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Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology
- testing22321 9mo agoAt 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 9mo agoIncluding the US. I don't want to be dependent on this stuff any more than anybody else does.
- lateforwork 9mo agoExactly. 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.
- testing22321 9mo agoThen you should do that. I just moved all my hosting and domains out of the US after 15 years of good service.
- johanneskanybal 9mo agoThis is the point of time in history where the people usually start a revolution. Do that.
- SpicyLemonZest 9mo agoThis is one of the things where the nature of the modern United States makes it hard. I routinely go around telling people that the current regime in Washington is illegitimate, nobody should obey them or listen to their lies, and that I look forward to the day they're ripped from their thrones and tossed in prison. In most places and times saying that would make me a revolutionary, but in the US it's not even arguably a crime.
- marcosdumay 9mo agoUsually, it's a crime when people do stuff. Complaining that the government is bad is free in almost all democracies.
- SpicyLemonZest 9mo agoWhat counts as doing stuff? Minneapolis has been hitting the streets for days trying to chase a major federal agency out of Minnesota, a cause which I and my elected representatives publicly support. But it's a huge country, Minneapolis is thousands of miles away from me, and outside of airport security I haven't personally seen an agent of the federal government in years. To me, following federal agents around blowing whistles at them and yelling that they'd better leave town seems at least a little revolutionary - the feds certainly think so, they murdered someone for doing it this morning. But it’s also unambiguously permitted under US law.
- hdhdhsjsbdh 9mo agoI 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.
- lazide 9mo agoThat would require some hard choices and actual hard work. It’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.
- jabwd 9mo agoI 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.
- lazide 9mo agoNo, I just think we’re underestimating how bad it’s gonna get. The lag of understanding is real. People are still waffling. It’s got to get bad enough there won’t be any waffling.
- ku-man 9mo ago[dead]
- lingrush4 9mo agoEurope 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.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoIn 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.
- lateforwork 9mo agoEven 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 9mo agoThe 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.
- mmooss 9mo agoI think that's overwhelmingly false. Wealth concentration isn't nearly as high in Europe.
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- aa_is_op 9mo agoBy 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-allying-with-european-far-right-to-strip-back-eu-rules https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1916422/us-tech-giants...
- Yoric 9mo agoMaybe? I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- flanked-evergl 9mo ago[flagged]
- johanneskanybal 9mo agoTrump is an obvious Russian agent. Stealing money for himself and destroying all western trust is his only goal.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- terminalshort 9mo agoWhich is why he sold weapons to Ukraine that the Obama administration refused, allows Starlink internet to be provided to Ukraine, orders the navy to seize Russian oil tankers, and allows US provided weapons systems to be fired into Russian territory? Maybe Trump isn't supporting Ukraine as much as you would like him too (and I feel the same), but this conspiracy is childish bullshit.
- nalekberov 9mo ago[flagged]
- causalscience 9mo agoRussian propaganda folks.
- nalekberov 9mo agoYeah, it’s hard to not call anything opposing your view a propaganda after being brainwashed for 24/7.
- causalscience 9mo agoI didn't say you've been brainwashed, I'm saying you're intentionally propagandizing.
- dilyevsky 9mo agoHave 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 9mo agoEveryone 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.
- nxm 9mo agoNo they don't... most people just want cheap stuff that works.
- Anonyneko 9mo 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 9mo agoIronically, Russia probing defenses in Europe is functioning like Chaos Monkey — revealing vulnerabilities and triggering hardening.
- ls612 9mo agoIt’s certainly doing the first, not so sure about the second.
- Nextgrid 9mo agoThe main vulnerability of the Western world isn't technical, it's that we voluntarily surrendered our communication and social fabrics to advertising-driven businesses that will happily host and promote anything as long as it generates engagement. This makes it trivial for foreign agents to sway public opinion where as back in the day influencing media required actual capital and connections. Unfortunately, a lot of our own people (and especially politicians) make money out of this situation so there's very little incentive to change this. Just look at the reaction every time regulations designed to curtail Big Tech ad-driven monopolies (EU DMA, GDPR, etc) are discussed. Our greed is what makes us vulnerable.
- dismalaf 9mo agoEurope wants a lot of things that they end up never actually doing.
- nxm 9mo agoAnother opportunity for brunch with the other ministers
- 13415 9mo agoIt'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.
- johanneskanybal 9mo agoThis 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.
- Sharlin 9mo agoIt'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.
- digiown 9mo agoOpen 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.
- Nextgrid 9mo agoDidn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system and Android app store once they got kicked out of the US-based competitors?
- jaesonaras 9mo agoSupport a dictator, and one day he will come for you.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jlehman 9mo agoYes, it’ll be much easier to put the surveillance measures they’ve been trying so hard for into EU-based companies.
- coredev_ 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoAs 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 9mo agoMost of this stuff is routine technology now. There's no reason for it to be centralized.
- bell-cot 9mo agoLike 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"
- pveierland 9mo agoThe 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.
- digiown 9mo agoI wonder if it would work if the governments provide some tax incentives for open source contributions similar to charity donations as well.
- irishcoffee 9mo agoPrompt: generate 15k in tax-deductible open source code contributions. Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.
- digiown 9mo agoI meant something like, as a deduction from payroll taxes as a proportion of worked hours by the employee if he works on open source projects. Obviously not perfect but I don't think it's much worse than the existing R&D type schemes.
- tjwebbnorfolk 9mo agoSoon: Github is filled with even more garbage in order to collect tax refunds. lol
- antxxxx 9mo agoUK government standards say that government software should be open source by default https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-make-new-source-code-open https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...
- thedelanyo 9mo agoWell they've finally awaken. Better late than never. I think this is one of the best decisions China got right.
- tjwebbnorfolk 9mo agoAre 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 9mo agoThe scariest part of US internet dominance isn’t vendor lock-in, it’s executive branch chaos engineering.
- whoknowsidont 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoI'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 9mo agoDane 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.
- Nextgrid 9mo 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.
- marcosdumay 9mo agoLooks like the US exports were at all time highs last year... Pulled by gold and other precious metals: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports I couldn't find data to actually answer your question. I just found this that is surprising in a multitude of ways and absolutely useless :) Every useful report seems to end at 2023.
- thfuran 9mo ago>Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? Why should they do that?
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
- cyanydeez 9mo agoFascism and business are poison and catalyst
- tsoukase 9mo agoWith 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 9mo agoDoes the EU regime grant its subjects independence from chat control? Or do bureaucrats try to force it on the sovereign again and again?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- sylware 9mo agoFirst, 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 9mo agowe 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 9mo 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 9mo agoMaybe he should have clarified “we (with a spine and moral compass) in America”. Obviously he didn’t mean leeches like you.
- coredev_ 9mo agoWe in EU like our regulations protecting people and data. That is not what have stopped us from creating Microsoft2.0.
- drivebyhooting 9mo agoEurope 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.
- apatheticonion 9mo agoThen 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).
- bethekidyouwant 9mo agoYes, what europe needs is way more regulation
- apatheticonion 9mo agoI'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.
- bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoA long ongoing discussion; Related recently: European Alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731976 AWS European Sovereign Cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640462 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427582 Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635 Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552389
- coredev_ 9mo agoThings 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 9mo ago2025: EU bans Huawei because is China tech 2026: EU bans BigTechs because is USA tech 2027: EU blackout
- hulitu 9mo 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.