Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology(theconversation.com) |
Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology(theconversation.com) |
I think all this nonsense can be traced back to USA abdicating its industry to China and over 20 years being completely hollowed out.
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!
I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.
Also O365 just sucks. We can do better. We've had better. Please stop using MS products and technology stacks.
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.
Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...
People need to stop buying into propaganda.
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.
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.
> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap
You answered your own question.
Not sure whether Excel is still good.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)
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.
The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.
And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.
Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.
Why the difference?
Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.
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.
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).
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.
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.
And the app is running on a phone with an OS coming from which country?
Like sibling said, this feels like performative BS.
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"
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.
Put me down as skeptical.
Headline could be “every country wants to end all reliance on US” and it would be the sane thing to do.
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.
Yeah, right. ROTFL. With all NGOs sponsored by the US, which sustain all political parties in Europe, this will be verry, verry difficult.
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'
True that. Also in many countries in Europe, IT jobs are not "special" anymore and salaries are similar to the median.
Stimulate the sector directly through investment and indirectly by enabling competition and the demand for jobs will increase - following with it salaries.
Cash injection isn't enough though, if you don't break down monopolistic barriers, businesses will fail regardless
One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).
Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.
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.
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.
- 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/
Meanwhile, very country still runs on Microsoft and IBM.
Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.
If there is a single policy change I could pick for public spending on IT it would be to forbid outsourcing to “contractors” and thinking of software delivery as “projects”
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
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, and with better market penetration: Google => Yandex, Meta => VK, Uber => Yandex Taxi, Amazon/eBay/Craigslist => Ozon/Avito/Wildberries, etc. Lack of own app store was more like an oversight. Europe is at least 20 years late in the game.
If there was a real conflict between the US and Europe, whether an open conflict or "cold war" type, you could be absolutely certain that every supply chain you're using is going to be mostly under US control. Open source is irrelevant for that issue, you're not compiling your own Linux distro and all software and your compiler toolchain and use your own repo hosting (and switch off all undocumented backdoors in your CPU's "management" engine). Funny enough, even if you did that, the hardware on which you run all this is almost certainly fully under US control. Guess where American Megatrends, Phoenix, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Intel are located. The same for every phone operating system. Binary blobs nowadays either come from China or from the US and their chip manufacturers (e.g. in Taiwan).
- 35h a week, doesn’t prevent engineers from working more legally (most do) - with the age of AI code velocity is no more about time spent, but fresh brain - And much much more important, it is significantly more efficient to have an employee 10 year in one place than 2 years in 5 places. What could explain higher US turnover than europe, you think?
It does seem like you can put your money where your mouth is in this case. You can now put a literal dollar value on how much you actually care about being tied to US tech. And it's like $20-40/user/month. Which isn't nothing but it's not untenable amounts of money.
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.
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.
I'm sure it'll be paraphrased to another company in another 30 years.
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.
The real problem is the almost total capture of the political process by money, which weaponizes the legislative branch against common citizens in the interests of corporate owners.
[1] See for example:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
It's not the US, the UK, or any of the EU countries, certainly not Russia, China, or India.
Populists come to power when the ruling elites bankrupt by corruption and ineptitude the trust that the populace had had in them.
Everyone else are low information voters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-roles-sup...
Bezos is actually a great example, because he made almost his entire US$250B fortune from unrealized stock appreciation rather than salary or new awards. Even the most extreme wealth tax proposals I've seen wouldn't get him down to US$25B. The US could only have achieved that target by restricting how much Amazon is allowed to innovate and grow.
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.
You could absolutely nail the document compatibility aspect and it still wouldn't be enough because of freaking Outlook.
I just moved all my hosting and domains out of the US after 15 years of good service.
People are still waffling. It’s got to get bad enough there won’t be any waffling.
Americans may be the biggest offenders but the pro-competition rules should apply to all.
Personally, I have the skills and interest to write a custom OS for my phone (Linux, custom DE, and waydroid for Android compat) - but it's literally impossible to due to anti competitive practices (I can't reverse engineer drivers and clean room driver development is practically impossible).
Similar story for my router, my "smart" TV and arm64 MacBook pro (or even an arm64 surface laptop).
all nations around the world are currently increasing their surveillance capability... And it's worth keeping in mind that at least some of us see that as an issue, that's actually not a broadly accepted fact. There are a lot of people that don't see an issue with it.
And you'll be able to find a topic you disagree with with all politicians, if you discredit everything they say afterwards, you're essentially left holding your ears closed to all dialog.
A man that is in directly involved in surveilling his own people does not have a leg to stand on in the Geo political arena. And to think otherwise is a massive mistake. Stop propping up people that do deserve it.
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.
Why should they do that?
Talent that is capable of building the next AWS can easily make 6 figures at AWS and not lose more than half of that in taxes... you need to do something to attract/retain such talent here.
I hate that "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" is a thing and that the people suggesting that we have good enough FOSS options when things were being planned out were probably given a dismissive look by the business people who were promised the sky by MS salesmen.
At least that's how I imagine it probably looked, given my own past experience of suggesting PostgreSQL and in the end the project going with Oracle (it's okay when it works, but for those particular projects PostgreSQL would have worked better, given the issues I've seen in the following years). It's the same non-utilitarian / cargo-cult thinking that leads to other solutions like SQLite not being picked when the workload would actually better be suited for it than a "serious" RDBMS with a network in the middle.
