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you've had twenty years to build an EU-native alternative...what do you have to show us? the EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success with

you've had twenty years to build an EU-native alternative...what do you have to show us? the EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success with fines

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
[flagged]
unixhero 2y ago
GDPR is a great incentive to build better products. Pre-gdpr there was a lot of sloppyness.
jfengel 2y ago
What they have to show us is two decades of not wasting time on problems someone else has solved. Capitalism at its finest. Now someone has thrown a monkey wrench at the invisible hand, and they have to duplicate a lot of effort. They lose, we lose. But at least they've stopped tying their future to an unreliable business partner. Divorce sucks for everyone.
- morkalork 2y ago
  That's basically it isn't it? Try going to any institutional investor asking for money to build a sovereign replacement for Google Docs or whatever in the last 15 years.
  - nadir_ishiguro 2y ago
    People have tried and you're right, there wasn't a lot of buy-in. It didn't help that these attempts were torpedoed aggressively by Microsoft, Google et al.
senand 2y ago
That's true. They were numerous attempts to introduce a European alternative, which (more-or-less) failed. The US cloud providers are years ahead. However, the EU is suffering from that; the US companies pay some taxes, but far less than you possibly believe, and it conversely doesn't have any tax revenue from their own companies. Not to mention the political and data independence that are now more necessary than ever.
qaq 2y ago
EU actually built solutions that people that care about $ use like OVH and Hetzner.
- wiether 2y ago
  I have never worked with companies that chose OVH or Hetzner (or Scaleway or any other EU provider) for something else than doing things cheap. They don't care at all about the provider being a local or European company. They just want the cheapest option. Which usually means using the same server to host dev/UAT/prod, and also using the extra storage available to store company data unrelated to the workloads hosted on the server. Whereas the companies that are using big clouds are more focused on doing things with more care, and trying to avoid as much disaster as possible. But I guess having PII data exposed on the web from an Hetzner server is better than having everything encrypted on AWS...
ranger_danger 2y ago
There are many EU-native cloud alternatives. https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-platforms https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl... Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.
- blagie 2y ago
  Most of them are horrible. I'd love to have a good Google Docs alternative. No one has made one. Nextcloud is the closest we've got, and I use it sometimes, but it's pretty bad. It's a lot less hard to build in 2025, and hopefully, someone will now.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/dream-num/univer https://github.com/dream-num/univer https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/firebase/firepad https://github.com/firebase/firepad https://github.com/prosemirror https://github.com/prosemirror https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc https://github.com/gobby/gobby https://github.com/gobby/gobby
    - darthwalsh 2y ago
      Can't comment on the other options, but a tool that requires proprietary Google Cloud Firebase is not a great option for ditching Google.
  - soundnote 2y ago
    Proton Docs has seemed fine to me.
- otterley 2y ago
  Hetzner isn’t really a full-service cloud provider. They provide machines and storage for rent. It’s the first rung on the ladder to becoming a cloud provider, but they’ve got a long way to go.
ulfw 2y ago
Wow propaganda bullshit straight on Hackernews. This what it has come to. After over a decade here I didn't expect to see the deterioration coming, but it's not surprising considering the state and division of your country.
blagie 2y ago
I mean, isn't the US saying that taxing imports is an ideal source of revenue? But at the end of the day, there was never any real incentive to make an EU-native alternative. Now, there is. The US is in an uncertain state. Will American be great again? A fascist dictatorship? Argentina? Who the heck knows. Right now, we have a lot of speculation about what's going on and precious little information. Unreliable partners give a very, very strong incentive to have critical infrastructure local. Beyond that, what's the downside? Before, it risked triggering a trade war. Seems we're there already, and going local just gives a stronger hand.
- graemep 2y ago
  The British government only fairly recently decided it needed to remove Chinese cameras from sensitive sites. They were complete happy to, for a long time, to give that power to a country that is an actual fascist dictatorship. Governments are too short termist to care. Its probably OK for the next few years so keep it cheap The danger is not just governments. Its businesses, and even consumer systems. If another country can brick all your vehicles or look through all your spy cameras or take down your telecoms then they have a great deal of power over you. This will only change after something happens.
