Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology

https://theconversation.com/europe-wants-to-end-its-dangerous-reliance-on-us-internet-technology-274042

by DyslexicAtheist • 6 months ago

297 251 6 months ago

theconversation.com

testing223212• 6 months ago

At this point they’d be insane not to.

Headline could be “every country wants to end all reliance on US” and it would be the sane thing to do.

analog31• 6 months ago

Including the US. I don't want to be dependent on this stuff any more than anybody else does.

lateforwork6• 6 months ago

Exactly. I live in the US but I'd like to switch from US apps and services controlled by US oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Zuckerberg to European alternatives.

johanneskanybal2• 6 months ago

This is the point of time in history where the people usually start a revolution. Do that.

hdhdhsjsbdh2• 6 months ago

I think they should. Let’s kick off some meaningful economic growth in Europe and provide a counter to the increasingly hegemonic, anti-human US tech oligarchs that have reaped all of the financial rewards of algorithmic radicalization and surveillance capitalism for the past 20 or so years. Maybe Europe can imagine something better.

lazide2• 6 months ago

That would require some hard choices and actual hard work. It’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.

jabwd• 6 months ago

I don't know, you might be underestimating how much damage the orange in charge is really doing to the interests of the US. Change is slow, and the subtle things set in motion are always perceived too late. A simple example would be a small county in germany saving 5+ million a year thanks to moving away from microsoft. Add that to the budget of the many (largely european) opensource projects out there , and you can see things can shift, slowly, but rapidly once noticed.

lingrush4• 6 months ago

Europe needs to roll back all of the socialism if it wants to compete with the US and China. European tech is never going to keep pace if the people who build it only work 35 hours a week and take a year of paternity leave every time they have a kid.

hithre• 6 months ago

How do they compete for actual tech then? Like Airbus.

- 35h a week, doesn’t prevent engineers from working more legally (most do) - with the age of AI code velocity is no more about time spent, but fresh brain - And much much more important, it is significantly more efficient to have an employee 10 year in one place than 2 years in 5 places. What could explain higher US turnover than europe, you think?

coredev_5• 6 months ago

No we do not need to roll back on our humanity. The US population however really need to wake up and start unionize and vote for politicians that are not big orange incompetent babies.

joquarky• 6 months ago

With decades of education cuts, top STEM researchers leaving the country, and immigration coming to a halt, I think you overestimate the future competitive position of the US.

hdhdhsjsbdh2• 6 months ago

Here’s the difference between US and Europe: in US tech, productivity gains due to AI will lead to lower employment and higher expectations for the remaining employees. Salaries will remain the same and any increases in profit will of course go straight to the capital owning class. It will continue to be great for a vanishingly small number of people. On the contrary, Europe’s “socialism” makes them well-prepared to deliver the same level of productivity with AI using more people working fewer hours. And their “socialist” attitude toward where that value should go will result in an increased standard of living for everyone. You know, like the AI utopia we’ve all been promised.

wolvoleo8• 6 months ago

In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude. "US big tech is so entrenched we'll never get away". "European cloud will never be good enough". "There's nothing like Microsoft 365". At my work they don't even want to think about alternatives.

I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.

lateforwork6• 6 months ago

Even if MAGA goes away in 3 years when Trump (hopefully) goes away, the US will remain an oligarchy. Billionaire's interests comes before citizens' interests. This is because of a supreme court decision that allowed billionaires to buy elections. For this reason, even though I am American, I'd like to see European alternatives to US apps and services, because they are more likely to serve my interests.

okanat• 6 months ago

The big picture isn't that different in Europe. Most EU countries are also oligarchies, just with a lot more bloody histories and national traumas. The social safety net is kept to the level of remembrance of those traumas. Once people start forgetting them, the oligarchs will take away the rights one by one.

The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.

