T
Story
Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology
>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.

Ironically, Russia probing defenses in Europe is functioning like Chaos Monkey — revealing vulnerabilities and triggering hardening.
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It’s certainly doing the first, not so sure about the second.
The 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.

Who is the "we" that you think surrendered control here? Freedom of the press necessitates that anyone can publish freely even if what they publish is foreign propaganda.
I wasn't talking about press, I was talking about how ad-driven social media became effectively the only communication tool and we still refuse to enact/enforce effective regulation to curb its hegemony.
It became the primary communication tool because that is what people chose to use when presented with the alternatives. If you want to force people to use different channels then that is a violation of freedom of the press.
Again I am not talking about press. I am talking about communication tools.

Yes the free market has decided that these tools are the "best" option as long as the negative externalities (such as exposure to malicious actors - foreign or otherwise) are not being priced in. We need adequate regulation to price in such externalities.

For that matter, press and conventional media is subject to many regulations that don't apply to social media. Conventional media wouldn't get away with even a sliver of what social media is allowed to get away with time and time again.

> Again I am not talking about press. I am talking about communication tools.

Which is the entire fucking point of freedom of the press

Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.

I am still not sure why you keep going on about press. I did not refer to press in my comment and I make no opinion on it here.

I am referring to the fact that back in the day communication used to be mediated by domestic, neutral carriers who got paid to carry communication neutrally regardless of source or content.

Nowadays, communication is primarily mediated by a handful of foreign companies that prioritize advertising revenue at all costs and will choose which media to carry and promote based on expected ad revenue. They are effectively acting as pseudo-press without the checks & balances and oversight that actual press is subject to.

> Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.

When’s the last time you saw an obvious scam advertised in a conventional print newspaper or magazine? Now check Facebook or YouTube ads. If such an ad made it through any reputable magazine heads will be rolling and they’d expose themselves to lawsuits, but social media keeps getting a pass.

Now, let’s say you’re a foreign threat actor and want to sway public opinion. You can’t just get in touch with the NYT/etc and ask them nicely. You’d need to buy and cultivate such influence over time and do so covertly because their people would get in trouble if there’s an obvious paper/money trail.

With Facebook? Create a page, make your propaganda video “engaging”, boost it with bot farms for the initial push and then Facebook will happily keep hosting and promoting your propaganda as long as its advertising revenue outweighs the costs of hosting it. That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than buying influence with traditional media.

You have to be joking. Print magazines have always been plastered with shitty scam ads for MLM pyramid schemes, bullshit weight loss treatments, psychic readings, and every other get rich quick scheme and ripoff known to man. And, of course, there were no adblockers. Were you not alive before the internet? You think they weren't full of foreign propaganda too? I'd like to introduce you to my friend AIPAC...
According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.
I mean, I guess the press is freer in Norway but it’s a backwater and no one cares what they say
Being subject to the topic promotion and suppression technologies [1] and bizarre political whims of billionaire media owners is an unusual definition of "freedom."

[1] See for example:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...

All media is subject to the whims of its owners. That's freedom of the press. The only other option is that the government tells the owners what they can and can't publish.
Another option is that the government limits the power individuals can have. How many people control, say, 80% of the media? Do you need more than one hand to count them?
"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to beg in the streets, to sleep under bridges, and to steal bread.
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Yes, Vladimir Lenin is likely one of the most appropriate people to quote on the question of freedom. Maybe only his successor Joseph Stalin is better in that regard.
I think "we" is everyone.
There are about 50 people on EU sanctions list that tried this, who can't travel, or engage in any normal economic activity.
The second isn't publicly promoted.
Why would there be a blackout? Is like hardening against a gas shortage
EMP attack
There’s no such thing
The nuke part is optional, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...

that said, there have been multiple past nuclear EMP orientated tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

results vary by location (earth's mag field) and pre hardening of infrastructure.

Thermonuclear weapon detonated in orbit
In 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.