  - blagie 2y ago
    As a point of fact, China is not, in fact, a fascist dictatorship. North Korea is not a fascist dictatorship either. Neither is or was Cuba, or medieval kingdoms with actual kings and warlords. Fascism is a right-wing ideology was widespread throughout all of Europe before WWII, and especially took hold in Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from e.g. Stalinist Russia. It is not a synonym for "bad government," "dictatorship," "violent government," or similar.
    - graemep 2y ago
      I agree that it is important to use the word fascist accurately, but it is also not not as well defined as you say. There is a reasonable case for calling China fascist. It has a cult of personality, state control of the economy, nationalism, racism, elimination of minority cultures. It is far more like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s than it is like Stalinist Russia.
sudosysgen 2y ago
OVH and Hetzner are quite decent and popular. The alternative does exist and I've used it a bunch, it works.
codethief 2y ago
Most companies I know (and/or have worked for) pay a lot of attention to where exactly their stuff is being hosted, partly due to GDPR. It might not be a Europe-native hoster but in most cases it will still be a data center in Europe (operated by AWS/Azure/GCP).
- senand 2y ago
  Which doesn't protect these companies. The CLOUD act allows the US to access the data even if hosted outside of the US, if it's a US company - since 2018. That has been a looming threat ever since, but is now more perilous than ever.
  - codethief 2y ago
    I think this article provides a more balanced perspective: https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/september/us-cloud-act-and-gdpr-is-the-cloud-still-safe https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/sep...
- jeffrallen 2y ago
  You and your colleagues probably need to learn more about the CLOUD Act, because it has changed the rules you thought you were operating under. A useful resource: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-trust https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-tr...
refulgentis 2y ago
Uh, isnt Hetzner HNs favorite host?
llm_nerd 2y ago
For decades, the technology center of the universe has been Silicon Valley. No matter where you lived -- Canada, the UK, Germany, India -- if you wanted to be serious, you moved to the US. And if you had a company, being acquired by a Silicon Valley company was basically the goal. In the same way that you had to move to LA if you wanted to do anything serious in the entertainment industry. So every innovation and success ends up being sucked into the gravity well of Silicon Valley. Every talent ends up having to move to the US to be credible. Soon everything is "American". The great innovation center of the universe, fueled by foreigners and acquired foreign businesses. Will this continue? That is hugely to be seen.
jonathanstrange 2y ago
We're using Hetzner and BunnyCDN, never store any data on US servers. The decision for it is independent of the current political situation, mostly to avoid the US legal system as best as we can and to ensure GDPR-compliance. There are plenty of other alternatives, e.g. Softmaker Office and Papyrus are German word processor and office applications.
bee_rider 2y ago
The EU is a pretty capitalist organization (I mean the single market is a big part of it). I think they have trouble competing with US tech companies because of our economies of scale, and widespread use of anti-competitive business practices, general inertia, and the tendency of the US to brain drain the rest of the world. I guess, fortunately for you guys, we’re trying to throw away many of our advantages.
- ebiester 2y ago
  There are enough tech people that are ready to brain drain from here right now - some well placed money would go a long way right now if Germany, France, the Netherlands, or another tech hub was ready.
watwut 2y ago
Yeah, it is call free trade. Paying to someone else. You know the trade deficit thing? Selling these things made it smaller. You will surprised, but American businesses benefit from selling their services.
megous 2y ago
Locally (in my country) managed virtual machines, or managed hosting services (1990-2000s variant of "git push" (ftp) your PHP app somewhere and have the website running, that US companies re-invented as "git push" to deploy, while somehow managing to invert the "app" hosting vs VM cost relationship at the same time, making managed hosting more expensive). At work we rely on "big" clouds offered by major telecom companies. AWS is seen as ridiculously expensive "religious requirement" to gain trust, if we'd ever decide to market our product to US customers, but little else. Big benefit of smaller countries and local apps. We can more easily fit apps on one to a few computers and don't need your hyperscaling clouds to serve the entire world, because our world is 10 mil. people.