Hikikomori2• 6 months ago

It likely isn't over with him. Trump is just the frontman and possibly fall guy for project 2025/federalist society. They are his entire cabinet and their plan was to replace all government workers with their own loyal people.

Archelaos• 6 months ago

The problem are not Trump or the billionaires, but the majority of the American people who support them. They knew what they were getting.

terminalshort14• 6 months ago

This is a tired old trope that really has no basis in reality. There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed. In two out of the last 3 elections, the major corporate money backed candidate lost. The government is run by the 24 hour news cycle and the attention economy, not by the decree of billionaires. We operate firmly under the tyranny of the majority.

Spivak2• 6 months ago

Genuinely, what's the sell of Microsoft 365? I get MS Word, Excel whatever lock in but what is their cloud actually adding that can't be substituted?

Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.

I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.

Yoric4• 6 months ago

And frankly, MS Word is really bad. So are pretty much of all their services.

Not sure whether Excel is still good.

Sharlin2• 6 months ago

It's adding the property that it's an all-in-one turnkey solution. Which is an extremely attractive proposition compared to having a dozen separate tools. And to paraphrase the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

esperent• 6 months ago

what's the sell of Microsoft 365
We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap

You answered your own question.

skocznymroczny• 6 months ago

The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?

briHass• 6 months ago

M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.

There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.

I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.

tchalla2• 6 months ago

Everyone has been going gung ho about Canadian PM speech but the banger one for me personally is the Belgian PM. He said it best “Being a happy vassal state is one thing, being a miserable slave is another”. Europe deserves every bit what’s coming to them.

OKRainbowKid• 6 months ago

Can you elaborate how this statement led you to your conclusion?

trinsic24• 6 months ago

Also the Canadian MP is involved in deploying surveillance[0] on his own country so I am not sure why people are giving him props. He is part of the problem.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...

People need to stop buying into propaganda.

tmtvl• 6 months ago

Here in Belgium voting is mandatory, so the clowns we have are who the public decided were the best candidates. The only excuse we can make is that single-vote list-PR is worse than ranked voting.

Telaneo3• 6 months ago

I'd imagine this attitude would start to disappear as soon as alternatives start being used. It's already happening to some extent, but it needs to trickle down into the general populace. The relevant names just aren't in people's minds yet (although there definitely are areas where there aren't exact 1-to-1 replacements available).

ummonk• 6 months ago

It’s amazing how complacent and weak-willed the European populace and political leaders are. Quite the contrast to Canada.

trinsic24• 6 months ago

What the hell are you talking about? Canada is in a pretty bad state themselves, just as much as we are in the U.S.

SpicyLemonZest5• 6 months ago

I think you're misreading the source of the defeatism. It's clear what European leaders should do if they want to compete with US big tech. They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.

To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.

api2• 6 months ago

The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy.

Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.

smsm425• 6 months ago

If Europe were capable of doing this, Europe would not need to do this. They'd already have active and vibrant tech scene compared to US one - EU is bigger than US by population, and certainly not less smart - in fact, a lot of people live in EU and work for US tech companies. So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not? They decided their political model must work differently, even at the cost of not having big tech. So now they don't have big tech. And no amount of committee meetings is going to change that, even if all governments would want it really, really hard.

Intralexical• 6 months ago

They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?

mmooss5• 6 months ago

making the creation of billionaires a policy goal

Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.

In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.

wolvoleo8• 6 months ago

No, the last thing we should do is transform Europe into a neoliberal stronghold like America. It's not all about making money. It's about creating a civilisation for citizens, not business. Business is just a means to an end.

The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)

gerdesj• 6 months ago

"In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude."

I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.

I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!

Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.

wolvoleo8• 6 months ago

I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.

And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.

Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.

