you can only enshittify your product and abuse your customers for so long before they start abandoning you.

fooker4• 6 months ago

What has Rome ever done for us?

nxm• 6 months ago

No, US tech is driven by investors willing to risk allocating a ton of capital towards companies and products that have a good chance of succeeding.

Europe has been struggling and behind on tech and investments way before Trump. It’s policy and over regulation that prevents Europe from making any inroads

cudgy8• 6 months ago

Less US software and hardware is made in US with offshoring and Chinese manufacturing and quality is dropping …

FpUser2• 6 months ago

No, you have to build something that can work reasonably well, get rid of being fucking dependency slave in strategic areas and then try to catch up. Of course does not work for small countries

terminalshort2• 6 months ago

You absolutely can fight market forces. China did it for decades with their car industry. Chinese people were financially forced to buy inferior Chinese cars to support a domestic industry until it learned to compete in the global market. Very difficult to do this in a democracy, though.

torton• 6 months ago

Isn't that the exact description of the current U.S. car market?

CodingJeebus2• 6 months ago

To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.

All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.

And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.

trollbridge• 6 months ago

A ride sharing app is ridiculously easy to create.

Most of the work is in network effects so you have a large pool of drivers willing to work below minimum wage and a large pool of riders interested in paying you a lot more than that.

fooker4• 6 months ago

Your story makes the point that the nonprofit app only worked under new government regulations and could not survive in the free market?

I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.

deaux• 6 months ago

This is such an American take diametrically opposed to reality. You literally could not be more wrong. The correlation between "effort to fight market forces (i.e. protectionism" and "independence from US tech) is 1:1. It's China, then Korea, then the rest of the world which is all 100% dependent on US tech. China is independent entirely thanks to protectionism and banning right from the staft, Korea is inbetween thanks to the exact same.

The only thing that works is throwing up huge barriers against dumping. This is the norm for physical goods. US big tech, and really Silicon Valley, is based on dumping - burning VC cash to become a monopoly. This is not a hair better for a domestic industry than being flooded by physical goods that are cheap thanks to burning through (let's say Chinese) government cash. In the latter we love to call this "artificiallly cheap", though for some reason I've never heard this adjective used for US tech based on monopolizing by burning VC cash.

bflesch9• 6 months ago

You talk about "market forces" and you don't seem to understand them at all.

"Confidentiality", "Integrity", and "Availability" are a foundational concept of security (the CIA triad).

For non-US citizens "Integrity" and "Confidentiality" have been compromised for a long time, but these things have no day-to-day impact. They are only relevant as kompromat material once you become powerful and they want you to act in US interests.

What's new are serious, escalating threats and actions against "Availability". This is the most important pillar of security, and a whole different beast. Microsoft has blocked email accounts of international court of justice due to political pressure. Buffoons in US tech leadership such as Cloudflare CEO feel so emboldened that they openly threaten to cut off Italy. After TV performances by Musk, Thiel, Tim Apple, Zucky and Bezos in favor of trump there is no doubt they would cut off another country as form of pressure - and if it is only for a week.

In this week, our markets would be offline and nonfunctional. The market has a very high incentive to untangle from this mess of shitty bootlickers and impulsive convicted criminals.

It will take some time, but the market forces are clearly following the new incentives.

What surprises me here on HN that people who are seemingly US tech workers are quite ignorant to how it feels to be on the receiving end of this totally reckless, unprompted and idiotic behavior.

bhawks2• 6 months ago

New?!

This isn't new. You just haven't been paying attention.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55615214

Or maybe it is fine when it happens to people you disagree with.

lm284692• 6 months ago

Better? It just needs to be cheaper I think.

The US tech power is a bit like the US political soft power, it's there because it's huge and has momentum but it's not like it'll be here forever, especially given the current trajectory

hokumguru• 6 months ago

Libre Office is literally free and has never competed for significant market share in 30 years.