you've had twenty years to build an EU-native alternative...what do you have to show us? the EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success with fines

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

[flagged]

unixhero 2y ago

GDPR is a great incentive to build better products. Pre-gdpr there was a lot of sloppyness.

jfengel 2y ago

What they have to show us is two decades of not wasting time on problems someone else has solved. Capitalism at its finest. Now someone has thrown a monkey wrench at the invisible hand, and they have to duplicate a lot of effort. They lose, we lose. But at least they've stopped tying their future to an unreliable business partner. Divorce sucks for everyone.

morkalork 2y ago
That's basically it isn't it? Try going to any institutional investor asking for money to build a sovereign replacement for Google Docs or whatever in the last 15 years.
- nadir_ishiguro 2y ago
  People have tried and you're right, there wasn't a lot of buy-in. It didn't help that these attempts were torpedoed aggressively by Microsoft, Google et al.

senand 2y ago

That's true. They were numerous attempts to introduce a European alternative, which (more-or-less) failed. The US cloud providers are years ahead. However, the EU is suffering from that; the US companies pay some taxes, but far less than you possibly believe, and it conversely doesn't have any tax revenue from their own companies. Not to mention the political and data independence that are now more necessary than ever.

qaq 2y ago

EU actually built solutions that people that care about $ use like OVH and Hetzner.

wiether 2y ago
I have never worked with companies that chose OVH or Hetzner (or Scaleway or any other EU provider) for something else than doing things cheap. They don't care at all about the provider being a local or European company. They just want the cheapest option. Which usually means using the same server to host dev/UAT/prod, and also using the extra storage available to store company data unrelated to the workloads hosted on the server. Whereas the companies that are using big clouds are more focused on doing things with more care, and trying to avoid as much disaster as possible. But I guess having PII data exposed on the web from an Hetzner server is better than having everything encrypted on AWS...

ranger_danger 2y ago

There are many EU-native cloud alternatives. https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-platforms https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl... Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.

blagie 2y ago
Most of them are horrible. I'd love to have a good Google Docs alternative. No one has made one. Nextcloud is the closest we've got, and I use it sometimes, but it's pretty bad. It's a lot less hard to build in 2025, and hopefully, someone will now.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/dream-num/univer https://github.com/dream-num/univer https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/firebase/firepad https://github.com/firebase/firepad https://github.com/prosemirror https://github.com/prosemirror https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc https://github.com/gobby/gobby https://github.com/gobby/gobby
  - darthwalsh 2y ago
    Can't comment on the other options, but a tool that requires proprietary Google Cloud Firebase is not a great option for ditching Google.
- soundnote 2y ago
  Proton Docs has seemed fine to me.
otterley 2y ago
Hetzner isn’t really a full-service cloud provider. They provide machines and storage for rent. It’s the first rung on the ladder to becoming a cloud provider, but they’ve got a long way to go.

ulfw 2y ago

Wow propaganda bullshit straight on Hackernews. This what it has come to. After over a decade here I didn't expect to see the deterioration coming, but it's not surprising considering the state and division of your country.

blagie 2y ago

I mean, isn't the US saying that taxing imports is an ideal source of revenue? But at the end of the day, there was never any real incentive to make an EU-native alternative. Now, there is. The US is in an uncertain state. Will American be great again? A fascist dictatorship? Argentina? Who the heck knows. Right now, we have a lot of speculation about what's going on and precious little information. Unreliable partners give a very, very strong incentive to have critical infrastructure local. Beyond that, what's the downside? Before, it risked triggering a trade war. Seems we're there already, and going local just gives a stronger hand.