PontifexMinimus• 6 months ago

In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude

The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.

qmmmur• 6 months ago

I would hedge most businesses don’t need the full offering of 365. You could get away with an email provider, a way to author documents and some file storage which are abundantly offered on other platforms like infomaniak.

tjwebbnorfolk9• 6 months ago

They might not need it if they started today. But once you have a few hundred TBs of data in Sharepoint, you've foreclosed any alternatives.

petre4• 6 months ago

Just wait until he asks for total control of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten.

bell-cot2• 6 months ago

Back when the danger was natural and physical - how much defeatism was there in Holland about building the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works ?

Why the difference?

wolvoleo8• 6 months ago

Those were different times. Right now Holland has been governed by oligarchs for the last 30 years. The country is unrecognisable.

Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder

aa_is_op• 6 months ago

By the time the idiot EU bureaucrats get to do something, they'll be replaced by right-wing loonatics sponsored by US tech giants: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1916422/us-tech-giants...

Yoric4• 6 months ago

Maybe?

I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.

dilyevsky• 6 months ago

Have they tried more regulation of the kind where your investment agreement has to be fully read out loud and in person by the notary to all parties?

thisislife2• 6 months ago

Everyone wants to, and not just from the US, but China too. Digital imperialism is real but nobody is confident yet how to effectively fight it. India especially is kind of trapped because our IT service industry is deeply entwined with the US and our government doesn't know how to safely untangle it from the US without harming our economy.

nxm2• 6 months ago

No they don't... most people just want cheap stuff that works.

Anonyneko• 6 months ago

In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout

Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.

kemiller• 6 months ago

Ironically, Russia probing defenses in Europe is functioning like Chaos Monkey — revealing vulnerabilities and triggering hardening.

ls612• 6 months ago

It’s certainly doing the first, not so sure about the second.

bethekidyouwant7• 6 months ago

Why would there be a blackout? Is like hardening against a gas shortage

zabzonk2• 6 months ago

EMP attack

jenadine• 6 months ago

If the Us imposes sanctions such as "no more login to any Google/Apple/Microsoft/... accounts from EU citizens until they give Greenland".

Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.

deepbluev7• 6 months ago

You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.

dismalaf• 6 months ago

Europe wants a lot of things that they end up never actually doing.

nxm2• 6 months ago

Another opportunity for brunch with the other ministers

134152• 6 months ago

It's more than just internet technology, though. Europe has no digital sovereignty at all. Every operating system is in US hands, most office and business software, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, all social media commonly used, and so on. The list is endless.

johanneskanybal2• 6 months ago

This is pretty basic tech to replicate if it's needed though. It wasn't needed before so we just used what was there. But crazy to think the place you spawned from 2k years ago couldn't make another basic payment system if it was important lol.

Sharlin2• 6 months ago

It's not a technical problem (well, it is, but not primarily). It's a social problem. Replicating a technology is one thing. Getting thousands and thousands of organizations to migrate is in a whole different universe difficulty-wise. The costs would be astronomical.

digiown3• 6 months ago

Open source is basically sovereign (if Russia can use it), so there do exist functional alternatives for most of these things. It's mostly from inertia and network effects that the American ones are used.

Nextgrid8• 6 months ago

Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system and Android app store once they got kicked out of the US-based competitors?

kgeist• 6 months ago

Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system

The MIR payment system started functioning in 2015, long before Visa/Mastercard pulled out of Russia

Android app store

Initially there was some fragmentation because several companies raced to develop "Russia's #1 answer to Google Play Store" but everyone eventually settled on RuStore developed by VK (Russia's Facebook).

Generally, Russia already had replacements for most major American services long before 2022, and with better market penetration: Google => Yandex, Meta => VK, Uber => Yandex Taxi, Amazon/eBay/Craigslist => Ozon/Avito/Wildberries, etc. Lack of own app store was more like an oversight. Europe is at least 20 years late in the game.

jakkos2• 6 months ago

Every operating system is in US hands

Desktop Linux is (becoming) usable for a normal person just in time, I was surprised how easily a non-technical friend switched over to Bazzite (immutable fedora with gaming extras).

