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A necessary step to reduce risk to infrastructure given that the US government has become erratic and has decided it is now anti-Europe. The US means to underm
by breve 10mo ago
A necessary step to reduce risk to infrastructure given that the US government has become erratic and has decided it is now anti-Europe.
The US means to undermine the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-hungary-from-eu/a-75134777 https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...
The US means to annex European territory: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo
It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- petcat 10mo ago> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it. Doesn't Europe actually have a lot of Chinese equipment in their telecom infrastructure? Is this an effort just to try not to make that mistake again?
- VWWHFSfQ 10mo agoEurope will just end up doing whatever is cheapest. It's the same story as always. They'll say some stuff publicly but they'll quietly come back to American tech once they see the price tag difference. They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
- victorbjorklund 10mo agoUS says that Europe is their number one enemy. Using American tech is the most risky thing you can do since Trump declared that they are now a hostile enemy with intents of overthrowing European democracies.
- andsoitis 10mo ago> US says that Europe is their number one enemy. Pardon my French, but where do you get that nonsense from?
- talideon 10mo agoThe latest US national security strategy, one would assume.
- mdhb 10mo agoWithout getting hung up on the exact phrase “number 1”. It’s very literally one of the biggest things in official US national security strategy right now and some leaks of the non-public version talk about explicit plans to try and destroy the EU. So semantics aside, the overall point stands on solid ground.
- disgruntledphd2 10mo agoThat whole thing is just incoherent. There's lots about forming a trading alliance against China, and then loads about destroying the EU. You can't have both of those at the same time.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10mo agoWith US tech now in profit-squeezing mode rather than user-acquisition mode, the cost sensitivity might favor switching for things like SaaS.
- cpursley 10mo agoYep - just look at their oil/energy situation: they still buy it by the boatload from you know who, but just through 3rd parties.
- yurishimo 10mo agoBut look at solar adoption across Europe since 2022. It’s going gang busters and now with sodium batteries coming online next year, cheap home energy storage is about to boom as well. Europe doesn’t want to buy Russian gas, but there is also the very real political reality of what happens if your citizens freeze to death. I will be very surprised if any EU state is reliant on Russian gas by 2035.
- cpursley 10mo agoThat's positive news, but I'm talking about oil - which is still needed for modern industrial economies (plastics, diesel, etc).
- panick21_ 10mo agoWhen people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot. Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution. And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
- seec 10mo agoYeah they are just insane whishfull thinkers. I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar. That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs. You would need at least 4 times that to be safe. Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country. That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
- Aiisnotabubble 10mo ago[dead]
- ben_w 10mo ago> They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse. Being risk-averse unfortunately now means "avoid the USA".
- mdhb 10mo agoWith good cause
- refulgentis 10mo agoWould (gently) note that we’re commenting on an article re: American tech risk. :) Not sure it’s really sunk in for my fellow Americans what’s going on, we’re not exactly used to consequences and it’s still considered, a best, impolite to treat a holistic evaluation of policies as something beyond debate.
- wkat4242 10mo agoMy Scaleway cloud stuff is way cheaper than AWS. Much simpler billing too.
- ulfw 10mo agoNo, not a lot as the EU has two very competitive providers in Ericsson and Nokia
- fidotron 10mo agoThe entire problem is they aren't nearly as "very competitive" as would be politically convenient.
- pigggg 10mo agoThey're both very expensive and the carriers primarily care about cost and features. And huawei will take a dozen devs, give them a one way ticket and put them in a hotel room near a customer to grind our whatever feature needed to seal the deal. I remember years ago talking to some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right". We live in new times anyways - most of the carriers have outsourced a lot of the tech stuff to the vendors anyways.
- freefrog1234aa 10mo agoYes. I worked for a Cambodian telco, when there was a range of Alcatel, Nokia, etc switching equipment across 10 carriers. Huawei swept the lot within 2 years, and Alcatel staff told me they were losing everywhere - they couldn't match the price or technology. This was before the US decided to sanction Huawei.
- breve 10mo ago> some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right". Then he has no principle and cannot be trusted.
- Angostura 10mo agoThe UK certainly ripped out a lot of Huawei equipment. Which is why our cellular coverage is a bit shitty these days
- bigyabai 10mo agoAs an American, I would much prefer spotty cellar coverage to a Salt Typhoon attack. You lot got off easy!