graemep 2y ago
The British government only fairly recently decided it needed to remove Chinese cameras from sensitive sites. They were complete happy to, for a long time, to give that power to a country that is an actual fascist dictatorship. Governments are too short termist to care. Its probably OK for the next few years so keep it cheap The danger is not just governments. Its businesses, and even consumer systems. If another country can brick all your vehicles or look through all your spy cameras or take down your telecoms then they have a great deal of power over you. This will only change after something happens.
- blagie 2y ago
  As a point of fact, China is not, in fact, a fascist dictatorship. North Korea is not a fascist dictatorship either. Neither is or was Cuba, or medieval kingdoms with actual kings and warlords. Fascism is a right-wing ideology was widespread throughout all of Europe before WWII, and especially took hold in Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from e.g. Stalinist Russia. It is not a synonym for "bad government," "dictatorship," "violent government," or similar.
  - graemep 2y ago
    I agree that it is important to use the word fascist accurately, but it is also not not as well defined as you say. There is a reasonable case for calling China fascist. It has a cult of personality, state control of the economy, nationalism, racism, elimination of minority cultures. It is far more like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s than it is like Stalinist Russia.

sudosysgen 2y ago

OVH and Hetzner are quite decent and popular. The alternative does exist and I've used it a bunch, it works.

codethief 2y ago

Most companies I know (and/or have worked for) pay a lot of attention to where exactly their stuff is being hosted, partly due to GDPR. It might not be a Europe-native hoster but in most cases it will still be a data center in Europe (operated by AWS/Azure/GCP).

senand 2y ago
Which doesn't protect these companies. The CLOUD act allows the US to access the data even if hosted outside of the US, if it's a US company - since 2018. That has been a looming threat ever since, but is now more perilous than ever.
- codethief 2y ago
  I think this article provides a more balanced perspective: https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/september/us-cloud-act-and-gdpr-is-the-cloud-still-safe https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/sep...
jeffrallen 2y ago
You and your colleagues probably need to learn more about the CLOUD Act, because it has changed the rules you thought you were operating under. A useful resource: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-trust https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-tr...

refulgentis 2y ago

Uh, isnt Hetzner HNs favorite host?

llm_nerd 2y ago

For decades, the technology center of the universe has been Silicon Valley. No matter where you lived -- Canada, the UK, Germany, India -- if you wanted to be serious, you moved to the US. And if you had a company, being acquired by a Silicon Valley company was basically the goal. In the same way that you had to move to LA if you wanted to do anything serious in the entertainment industry. So every innovation and success ends up being sucked into the gravity well of Silicon Valley. Every talent ends up having to move to the US to be credible. Soon everything is "American". The great innovation center of the universe, fueled by foreigners and acquired foreign businesses. Will this continue? That is hugely to be seen.

jonathanstrange 2y ago

We're using Hetzner and BunnyCDN, never store any data on US servers. The decision for it is independent of the current political situation, mostly to avoid the US legal system as best as we can and to ensure GDPR-compliance. There are plenty of other alternatives, e.g. Softmaker Office and Papyrus are German word processor and office applications.

bee_rider 2y ago

The EU is a pretty capitalist organization (I mean the single market is a big part of it). I think they have trouble competing with US tech companies because of our economies of scale, and widespread use of anti-competitive business practices, general inertia, and the tendency of the US to brain drain the rest of the world. I guess, fortunately for you guys, we’re trying to throw away many of our advantages.

ebiester 2y ago
There are enough tech people that are ready to brain drain from here right now - some well placed money would go a long way right now if Germany, France, the Netherlands, or another tech hub was ready.

watwut 2y ago

Yeah, it is call free trade. Paying to someone else. You know the trade deficit thing? Selling these things made it smaller. You will surprised, but American businesses benefit from selling their services.

megous 2y ago

Locally (in my country) managed virtual machines, or managed hosting services (1990-2000s variant of "git push" (ftp) your PHP app somewhere and have the website running, that US companies re-invented as "git push" to deploy, while somehow managing to invert the "app" hosting vs VM cost relationship at the same time, making managed hosting more expensive). At work we rely on "big" clouds offered by major telecom companies. AWS is seen as ridiculously expensive "religious requirement" to gain trust, if we'd ever decide to market our product to US customers, but little else. Big benefit of smaller countries and local apps. We can more easily fit apps on one to a few computers and don't need your hyperscaling clouds to serve the entire world, because our world is 10 mil. people.