It has to be better

estimator72922• 6 months ago

Good thing that US Tech is building the worst technology possible. Should make things a lot simpler

pessimizer• 6 months ago

Only if you think that government's only purpose is to look pretty. Economies are planned. You can either plan them as governments, or let your oligarchs and foreign oligarchs plan them together ("market forces.") These only look the same when you allow oligarchs to determine your governments.

At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating.

If some guy in Canada builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.

edit: "Our ambition cannot stop there though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools, and other public institutions—not to mention private businesses—are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest."

This has always been the only answer, but it requires a relatively clean government. The government has to maintain ownership of these things, and cannot subcontract out the work.

JCM9• 6 months ago

You’re getting downvoted because you touched on a sensitive spot with some folks, but you’re right.

If other countries want to stop their reliance on US tech then they need to build better tech. Your BlackBerry quote shows that playing out in reverse. A non-US company dominated the market, a US company built something better (the iPhone) and the non-US company imploded.

bchalios• 6 months ago

Literally in the front page of HN: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/16/patch_tuesday_secure_...

microtonal6• 6 months ago

It's only a small contribution, but last week we have ended our Dropbox subscription (12 * 20 Euro = 240 Euro) and moved our data to Proton Drive. We are also moving out photos out of Apple Photos (12 * 10 = 120 Euro per year for storage). And I have also moved my mail out of Fastmail (to Proton Mail), which is a nice Aussie company, but their main servers are hosted in the US, so too risky. We also just moved all our backups from Backblaze B2 to Hetzner + local (between me and my wife 12 * $15 = $180 per year). Besides moving to Proton and Hetzner, we are increasing donations to non-profits like Mastodon.

I encourage everyone outside the US and in particular Canada and Europe to move your data out of the US and away from US cloud companies now. Putting your data there is not safe anymore and can and will be used for blackmail (see Microsoft cutting access of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) chief prosecutor's email). Trump is now blackmailing countries with tariffs to get them to back off support for Greenland (not going to happen), so things are going to get ugly.

If you are heavily into tech or an activist, etc. it's also a good time to pick up an extra phone like a second hand Pixel to run GrapheneOS as a backup. Or (less secure) a phone that can be unlocked and run something like /e/OS.

I know that it might take years to get all companies, governments, etc. off American big tech products. But that's not a good reason for not safeguarding your own data. Besides that, the more funding non-US alternatives get through enthusiasts, the better they are positioned to improve their alternatives.

mixmastamyk4• 6 months ago

Fairphone with Murena is another Euro-friendly choice on the mobile front.

cudgy8• 6 months ago

True. European countries will never violate privacy, prosecute citizens for their beliefs, or use blackmail operations against its citizens. Problem solved!

palmotea• 6 months ago

The easiest was of escaping the trap of US tech dependence, is to buy your tech from China. Everything they have is very advanced, and cheap to boot. Huawei instead of Apple, WeChat instead of WhatsApp, etc. Everyone wins except Trump.

mixmastamyk4• 6 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637463

Euro tech already exists. Add in Nova custom and Star labs. I understand many components are still made in China but this is the first step.

Loughla• 6 months ago

Is China a better country to rely on?

bflesch9• 6 months ago

Right now, China is still supporting the russian war machine. The russian people are openly at war against Ukraine and the European idea.

Still China is a great alternative to US in terms of hardware, because all the things you would buy from the US is just made in China anyways.

While the US are acting like foolish, uneducated hotheads China is silently benefiting from all parties involved.

dekrg2• 6 months ago

You mean compared to the country that is bombing other countries, kidnapping their leaders while also threatening to annex territory of its ally?

istanbulbebesi4• 6 months ago

More sane and predictable for sure. Which is a good thing.

bflesch9• 6 months ago

There's a German saying "Vom Regen in die Traufe", I think the English version is "out of the frying pan into the fire".

China is a good alternative for a lot of hardware, but in terms of software it is not an option.

yadaeno2• 6 months ago

The downside is that this tech stack is also being rolled out to Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Venezuela to build their own local versions of the Great Firewall. It is currently being used to crush dissent and imprison anyone who disagrees with the regime.

