3 ms·

This list is very impressive, but it is the wrong approach. We simply need an EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon etc. The cl

by jacquesm 10mo ago

This list is very impressive, but it is the wrong approach. We simply need an EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon etc. The closer to a drop-in replacement the better. Tying all of these functional bits and pieces together to form a consistent whole is just not going to happen. You need to approach this on a per-company level. So, who will step up to the plate and re-implement as much of Google as necessary to catch 80% of the functionality and their EU customers?

yabones 10mo ago
Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.
- jacquesm 10mo ago
  Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
  - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    Is there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?
    - atmosx 10mo ago
      It’s not a matter of mechanism. It’s a matter of mindset. Until today the mindset wasn’t there. Maybe this will change.
      - palata 10mo ago
        I'm not convinced. If a company owner can get rich by selling their company to the devil himself, they will rationalise it so well that the employees will think it's helping humanity.
    - jacquesm 10mo ago
      There is in France. They have a government investment arm that will invest relatively small amounts but with a string attached: a veto on any majority acquisition. This was used for instance to block the takeover of Dailymotion by Yahoo iirc. It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
    - deaux 10mo ago
      Of course there is. Google Mush Ryanair, for one. And just 2 seconds of thinking is enough to answer that question. Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML yet if money alone was enough?
      - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
        I asked to discuss, not because I didn’t know the answer. Please attempt to be more polite in the future.
        deaux 10mo ago
        There was absolutely nothing about your comment that indicated this intent. Open questions can be asked for discussion, not closed yes/no factual questions with a singular, well-known answer.
  - atmosx 10mo ago
    And the EU governments will be advertising it.. already happened in Greece… few companies with strong core tech were bought by Microsoft and the gov was “so happy” for the “success story”. Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
    - palata 10mo ago
      > Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway Though that's one of the easy ones. Get your own domain and you're free to use whatever you want forever.
      - trinix912 10mo ago
        In theory yes, in practice the messages from your random domain way too often end up in spam for Gmail and Outlook users, if they get delivered at all.
      - jacquesm 10mo ago
        That's not as simple as it may seem. I've been running my own mailserver on an alternate domain for decades now and it is one thing to be receiving mail there but to send it is a nightmare. Google, Microsoft etc have made it all but impossible to get through their anti-spam measures to the point that they reject tons of perfectly good mail.
        palata 10mo ago
        I have used Fastmail for years, and now Migadu for years as well. Never lost a single email?
        jacquesm 10mo ago
        That's not comparable at all.
        palata 10mo ago
        Why not? I said "get your own domain", not "self-host your server". You are the one saying that it doesn't work so well to self-host your server, I never asked about it.
  - palata 10mo ago
    > the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it That's usually what happens indeed. There is a lot of great tech coming from [the rest of the world] and being bought by the US. > the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details I kinda disagree there. The lack of competition is the problem today. If, instead of AWS, there were 50 services all over the world and companies were distributed amongst them, then it would be much less of a problem. The problem right now is that the US can bully entire countries because those countries 100% rely on US services. Instead of building a European replacement for AWS, I would like to see open standards allowing companies to easily switch, and different providers competing behing those standards. Or even better: companies could even mix the services: say "I want my backups replicated between this French company and this Croatian one".
    - jacquesm 10mo ago
      That's obviously the idea, but unfortunately everybody just wants convenience instead of decentralization. Hence Mastodon's amazing adoption rate...
  - deaux 10mo ago
    The task of governments is to stop this. Just like how Musk is prohibited from buying EasyJet. Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML if Europe would let them? They would've done so a decade ago. The exact same reasoning now needs to be applied to the likes of OVHCloud.
mixmastamyk 10mo ago
A few friends and I have thought similarly, although we focused on Apple first and the Google/Office suite second. We wrote our thoughts here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ and the alternatives here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?
- jacquesm 10mo ago
  Excellent question and great to see you thinking in the same direction. Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain. I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
  - mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    Hmm, I wouldn't say it would take a "massive" amount of capital. EU is rich enough and they don't pay developers as well, correct? Most of the building blocks already exist.
    - jacquesm 10mo ago
      Yes, but integrating them seamlessly and securely is still a huge undertaking.
petcat 10mo ago
> EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen". I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.
- jacquesm 10mo ago
  You don't have to do all five at once, and a proper replacement based on the integration of a number of partial solutions should in principle be workable. What is required is the capital and the will to do it. If someone pulls this off they can count on my company as a subscriber and I think there are many more like me.