Everyone has been going gung ho about Canadian PM speech but the banger one for me personally is the Belgian PM. He said it best “Being a happy vassal state is one thing, being a miserable slave is another”. Europe deserves every bit what’s coming to them.
Also the Canadian MP is involved in deploying surveillance[0] on his own country so I am not sure why people are giving him props. He is part of the problem.

[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...

People need to stop buying into propaganda.

Can you elaborate how this statement led you to your conclusion?
I don’t understand your question. I’m assuming you are asking about the part “Europe deserves”. It’s simple really - for decades now Europe has been relying on US for military support. It’s a cardinal sin to do so if one wants an equivalent seat at the negotiating table. But the EU just can’t agree amongst themselves. Mercosur takes 30 years, India defence agreement has taken 20. The warning signs were there during 2016 but conveniently brushed. EU either acts together for the common good even if they don’t like something or continues to be bureaucratic, irrelevant old person. It’s slow agony at the moment.
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The EU couldn't agree amongst themselves because the US (and its biggest vassal, the UK when it was in the EU) did everything to prevent such agreement.

We'll see what the States that were the most against any form of common European defense will do now that the US has proven unreliable. And if they are still under the delusion that the current US policies will go away, then it's time for Two-Speed Europe.

Don't blame this on the UK. UK leave vote was a few months before the 2016 election, so the timing is convenient. But let's not pretend that it was anything but complacency (that was shattered by Trump) is to blame here.
You are just swallowing the Trump line whole. Try being a hegemon without Ramstein and all the other bases.
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> try being a hegemon without...

The hypothetical should really be on the vassal or it is just rethorics.

This is the time to call each other bluffs and keep revealing the naked emperors

I would hedge most businesses don’t need the full offering of 365. You could get away with an email provider, a way to author documents and some file storage which are abundantly offered on other platforms like infomaniak.
They might not need it if they started today. But once you have a few hundred TBs of data in Sharepoint, you've foreclosed any alternatives.
It’s amazing how complacent and weak-willed the European populace and political leaders are. Quite the contrast to Canada.
What the hell are you talking about? Canada is in a pretty bad state themselves, just as much as we are in the U.S.
I'd imagine this attitude would start to disappear as soon as alternatives start being used. It's already happening to some extent, but it needs to trickle down into the general populace. The relevant names just aren't in people's minds yet (although there definitely are areas where there aren't exact 1-to-1 replacements available).
"In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude."

I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.

I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!

Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.

> In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude

The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.

Genuinely, what's the sell of Microsoft 365? I get MS Word, Excel whatever lock in but what is their cloud actually adding that can't be substituted?

Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.

I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.

M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.

There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.

I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.

> with zero competition

Google Workspace with Chromebooks. No windows endpoints getting a virus or ransomware or some other malware. It's all about the bubble you're in. Mine, windows isn't even needed anymore for games because SteamOS is sufficiently there for the games we play.

Not helping with your US/big tech dependence though
It's roughly the same price (or even more expensive) and doesn't include Outlook... which is THE crack application for all those windows addicts.

You could absolutely nail the document compatibility aspect and it still wouldn't be enough because of freaking Outlook.

It's adding the property that it's an all-in-one turnkey solution. Which is an extremely attractive proposition compared to having a dozen separate tools. And to paraphrase the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
Well maybe the old adage need to change
He did change it when paraphrasing, just now :-)

I'm sure it'll be paraphrased to another company in another 30 years.

The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?
I haven't used any but there are several it seems: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/google-docs

NextCloud looks ok.

For some reason I thought it was open to the public, but France also maintains a full sovereign cloud office suite for use by civil servants: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en

Maybe one day they'll open it up publicly.

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Anyone can edit it and it also might get randomly corrupted. It’s crap, especially if some people are on Macs.
Open-Xchange supports collaborative editing of spreadsheets. Mailbox.org uses that for their email service, and you get access to their online office suite when you subscribe. I can't speak to the quality of the shared editing, but their online office suite is fine for basic stuff.
Zoho.
> what's the sell of Microsoft 365

> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap

You answered your own question.

