EU plots long game against US digital supremacy

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-plots-long-game-against-us-digital-supremacy/

by vrganj • 21 days ago

31 16 21 days ago

politico.eu

vrganj• 21 days ago

https://archive.ph/Xe98t

inglor_cz2• 21 days ago

The Lisbon Strategy, stemming from 2000:

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

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

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

watwut• 21 days ago

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

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

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

inglor_cz2• 21 days ago

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

JumpCrisscross2• 21 days ago

Oh, this is actually substantial [1].

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

sph2• 21 days ago

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

JumpCrisscross2• 21 days ago

Is it?

Idk. It’s draft legislation.

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

quentindanjou• 21 days ago

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

sph2• 21 days ago

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

maeglin• 21 days ago

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

TacticalCoder• 21 days ago

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

Big round of applause.

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

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

It's a strategy from losers and by losers.

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

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

petre2• 21 days ago

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

zrn900• 21 days ago

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

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

google234123• 21 days ago

I think they should shut down more nuclear energy plans.

michelb• 21 days ago

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

EU plots long game against US digital supremacy

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