- bostik 10mo agoI moved to UK in late 2013 and to be fair, from my observation the cellular coverage in the country has always been more than just a bit shitty. Incidentally, the voice call quality in the UK is also really crappy. Operators compress/downsample the audio stream to the very edge of recognisability, because investing in sufficient infrastructure to support higher bandwidths is expensive.
- DiogenesKynikos 10mo agoHow was it a mistake? Europe got a lot of good telecom infrastructure for a low price. There's no evidence it was compromised. It was actually the US that was pressuring Europe to get rid of Chinese telecom equipment, as part of the first Trump administration's broader strategy against China.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- pembrook 10mo agoEurope should be building domestic digital capacity regardless (and not just servers) but saying it needs to treat the US like China is a bit melodramatic given the economic and physical threat to Europe is 10X greater in the east. The US is not anti-Europe. The US has just begun to start evaluating its relationship with Europe rationally and wants it to grow up beyond the post-WW2 training wheels. The overreaction to this kind of gives vibes of slamming the door and screaming “you don’t love me!” because dad won’t buy a new toy.
- saubeidl 10mo ago[flagged]
- pembrook 10mo ago[flagged]
- saubeidl 10mo agoTheir VP and one of their government-linked oligarchs is meeting with literal Neonazis in Germany that are trying to topple the constitutional order: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/14/jd-vance-afd-meeting-019130 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/14/jd-vance-afd-meetin... To say they're not anti-Europe is either hopelessly naive or cynically ideologically aligned with their goals.
- mlrtime 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany AFG are Neonazis?
- saubeidl 10mo agoIndeed. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/turmoil-in-germany-over-neo-nazi-mass-deportation-meeting-explained https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/turmoil-in-ger... https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liaisons-the-true-proximity-of-germany-s-afd-to-neo-nazis-a-e69c51d3-4b3c-49d2-8d54-d7b0a19c3f9a https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liais...
- ExoticPearTree 10mo ago> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it. Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software. My belief is that there is no problem with the Chinese equipment, just scare-mongering from the US because it has no manufacturer of 5G equipment. And Europe jumped on the bandwagon just because.
- throw0101c 10mo ago>> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it. > Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software. The logic is don't use infrastructure of people you don't trust. If Europeans don't trust Chinese, then don't use Chinese infra; if the Europeans don't trust the US (anymore), then don't use US infra. The Europeans could trust the Canadians, and use Canadian infra for example.
- rapnie 10mo agoYes, there is a lot of affinity towards Canada in Europa, I feel. Last Bastion of Democracy on the North-American continent, and not part of the whacky Trump-Atlantian Hemisphere.
- ExoticPearTree 10mo agoCanada is as democratic as the UK…
- xethos 10mo agoWithout agreeing or disagreeing, I will note that GP specifically called out North America
- ninalanyon 10mo ago
- MangoToupe 10mo ago> You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it. It's not clear that europe even trusts europe anymore. Especially with french and german economic dominance looking shakier than ever, debt financing an unpopular war in the east piling up, mounting deficits, industry collapse, youth unemployment... european countries (or greenland for that matter) could do a whole lot worse than turning to china. Agreed, though, that reliance on US is foolhardy. I can't make any sense of why we're trying to saw the feet off our own economy.
- reeredfdfdf 10mo agoYea, in 29 Germany, France and UK will have elections, and far-right parties with anti-EU and partially pro-Russian attitudes are leading the polls. If they win, there will be hardly any unified "Europe" left. Why would I then trust Germany ruled by AfD over MAGA-America? At least with China there's some consistency. I can reliably trust them not to give a shit about me or my privacy, and to further their geopolitical interests. Meanwhile populists in the West aren't really even acting rationally from geopolitical perspective, they're more unpredictable.
- nickff 10mo agoAre you talking about the same China which has repeatedly performed industrial espionage, embedded surveillance into products, and supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
- well_ackshually 10mo ago>which has repeatedly performed industrial espionage Ah yes. Europe and the US are famously not known for performing industrial espionage. They're bestest friends. https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-massive-us-industrial-espionage-against-france https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m... https://web.archive.org/web/20151016000311/http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/14/news/14iht-spy_.html?pagewanted=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20151016000311/http://www.nytime... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petrobras-idUSBRE98817N20130909/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petr... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/brazil-canada-espionage-which-countries-are-we-spying-on-1.1930522 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/brazil-canada-espionage-which... > embedded surveillance into products I'm sorry, did we already forget about the NSA literally running the biggest dragnet the world has ever known and the US CLOUD Act that allows them to spy into absolutely any US company anywhere in the world ? >supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine? As regrettable as it is, China's "support" of the invasion is mostly a matter of them both not giving a shit about the situation, and it helping them geopolitically with regards to Taiwan. They sold weapons. Just like France sold weapons to north african regimes when they were brutally repressing their protesters. The vast majority of Europe is doing the bare minimum for ukraine to keep the fight away without being actually involved. Countries are not moral, and will do what benefits them. Some of them are more ruthless than others, but as it stands the vast majority of Europeans are considering the US as a greater threat to democracy and general life quality than China.