Visa, Mastercard, Paypal

The EU has already been working on a "Digital Euro" for a while

all social media commonly used

I'm hoping more decentralized social media continues to pick up steam

coredev_5• 6 months ago

This is just ignorance. And I would say that it is likely that Microsoft ditches Windows for Linux within 20 years.

134152• 6 months ago

Sorry but that reply is verging on the delusional and it's ironic, if not typical for social media, that you accuse me of ignorance. Linux vs Windows doesn't even matter. I'm a European who has been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 20 years and I know that the majority of popular Linux distros are mostly in US hands. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding and I wasn't clear enough about the scope of my comment. I meant it to apply to a situation in which the US is really no longer trustworthy and Europe needs some almost complete independence, not just about increasing digital sovereignty a little bit away from US products.

If there was a real conflict between the US and Europe, whether an open conflict or "cold war" type, you could be absolutely certain that every supply chain you're using is going to be mostly under US control. Open source is irrelevant for that issue, you're not compiling your own Linux distro and all software and your compiler toolchain and use your own repo hosting (and switch off all undocumented backdoors in your CPU's "management" engine). Funny enough, even if you did that, the hardware on which you run all this is almost certainly fully under US control. Guess where American Megatrends, Phoenix, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Intel are located. The same for every phone operating system. Binary blobs nowadays either come from China or from the US and their chip manufacturers (e.g. in Taiwan).

jaesonaras• 6 months ago

Support a dictator, and one day he will come for you.

jlehman• 6 months ago

Yes, it’ll be much easier to put the surveillance measures they’ve been trying so hard for into EU-based companies.

coredev_5• 6 months ago

I guess they want to be just as good as the US. Whistle blowers showed that NSA has access to most US tech/data companies (Google, Apple, MS, Dropbox).

yalogin• 6 months ago

As they should. It’s an incredible opportunity to develop technology natively and by extension wealth. The US has proven in this one year that it’s not to be trusted let alone relied upon. Unfortunately the tide once set in motion cannot be u done and the damage done in this one year is irreparable, may be now the tech billionaires will speak up and to use a phrase from Carney - take the sign down from their windows

Animats• 6 months ago

Most of this stuff is routine technology now. There's no reason for it to be centralized.

bell-cot2• 6 months ago

Like the life-long couch potato who wants to exercise daily and really get into shape...there is that dratted gap between "wants to" and "does"

pveierland4• 6 months ago

The tax authority in Norway alone employs 500 full-time software developers. If all of Europe followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles for all publicly funded development - and prioritized open formats + protocols + interoperability - it would within only a few years be possible to greatly improve software reliability for all nations.

digiown3• 6 months ago

I wonder if it would work if the governments provide some tax incentives for open source contributions similar to charity donations as well.

irishcoffee3• 6 months ago

Prompt: generate 15k in tax-deductible open source code contributions.

Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.

antxxxx• 6 months ago

UK government standards say that government software should be open source by default https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...

tjwebbnorfolk9• 6 months ago

That is a document. Show me reality.

Nextgrid8• 6 months ago

followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles

Has this actually produced any tangible results?

I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.

pveierland4• 6 months ago

I'm hopeful that it can work if:

- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".

- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.

Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.

One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

tjwebbnorfolk9• 6 months ago

EU countries are great at adopting principles. And saying things. And writing documents. And passing regulations.

Meanwhile, very country still runs on Microsoft and IBM.

hollow-moe• 6 months ago

French gov open source is a joke, single repo dump once from a zip file given by the contractor and then nothing. And that's when the source is provided, France Identité is closed source and Play Integrity dependent.

CuriousSkeptic• 6 months ago

the contractor

If there is a single policy change I could pick for public spending on IT it would be to forbid outsourcing to “contractors” and thinking of software delivery as “projects”

thedelanyo• 6 months ago

Well they've finally awaken. Better late than never. I think this is one of the best decisions China got right.

tjwebbnorfolk9• 6 months ago

Are they, though? Trump has been trying to wake up Europe since 2016. Russia INVADING a european country was still not enough. You think a spat over greenland will finally do the trick?