I guess if you consider that “winning” then definitely continue to support Chinese dominance.

solidsnack90003• 6 months ago

How would this lead to sovereignty?

SilverElfin3• 6 months ago

This is written from a Canadian perspective, but even within America, there are good reasons to stop giving money to American tech companies and find alternatives. The founders and executives and investors of all of these companies have become wealthy and powerful. Now they are dismantling the country by funding a certain political group and looking the other way as that same group seeks to deport 100 million Americans (basically all non whites), invade allied nations, and terrorize people in the streets. There’s no escape from the reality that dollars given to American tech companies is dollars given to that same machine.

bflesch9• 6 months ago

Do you think a lot of US tech workers feel the same?

From my personal interactions these past few days on HN it is very disappointing how ignorant and devoid of facts the arguments are which come from people who seem to be US tech workers.

SilverElfin3• 6 months ago

I think most are totally unaware. The ones that could become victimized by the administration are quietly terrified and worried about their future. But they can’t speak up because their CEOs are fans of the administration. One disappointing pattern I see is many tech workers downplaying what’s going on - I think it’s hard for them to imagine what the impact is when it doesn’t threaten them specifically.

loeg2• 6 months ago

[Republicans] [seek] to deport 100 million Americans (basically all non whites), invade allied nations,

You think these are statements of fact?

emptybits• 6 months ago

These statements are pretty well supported.

Re/ deporting 100 million Americans: The actual number would be 53 million and I'll explain. The USA Department of Homeland Security made an official statement two weeks ago which included an image of a classic American car on a beach with blue sky and the headline "America after 100 million deportations."[1][2] According to the US Census there are fewer than 47 million people living in the USA who are foreign born.[3] So even if every single immigrant is deported, including legal residents and naturalized citizens, hitting the government's goal of 100 million deportations would require deporting approximately 53 million people born in the USA who are, according to the 14th Amendment, entitled to citizenship. The Supreme Court has said the exceptions to this citizenship right are 1) children of foreign diplomats, and 2) children of an occupying enemy force. I'm going to say #1 is tiny and #2 is zero. DHS appears to have a goal to deport approximately 53 million Americans.

Re/ invading allied nations: For months the world has listened to the American president and republicans threatening to annex and control allied nations, such as Canada and Greenland. I don't think that claim even requires a citation, does it?

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DS8Tx3XCRLQ

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/03/homeland-sec...

[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/POP645223#PO...

SilverElfin3• 6 months ago

I recommend following the Twitter profiles of the various federal agencies. They tweet supremacist slogans or variations all the time. The official DHS account tweeted a call to deport 100 million:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dhs-100-million-deportations-...

As for invasions of allies that have been proposed by the administration - Canada, Mexico, Greenland.

gdulli• 6 months ago

Geopolitics aside, tech dependence in general has tipped from net helping us to hurting us. AI dependence is going to make social media dependence look like nothing.

marcosdumay• 6 months ago

I have never seen some person or organization that couldn't ditch LLMs in an instant.

Are you talking about some other kind of AI?

Yoric• 6 months ago

Big Tech is trying to push forward a model in which technicians use LLMs without understanding them. That's where all these "you don't need to learn coding" PRs converge towards.

That would be a nightmare scenario for almost everybody involved, but it's exactly the one in which the Trump admin believes and invests, and it is a possible future.

lelanthran4• 6 months ago

I have never seen some person or organization that couldn't ditch LLMs in an instant.

I read parent as "This is where they want to be", not "this is were they are right now".

ris• 6 months ago

Tech dependence is nothing compared to the world's dependence on US financial infrastructure.

yogthos• 6 months ago

Hasn't really been true for the past few years with a whole separate infrastructure emerging around BRICS Now.

mdhb• 6 months ago

The EU has a plan to replace all of that in the pipeline already. That isn’t new, they are already like 5 years into it and I think looking to launch it next year. That one I actually don’t think is going to be a problem at all as a lot of it is already built and basically ready to go.

pseudony• 6 months ago

Made a Ask HN, but screwed it up by editing the text.