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And frankly, MS Word is really bad. So are pretty much of all their services.

Not sure whether Excel is still good.

Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

For everybody else, Libreoffice is fine as far as functionality is concerned. UI might be another story, but that's worth getting over anyway, especially since a lot of people for whom this is a problem, would also have problems with getting away from Windows as a whole, just from buttons moving and things being different in general.

Porting involved Excel sheets into web apps has been a decent chunk of my dev career.
What works best in those situations, in your experience?

Do you recreate a spreadsheet, use an existing online service, and/or create a database with proper logic, etc.? If the latter, how do users handle the UI change, and can they have an ease of creation similar to what Excel provides?

Bad how? Works just fine for everything I have ever needed to do with it. I'm not a power user, though, but my point is neither are 95% of users and the basic functionality is just fine.
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Being good is one thing, being compatible with existing files full of VBA macros is another.

Although MS themselves apparently don't realize that, considering how they push the web version which doesn't support them?

I think you're misreading the source of the defeatism. It's clear what European leaders should do if they want to compete with US big tech. They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.

To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.

If Europe were capable of doing this, Europe would not need to do this. They'd already have active and vibrant tech scene compared to US one - EU is bigger than US by population, and certainly not less smart - in fact, a lot of people live in EU and work for US tech companies. So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not? They decided their political model must work differently, even at the cost of not having big tech. So now they don't have big tech. And no amount of committee meetings is going to change that, even if all governments would want it really, really hard.
It’s not really comparable though. The EU isn’t a unified single language market, and its GDP and per capita GDP are much smaller.
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Language is not a huge deal - if the French and the Spanish and the Dutch can use Facebook, they could use Eurobook if that existed, as well. The problem of course would be, if they made a committee to build Eurobook, they'd spend 5 years in meetings to ensure every country and every language is absolutely equally represented and then would build something that no speaker of any language would use.

As for GDP, EU overall GDP is only slightly less than US GDP, so it could very well sustain the industry of comparable size. Per capita GDP is indeed lower, but I'm not sure how that precludes creation of something like Eurobook.

> They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?

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The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy.

Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.

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> making the creation of billionaires a policy goal

Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.

In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.

Even 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.
This is a tired old trope that really has no basis in reality. There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed. In two out of the last 3 elections, the major corporate money backed candidate lost. The government is run by the 24 hour news cycle and the attention economy, not by the decree of billionaires. We operate firmly under the tyranny of the majority.
> There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed

Just for anyone else reading this comment, it’s pretty wildly incorrect.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/business/trump-administra...

From your own link:

> CBO estimates that as result of P.L. 119-21, U.S. households, on average, will see an increase in the resources available to them over the 2026– 2034 period. The changes in resources will not be evenly distributed among households. The agency estimates that, in general, resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.

That's hardly a picture of billionaires pulling the strings

Going down with this ship, huh?

Care to quote the second one? The one whose byline is “Trump giving hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the ultra wealthy”?

Or will you dismiss that too because it doesn’t explicitly say billionaires?

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We could argue that there didn't need to be change, because favoring the wealthy was already the policy: Wealth concentration was already at historic highs. Taxes were already very low, including capital gains tax (the primary source of income for the very wealthy - return on capital is the primary income of capitalists), social safety net relatively underfunded including widespread lack of health care, social and economic mobility dropping, access to higher education relied primarily on family wealth and not grades, access to housing dropping, etc. State governments brag about no income tax, which means they rely on regressive taxes to pay for the common good.

Regardless, I think the parent comment facts are wrong and there there have been massive changes benefitting the wealthy: There have been massive tax cuts for them, reduction in enforcement of financial laws (e.g., by the SEC, etc.), lagging financial regulation of private equity, destruction of consumer protection (such as the CFPB), massive changes in policy and action to benefit the fossil fuel industry including use of the US military, ... there was a big tax law change to benefit SV founders that was advocated here on HN, protectionist measures increasing prices for consumers and giving the benefits to corporations, etc.