yabones 10mo ago

Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.

jacquesm 10mo ago
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  Is there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?
  - atmosx 10mo ago
    It’s not a matter of mechanism. It’s a matter of mindset. Until today the mindset wasn’t there. Maybe this will change.
    - palata 10mo ago
      I'm not convinced. If a company owner can get rich by selling their company to the devil himself, they will rationalise it so well that the employees will think it's helping humanity.
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    There is in France. They have a government investment arm that will invest relatively small amounts but with a string attached: a veto on any majority acquisition. This was used for instance to block the takeover of Dailymotion by Yahoo iirc. It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
  - deaux 10mo ago
    Of course there is. Google Mush Ryanair, for one. And just 2 seconds of thinking is enough to answer that question. Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML yet if money alone was enough?
    - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
      I asked to discuss, not because I didn’t know the answer. Please attempt to be more polite in the future.
      - deaux 10mo ago
        There was absolutely nothing about your comment that indicated this intent. Open questions can be asked for discussion, not closed yes/no factual questions with a singular, well-known answer.
- atmosx 10mo ago
  And the EU governments will be advertising it.. already happened in Greece… few companies with strong core tech were bought by Microsoft and the gov was “so happy” for the “success story”. Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
  - palata 10mo ago
    > Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway Though that's one of the easy ones. Get your own domain and you're free to use whatever you want forever.
    - trinix912 10mo ago
      In theory yes, in practice the messages from your random domain way too often end up in spam for Gmail and Outlook users, if they get delivered at all.
    - jacquesm 10mo ago
      That's not as simple as it may seem. I've been running my own mailserver on an alternate domain for decades now and it is one thing to be receiving mail there but to send it is a nightmare. Google, Microsoft etc have made it all but impossible to get through their anti-spam measures to the point that they reject tons of perfectly good mail.
      - palata 10mo ago
        I have used Fastmail for years, and now Migadu for years as well. Never lost a single email?
        jacquesm 10mo ago
        That's not comparable at all.
        palata 10mo ago
        Why not? I said "get your own domain", not "self-host your server". You are the one saying that it doesn't work so well to self-host your server, I never asked about it.
- palata 10mo ago
  > the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it That's usually what happens indeed. There is a lot of great tech coming from [the rest of the world] and being bought by the US. > the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details I kinda disagree there. The lack of competition is the problem today. If, instead of AWS, there were 50 services all over the world and companies were distributed amongst them, then it would be much less of a problem. The problem right now is that the US can bully entire countries because those countries 100% rely on US services. Instead of building a European replacement for AWS, I would like to see open standards allowing companies to easily switch, and different providers competing behing those standards. Or even better: companies could even mix the services: say "I want my backups replicated between this French company and this Croatian one".
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    That's obviously the idea, but unfortunately everybody just wants convenience instead of decentralization. Hence Mastodon's amazing adoption rate...
- deaux 10mo ago
  The task of governments is to stop this. Just like how Musk is prohibited from buying EasyJet. Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML if Europe would let them? They would've done so a decade ago. The exact same reasoning now needs to be applied to the likes of OVHCloud.

mixmastamyk 10mo ago

A few friends and I have thought similarly, although we focused on Apple first and the Google/Office suite second. We wrote our thoughts here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ and the alternatives here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?

jacquesm 10mo ago
Excellent question and great to see you thinking in the same direction. Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain. I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
- mixmastamyk 10mo ago
  Hmm, I wouldn't say it would take a "massive" amount of capital. EU is rich enough and they don't pay developers as well, correct? Most of the building blocks already exist.
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    Yes, but integrating them seamlessly and securely is still a huge undertaking.

petcat 10mo ago

> EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen". I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.

jacquesm 10mo ago
You don't have to do all five at once, and a proper replacement based on the integration of a number of partial solutions should in principle be workable. What is required is the capital and the will to do it. If someone pulls this off they can count on my company as a subscriber and I think there are many more like me.