Anyway, good ideas/tools for evaluating LLMs ? Naturally, as a Dane, I am moving away from Claude, but I’d like more than a gut feel about how much I may have given up to do so.

istanbulbebesi4• 6 months ago

Just go for Qwen or Deepseek. They are both very good.

microtonal6• 6 months ago

Or Mistral, it is French and has been great for my day to day queries (haven't tried for programming yet).

mcbetz• 6 months ago

You might benefit from LMArena's Leaderboard. It does not have Danish (yet), but German and English evaluation might help: https://lmarena.ai/de/leaderboard/text/german

Openrouter.ai shows the location of providers, you can find just a few European services, but also Singaporean and Canadian. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to filter easily.

istanbulbebesi4• 6 months ago

Here are the migrations we been doing to with my extended family to get rid of our US dependencies:

- Gmail -> ProtonMail

- Whatsapp -> Telegram

- I installed Linux to my parents laptops. They like it.

- YouTube App -> Newpipe and Smarttube

Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.

solidsnack90003• 6 months ago

Ford actually makes vehicles in Europe. Does BYD?

If push comes to shove and Europe needs to part ways with the USA, to greater or lesser degree, there will still be machinists, mechanics, and actual facilities in place to keep making Fords. That is a positive from the standpoint of European sovereignty.

The EU probably has rules in place to strongly encourage US manufacturers of automobiles to put facilities in the EU. The US has similar rules and many Toyotas, Hondas, &c, are made in the US, using US suppliers for parts.

It's not hard to imagine an approach to digital services that trends in a similar direction. In the EU or Canada, the US parent company would supply technical data, software, specifications, &c, to a domestic company with its own facilities and operations. It probably requires a combination of regulations and regular stress tests; but nothing prevents the domestic company's operations from being as de facto severable as a car factory.

istanbulbebesi4• 6 months ago

Ford is American, BYD is not. That is enough for me.

tzs2• 6 months ago

Ford actually makes vehicles in Europe. Does BYD?

Not yet. They are in the process of opening a factory in Hungary. The production line equipment arrived in December, with trial production scheduled for Q1 2026, and mass production in Q2, with capacity ramping up over two years.

They are also doing a factory in Turkey.

Their plan is for all of the EVs they sell in Europe to be made in the EU by 2028.

They aren't the only Chinese car maker interested in producing in Europe. Chery is building a big plant in Spain. Geely is looking at options in Poland or Hungary but hasn't decided on a site yet. SAIC is planning to make cars in Hungary.

microtonal6• 6 months ago

Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.

Replacing one non-ally by another. We have a VW ID.3 and it's great. Some people will argue that the on-board system is better on a Tesla or BYD, but a small loss of convenience, but a huge win for independence and the internal market. (Most of the criticisms are also outdated, the platform improved a lot since earlier generations.)

ta9000• 6 months ago

Please, just leave already. Stop talking about it and just do it. It’s like people talking about how awful social media is. Just don’t fucking use it.

Nothing would make Americans happier than an alternative. Europeans, go build your own big tech that can compete and win against Microsoft/Copilot. It’s not a big lift.

mixmastamyk4• 6 months ago

It's already built, now it only needs to be used.

Sytten• 6 months ago

If we want to meaningfully reduce our dependency we "just" need more capital. All founders in Canada will tell you that Canadian VC suck: they are risk averse, their due diligence is painful and their terms are made so they can't lose. It is not rare in Canada for ex-founders of failed startups to be hundred of thousands of dollars in debt. That's why we are always advised to go seek funding in the US.

In Canada we like to give money to big established monopolies, that's our thing. The SR&ED program is a prime example of that, as a bootstrap business it took us 3 years before we could apply since we didn't have enough money to front full salaries for 1.5y before receiving a grant.

It is not really a complex problem to solve, the entrepreneurs know the solutions but our politicians and wealthy people are so small c conservative it's pathetic.

ambicapter• 6 months ago

I mean it’s their money, not yours. Stands to reason that if you have a silly amount of money you can afford to spend it in silly ways (and if you don’t, you don’t). Sometimes you even hit it big then you get to tell everyone how much of a genius you are!

am3141• 6 months ago

This is 100% true.