Put me down as skeptical.

subprotocol• 6 months ago

The scariest part of US internet dominance isn’t vendor lock-in, it’s executive branch chaos engineering.

whoknowsidont• 6 months ago

I mean good. The U.S. is currently run by a pedophile ring and has legitimate Nazi elements in its employ.

Also O365 just sucks. We can do better. We've had better. Please stop using MS products and technology stacks.

internet2000• 6 months ago

I've got no horse in this race, but, didn't they say the same things during the current US president's first term? Both about technology and defense. What came out of that?

Eupolemos• 6 months ago

Dane here.

Feelings are different now. IIRC, the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American.

It has become broadly clear, that it is about self preservation.

Nextgrid8• 6 months ago

the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

That sounds like performative bullshit though? A "feel good" thing just like plastics "recycling".

Are people actually choosing to pay fair price for a non-American product? Are people choosing to invest in or start local competitors to those American products? Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? And so on.

joe_mamba• 6 months ago

the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

And the app is running on a phone with an OS coming from which country?

Like sibling said, this feels like performative BS.

tjwebbnorfolk9• 6 months ago

Ok but parent's question stands: why didn't you get the message the first time?

taneq• 6 months ago

The wheels of Eurocrats turn slowly. (That was meant to be bureaucrats but autocorrect won this time. :D )

jakkos2• 6 months ago

First time round, Trump would consistently say lots of worrying stuff, but people in the US administration would stop him from following through.

This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.

The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"

cyanydeez• 6 months ago

Fascism and business are poison and catalyst

tsoukase• 6 months ago

With the current speed of things, Europe will need a hundred years to effectively and totally set free from the US digital dominance. You will know if this timeframe gets shorter if a torrent of change, news and enthusiasm floods almost any European company, either IT or not, mobilize vertical and horizontal government agencies and a large share of the population actively participates.

293736729129• 6 months ago

Does the EU regime grant its subjects independence from chat control? Or do bureaucrats try to force it on the sovereign again and again?

sylware• 6 months ago

First, get rid of whatng web engines and google/apple apps... wait.... mmmmmh... how many devs fully subsidized to dev and maintain some "replacement"?

On this matter, the only way out, technically simple protocols but doing a good enough job allowing a small team of average devs or even an individual average dev to develop and maintain an alternative software with a reasonable amount of effort. That with some hardcore regulations to allow them to exist. Remember that nearly 100% of the only services were fine with the classic web, aka noscript/basic (x)html web (and if you add only the <video> and <audio> elements you are getting dangerously closer to those 100%)

Don't forget, you cannot compet on economic grounds and international finance, their thousands of billions of $ will wreck you. And china is on the other side of the spectrum. You will end-up crushed on both sides.

And first thing first: some high performance EU silicon (design and manufacturing)? But we all know the state-of-the-art silicon tech is an international effort.

defence grade effort at EU scale... oooof!

paulvnickerson• 6 months ago

we in America would love to see Europe break free of its suicidal regulatory straitjacket and do enough innovation and building to carry its own weight

CGamesPlay• 6 months ago

we in America would love to see Europe break free of its suicidal regulatory straitjacket and do enough innovation and building to carry its own weight

This is false. Europe innovating and "carrying its own weight" means less market share for American companies, less American middlemen tapping into money moving throughout the European economy, less ability for American intelligence agencies to access European information, and less soft power from the threat of cutting off American technology.

bartekpacia• 6 months ago

Maybe he should have clarified “we (with a spine and moral compass) in America”. Obviously he didn’t mean leeches like you.

coredev_5• 6 months ago

We in EU like our regulations protecting people and data. That is not what have stopped us from creating Microsoft2.0.

drivebyhooting• 6 months ago

Europe should end its dangerous reliance on Russian gas and oil.