> the major corporate money backed candidate lost

Elon Musk spent $290 million to elect Trump. Are you saying that had no impact? How do you know this?

It's widely reported that the democrats spent over twice as much money as Trump. Both parties have their share of big donors, this isn't new, nor is it specific to Elon. It's been this way a long, long time.
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Are those shares equal? It's true that both parties got votes in every state, but that doesn't tell use much.
Both sides have their supporters. Everyone knows that. I'm not going to take your bait to prove a negative. In both 2016 and 2024 Trump raised less money than his opponent (massively less in 2016) and still won.
That was a different election.
Trump raised and spent less money in 2024. Full stop.
Citizens United is precisely why we have a majority of politicians following the will of the donor class rather than a majority of actual voters. It’s why we lack universal healthcare, for example, despite 62% of Americans supporting it a year ago, with a similar number supporting raising the minimum wage.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Regarding the last national election:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fift...

The Court’s decision and others that followed shaped the 2024 election to a greater degree than any that came before it. Most notably, Donald Trump substantially trailed Kamala Harris in traditional campaign donations, which are subject to legal limits and must be disclosed. Yet he was able to compensate for this disadvantage by outsourcing much of his campaign to super PACs and other outside groups funded by a handful of wealthy donors. While such groups had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in previous cycles, this was the first time they successfully took on many of the other core functions of a general election presidential campaign, such as door-to-door canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. Their activities unquestionably would have been illegal before Citizens United.

We didn't have universal health care before CU either. It wasn't included in the ACA, before CU. It failed when Clinton tried in the 90s, and it failed every other time anyone tried before that too. You are just using Citizens United as a bogey man for a policy you don't like. You can complain about Trump all you like, but Harris didn't have much less dark money than he did. And Clinton / Biden had double what Trump did in 2016 and 2020. https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race
The 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.

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I think that's overwhelmingly false. Wealth concentration isn't nearly as high in Europe.
Wealth concentration doesn’t make his point false at all
The problem are not Trump or the billionaires, but the majority of the American people who support them. They knew what they were getting.
No they didn't know what they were getting. They didn't and can't look beyond the price of eggs at their local Kroger. To a large extend this election was decided by the price of eggs.
"The price of eggs" was direct result of the screwed response to the pandemics, all that panicked senseless running around like beheaded chickens and the total dismissal of reality.

Populists come to power when the ruling elites bankrupt by corruption and ineptitude the trust that the populace had had in them.

A permanent cult-following minority does want a white christian nationalist dictatorship.

Everyone else are low information voters.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-roles-sup...

It likely isn't over with him. Trump is just the frontman and possibly fall guy for project 2025/federalist society. They are his entire cabinet and their plan was to replace all government workers with their own loyal people.
Then 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).

Yes, what europe needs is way more regulation
The 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.
UK government standards say that government software should be open source by default https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...
That is a document. Show me reality.
They have 1.5k public repositories here at least: https://github.com/orgs/alphagov/repositories?type=all

Collection of RFCs: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-rfcs

Open design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk

> followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles

Has this actually produced any tangible results?

I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.

I'm hopeful that it can work if:

- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".

- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.

Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.

One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

EU countries are great at adopting principles. And saying things. And writing documents. And passing regulations.

Meanwhile, very country still runs on Microsoft and IBM.

I wonder if it would work if the governments provide some tax incentives for open source contributions similar to charity donations as well.
Prompt: generate 15k in tax-deductible open source code contributions.

Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.

I 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.
Soon: Github is filled with even more garbage in order to collect tax refunds. lol
Everyone 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.
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No they don't... most people just want cheap stuff that works.
With 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.
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
> 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.

I'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?
Dane 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.

> 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.

Looks like the US exports were at all time highs last year... Pulled by gold and other precious metals:

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.