Havoc2• 6 months ago

I really wish the EU leaned heavily into the cloud basic building blocks.

There's a lot of stuff in big cloud that is genuinely hard to duplicate especially with network effects, but I don't see why they can't throw a billion or 3 at ensuring you've got a homegrown stack that can do VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc - with guaranteed funding, clear licenses, handful of local options perhaps with some sort of local guaranteed certification etc.

Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks

microtonal6• 6 months ago

Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks

Yes. EU citizens should not let others (or themselves) talk them down. Yes, it will be an enormous job, but it's how you tackle any job - step by step. And there are a lot of things that can already be moved, like e-mail, code forges, databases, etc.

lelanthran4• 6 months ago

I really wish the EU leaned heavily into the cloud basic building blocks.

...

VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc

You think those are building blocks? I think that those are the very tippy-top of the tech stack!

Because, okay, lets say you have already got those things I quoted.

What are you going to run them on (CPU, RAM, storage, etc)? How are they going to talk to each other (Routers, switches, etc)?

It makes no sense, IMO, to have all your software but nowhere to run them. Better to throw that money at ARM/RISC-V development, and you'll literally get startups starting up to build the software for that hardware.

All you're proposing now is (re)building software for a US stack.

Havoc2• 6 months ago

You think those are building blocks?

From the users perspective yes.

EU doesn’t need cloud tech to have cloud tech for the sake of it but rather to build an ecosystem on top of it. The cloud is just the missing plumbing not the end goal

All you're proposing now is (re)building software for a US stack.

AWS has like 200 services. My point is with the right combination of half a dozen you can cover a big chunk of needs

cudgy8• 6 months ago

Didn’t moving to the cloud exacerbate the problem in the first place?

steve19772• 6 months ago

I think many people don't realize how big this dependence is.

You're running Linux? Oh fine... on which hard- and firmware? Intel? AMD? Apple Silicon? Qualcomm? All US.

You're using the Internet? Via Cisco routers?

Europe and other regions would have to put in huge efforts to really gain independence.

tadfisher• 6 months ago

I think there are different forms of dependence that result in more or less severe carrying costs. Hardware is only a problem when you need to replace it or create new installations, so its carrying cost is rather low. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is subscription-based, induces vendor lock-in with a whole software/hardware ecosystem, and is updated on a whim from the vendor with next to no customer control; its carrying cost is enormous.

microtonal6• 6 months ago

The thing is that we had been allies for many decades. So the US and the EU are very entwined. You only mention one side, those chips are made using ASML machines from The Netherlands (with lenses from Germany), the latter two use an architecture licensed from a UK company (owned by a Japanese conglomerate). It was a very successful cooperation between two continents, but since the US wants to throw that under the bus, we have to become self-sufficient.

It will take time to untangle the mutual dependencies and become more independent. That said, ARM also designs full ARM64 cores (until recently Qualcomm cores were based on ARM cores, until the new cores based on the NUVIA acquisition) and they can be fabbed in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung), and hopefully Europe in some years.

Besides that, it's true that if you are running Linux, you rely on US firmware and Intel/AMD chips, but assuming that Intel ME doesn't have a bad remote kill switch, you can continue to run on existing hardware.

jsiepkes• 6 months ago

All that hardware (with chips) is made by machines from ASML. Mobile devices? That's all ARM. Mobile infrastructure like 5G? Mostly Nokia or Ericsson.

colinnordin• 6 months ago

China is getting closer to tech independence by the day, I imagine they are happy to sell their tech to anyone who is willing. Not saying this is good or desirable from a European perspective, but quite likely.

mixmastamyk4• 6 months ago

This story is getting penalized, pushed off the front page, because it has more comments than points. It's important, so please upvote.

throwaway_7347r2• 6 months ago

All the countries now going local. I hope there is lots of redundant jobs b/w countries and increase employment. We don't need any more efficiency, all we need is to work sane hours without stress and die in peace.

Escaping the trap of US tech dependence

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