I think all this nonsense can be traced back to USA abdicating its industry to China and over 20 years being completely hollowed out.

apatheticonion4• 6 months ago

Then invest in and attract people to build it. I'd move to Europe if the salary was competitive.

IMO start by funding the living crap out of open source projects. Mandate that hardware sold in the EU comes with unlocked bootloaders and documentation sufficient to develop drivers from.

Relax IP protections so developers are allowed to reverse engineer products and build derivative works from them (extending the life of, facilitating compatibility).

Ban security systems used by big companies that enforce OS conformity (like kernel based anti-cheat, or banks disabling tap-to-pay on phones running beta android/rooted).

Double down on platform interoperability - e.g. Allow me to write a chat app that uses Facebook messenger as a back end.

Hey-ho there you go, European competitors to Android/iOS will pop up overnight. Asahi Linux and other OSes will get a shot in the arm (ha).

bethekidyouwant7• 6 months ago

Yes, what europe needs is way more regulation

apatheticonion4• 6 months ago

I'm talking about provisions to increase competition in the free market - not classical "corporations bad" regulations.

Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft thrive off competition barriers.

For example;

Why is Asahi Linux on the MacBook not daily drivable? Because we can't write drivers and require non-scalable geniuses to reverse engineer hardware from photos of circuit boards.

Why can't you install an alternative to Android or iOS on your phone? Because we can't write drivers and/or the hardware blocks you from even trying.

Preventing monopolies from ring-fencing empowers the free market through competition enablement. Ultimately, it's impractical to tell us non Americans that you need to build a hardware and software stack entirely from scratch and have that be competitive within a few years.

Without those barriers - perhaps the EU would have a homegrown mobile operating system. Perhaps Linux desktop adoption would be bostered enough to justify further investment in OSS initiatives.

workfromspace• 6 months ago

Then invest in and attract people to build it. I'd move to Europe if the salary was competitive.

True that. Also in many countries in Europe, IT jobs are not "special" anymore and salaries are similar to the median.

karussell• 6 months ago

Isn't the salary difference more about differences between Silicon Valley (or Big tech in US) and Europe?

One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).

Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.

apatheticonion4• 6 months ago

There's no profit in technology so there's no interest in starting a business leading to low demand for workers.

Stimulate the sector directly through investment and indirectly by enabling competition and the demand for jobs will increase - following with it salaries.

Cash injection isn't enough though, if you don't break down monopolistic barriers, businesses will fail regardless

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

A long ongoing discussion;

Related recently:

European Alternatives

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731976

AWS European Sovereign Cloud

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640462

I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427582

Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635

Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902

'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552389

coredev_5• 6 months ago

Things are moving fast right now.

But one thing you have to understand is that being reliant on US tech and defence industry was seen as something very positive up till now. Heck most EU countries even let US/NSA tap our internet data. We bought US fighters jets mostly not for the specific jets but for being on good terms with the US.

We all knew that US screwed us a bit, like probably practicing industrial espionage against us as well as collecting data on our citizens, but we let that slip for being a part of the US security umbrella.

I would say that is one reason why we did not push for our own word processors and OSes.

The US was also very good at utilizing this relationship, buying up initiatives (remember Skype). Don't know if this was a strategy or not.

I suspect that this is going to change now trough public opinion and regulations. I made the switch from Anthropic to Mistral last week. One great thing with GDPR is that we can not place PII in US services, that have been very good for our own Software industry.

grigio• 6 months ago

2025: EU bans Huawei because is China tech 2026: EU bans BigTechs because is USA tech 2027: EU blackout

hulitu• 6 months ago

Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology

Yeah, right. ROTFL. With all NGOs sponsored by the US, which sustain all political parties in Europe, this will be verry, verry difficult.

Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology

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