Ok but parent's question stands: why didn't you get the message the first time?
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not op, but maybe something along the lines of, "fool me once..." etc.?
>the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

And the app is running on a phone with an OS coming from which country?

Like sibling said, this feels like performative BS.

Yeah, the fact that Europe hasn't been able to develop another OS in the last few months/years is proof that nothing can change. Stop trying and wasting time; any effort in this direction is futile.
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First time round, Trump would consistently say lots of worrying stuff, but people in the US administration would stop him from following through.

This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.

The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"

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  • taneq
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The wheels of Eurocrats turn slowly. (That was meant to be bureaucrats but autocorrect won this time. :D )
Support a dictator, and one day he will come for you.
Have 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?
Well they've finally awaken. Better late than never. I think this is one of the best decisions China got right.
Are 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.

Yes, it’ll be much easier to put the surveillance measures they’ve been trying so hard for into EU-based companies.
Most of this stuff is routine technology now. There's no reason for it to be centralized.
Many discussions about this for ages;

Related recently:

European Alternatives

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731976

AWS European Sovereign Cloud

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

Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635

Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities

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

Does the EU regime grant its subjects independence from chat control? Or do bureaucrats try to force it on the sovereign again and again?
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The scariest part of US internet dominance isn’t vendor lock-in, it’s executive branch chaos engineering.
Europe 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.

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It'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.
This 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.
It'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.
Libre software should be used regardless. And the switching cost with it is still not low but drastically lower.
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> Every operating system is in US hands

Desktop Linux is (becoming) usable for a normal person just in time, I was surprised how easily a non-technical friend switched over to Bazzite (immutable fedora with gaming extras).

> Visa, Mastercard, Paypal

The EU has already been working on a "Digital Euro" for a while

> all social media commonly used

I'm hoping more decentralized social media continues to pick up steam

Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system and Android app store once they got kicked out of the US-based competitors?
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>Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system

The MIR payment system started functioning in 2015, long before Visa/Mastercard pulled out of Russia

>Android app store

Initially there was some fragmentation because several companies raced to develop "Russia's #1 answer to Google Play Store" but everyone eventually settled on RuStore developed by VK (Russia's Facebook).

Generally, Russia already had replacements for most major American services long before 2022, with good market penetration: Google => Yandex, Meta => VK, Uber => Yandex Taxi, Amazon/Craigslist => Ozon/Avito/Wildberries, etc. Lack of own app store was more like an oversight.

Open 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.
As 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
Like 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"
At 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.

Including the US. I don't want to be dependent on this stuff any more than anybody else does.
This is the point of time in history where the people usually start a revolution. Do that.
This 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.
Usually, it's a crime when people do stuff. Complaining that the government is bad is free in almost all democracies.
What 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 clearly revolutionary - except that under US law you have a right to do that and the feds can't stop it.
Exactly. 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.
Then you should do that.

I just moved all my hosting and domains out of the US after 15 years of good service.

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I 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.
That would require some hard choices and actual hard work. It’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.
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I 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.
Europe 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.
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Europe wants a lot of things that they end up never actually doing.
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Another opportunity for brunch with the other ministers
By 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...
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Maybe?

I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.

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First, 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!

Fascism and business are poison and catalyst
Trump has been trying real hard to get Europe to stand on it's own, maybe they do it out of spite. Would be awesome if we could maybe kick Russia (which is much weaker than Europe I'm told) out of Ukraine.
Trump is an obvious Russian agent. Stealing money for himself and destroying all western trust is his only goal.
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Which 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.
What Europe has got to do with Ukraine? Europe is much more dependent on Russia (for cheap energy resources) than it's on Ukraine, son. Besides, who forced EU to send billions of euros to Ukraine to fuel this pointless war - which only made Europe weaker than ever?
Russian propaganda folks.
Yeah, it’s hard to not call anything opposing your view a propaganda after being brainwashed for 24/7.
I 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.