- sschueller 10mo ago> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. Hopefully now "Europe" will think before fire selling all of its hardware manufacturing companies to foreign firms.
- PedroBatista 10mo agoYeah, for those foreign firms to manufacture goods from US companies in order to fill Walmarts and number go up.
- awestroke 10mo agoManufacture goods from US companies? Do you mean "for"?
- refulgentis 10mo agoHonest q, 3rd party crashing in: does it make a difference? My assumption is not for parsing for understanding and grammatically, its fine, if significantly less common than the “for” construct.
- awestroke 10mo agoI'm just trying to understand what point they are trying to make
- mathgradthrow 10mo agoIs it actually anti-europe to ask europe to meet its NATO obligations?
- burkaman 10mo agoThis is a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the comment or articles you're responding to.
- mathgradthrow 10mo ago>The US government has decided that it is anti-Europe.
- bogeholm 10mo agoWhataboutism. The linked articles are not about NATO obligations.
- mdhb 10mo agoThe American public schooling system in action yet again here. 3rd grade reading comprehension in no way stops them from loudly proclaiming some of the dumbest shit possible.
- DaSHacka 10mo agoLiterally this. "The US is gonna have their FO moment aaaany day now, they're gonna regret messing with us Europeans!" "Bro you haven't even kept your end of the deal on your NATO military spending." Turns out despite all the hubub, the 'superpower' fading the fastest was Europe after all.
- jeltz 10mo agoMost of Europe does meet them. It is mainly a few countries like Spain which does not.
- i_am_a_peasant 10mo agoThe US leadership and billionaires are literally trying to destroy my country by supporting far right parties here. I never want to have anything to do with the US again at least until they sort their own crap out.
- wkat4242 10mo agoYeah I don't want to deal with a country that's trying to pretend to be our friend and then literally giving encouraging speeches to groups trying to destroy our continent. Even if the democrats make it back to power, a lot of trust and goodwill has been lost. There can always be another trump.
- i_am_a_peasant 10mo agoI don’t think Democrats would really jump to our aide either. The rhetoric is different but I think the vast majority of Americans think that they can let Europe burn without it affecting them much.
- Sharlin 10mo agoIt's incredible how quickly such obvious hostility as plans to incite what amounts to secession in a putatively friendly, allied sovereign entity has become normalized and ho-hum.
- pphysch 10mo ago[flagged]
- neoromantique 10mo agoThis is not Russia Today.
- quotz 10mo agoHere’s the source from the guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/06/us-ukraine-russia-eu-victoria-nuland https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/06/us-ukraine-rus...
- neoromantique 10mo ago>"an architect of the Ukraine crisis". Architect of the Ukraine crisis is Russian armed forces crossing the border and occupying the land, everything else is irrelevant.
- locknitpicker 10mo ago> Architect of the Ukraine crisis is Russian armed forces crossing the border and occupying the land, everything else is irrelevant. Russia's hostility towards Ukraine starts well before the 2022 invasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war
- neoromantique 10mo agoWe are discussing 2014. Russian armed forces were present there from the get-go, and hybrid approaches were there long before 2014 too.
- Jon_Lowtek 10mo agothis is not a new issue: airbus has been the victim of corporate espionage supposedly by boeing with aid by the nsa in a well documented case in november 2011, and they are not the only victim of US government agency supported corporate espionage: investigations into the selector lists that ran in the cabinet noir at DE-CIX have shown that a large part of them were targeting european corporations. and that predates the cloud act of 2018, which made american infrastructure significantly less trustworthy.
- forgotTheLast 10mo agoThe French DGSE was also exposed targeting dozens of american tech aerospace companies in the 90s (and probably still are). That type of state-assisted industrial espionage is pretty common, even between "friendly" nations. I think what's different now is the US announcing its intent to meddle into internal EU politics and supporting political opposition.
- wkat4242 10mo agoEven before that, remember the echelon incident in the 90s where the US used military espionage to Boeing an edge in commercial posts.