Apply the same to server OSes (Windows vs Linux distros and even DEB based distros vs RPM RHEL-compatibles), MS Office vs LibreOffice when you don't even need advanced features and stuff like Slack/Teams vs self-hosting Mattermost or Zulip or whatever. It's not even jumping on untested software, but fairly boring and okay packages (with their limitations known that are objectively often NOT dealbreakers) and not making yourself vendor-locked (hostage).
I guess I could also make the more realpolitik take - use MS, use Oracle, use whatever is the path of least resistance BUT ONLY if you're not making yourself 100% reliant on it. If Microsoft or Google decides they hate you tomorrow, you should still have a business continuity plan. If systems have standby nodes, why not have a basic alternative standby system, or the ability to stand up a Nextcloud instance when needed for example (or the knowledge and training on how to do that)? If people had govt. services before computers being widespread and you can have people processing a bunch of paper forms, then surely if push comes to shove it'd be possible to standup a basic replacement for whatever gets borked while ignoring all of the accidental complexity (even if it'd mean e-mailing PDFs for a while). Unless someone builds their national tax system or ID system on a foreign cloud, then they are absolutely fucked.
Or github if you're using a bit more than self-hosted gitlab can provide.
It's not always about the location, it's usually about features (how it integrates into other hardware/software) rarely prices.
For example, can you suggest firewalls for offices that aren't either American or Israeli? We'd need something to replace Palo Alto, Bluecoat, Fortigate and Juniper. Also it'd be good to replace Cisco VPNs to be honest.
But it kind of must be feature parity, because (European) regulators hold our balls over hot coals.
Well, that sounds easy! I wonder why no one else ever thought of it. Good thing there are geniuses like you around.
But it’s one of the thing the EU could do to win in new industries.
Honestly if the EU became more innovation and entrepreneur friendly I think they’d kick America’s ass. Tons of smart people, and the positive side of the social safely net is that it derisks entrepreneurship. America is full of would be founders who can’t afford to take the leap since they could lose their health care, etc.
But I take your answer as provided in the good faith.
Collection of RFCs: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-rfcs
Open design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk
Git is decentralized and using a self-hosted instance of Gitea / Forgejo will give you a replacement for the essential parts of GitHub. GitHub is absolutely replaceable.
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.
It is true that most(not all, for example Switzerland, Finland Poland all have excellent militaries) European countries have been underfunding their military in stark contrast to the war mongering nation across the Atlantic, but I would not call that “relying on”, just a delusion that we lived in an eternal peace.
FWIW I served my country Sweden for three years, including a tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan. I have been against this recklessness for as long as I can remember.
Also, the EU is hardly irrelevant, stop the hyperbole…
It is subtle, but different
Because "the EU" is not a country. It is a bloc. People that speak lf EU here are very delusional about what it is, and seemingly never understand its function.
People speak of the EU as if it was going to be as nimble as a unified country with a single government structure. It is not. It is a bloc composed of 27 countries each with its own government structure, interests, budgets, industries, culture, and so on.
Also - defense. The EU has no army. Each of its 27 countries have their own separated armies, and make their own decisions.
In a post WW2 scenario, where most of Europe needed to rebuild, outsourcing defense to an ally was a correct decision (especially considering that escalating power in the preceeding decades only led to war).
Perhaps the current state of affairs lead to a more federalized EU, who knows.
USA is pure aggressor here. USA becomming fascist is not fault of Europe, so no, Europe does not deserve to be attacked by USA.
USA asked Europe for help, got it, used it for own benefit and then attacks Europe with lies and threats.
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
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.
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 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.
It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.
One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.
But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.
In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
Because having "big tech" is a sign that the government has completely failed to enforce anti-trust laws and allowed dangerous concentration of power to occur. It's a symptom of a disease not some desirable goal.
The EU doesn't need or want "big tech", it just needs "tech". It needs generous public funding for infrastructure, open source, and it should aim to build upon open standards whenever possible.
We don't need domestic monopolies that are just going to fuck us in the same way that US corporations fuck Americans while we all pretend to enjoy it for the sake of looking superior to the other camp.
Why doesn't it already have "tech" and has to resort to governmental action to procure one? I mean, it is obviously very easy to acquire just "tech" without government completely failing to enforce laws and population being fucked by corporations, and it is a testament to how dumb Americans really are that they failed to do that. But Europeans are not dumb, so why they didn't do it by now? Why we are discussing the matter now instead of just pointing to clearly superior open-standard non-fucking European "just tech" as a superior alternative to American "big tech"?
If you walk into a bank in Europe and have some money to invest they will sell you mostly debt and the "Magnificent Seven" or a funds with those stocks inside.
The EU is ridiculous when it says it want to built an alternative because it's entire financial/banking system end up fueling the saving of its citizen into those companies.
This is also why we end up in that absurd situation where the Mag 7 make up 1/3 of the S&P 500 market cap.
If the EU is serious about offering an alternative (which I doubt) it needs to offer a sustainable path for its people to invest in it. Not do another fake program where insiders will grab some public money and get nowhere (it has been tried for 25 years).
Did US government do something like that? If US has some attractive investments and EU does not, why don't they? I mean, EU citizens would probably like to invest in EU companies, much better than in US companies, they are not some self-haters to refuse a good investment just because it's in EU, right? So why don't they invest there? Why do they invest in US instead and there is a need in a special action - not taken prior to now - to enable them to invest in the EU?
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.
FB was incubated in a single unified market before it really spread to the EU. It’s harder for companies to take off and reach tech giant reach with the much smaller individual markets in the EU.
It’s much harder to build a product that appeals to everyone from the Irish to the Bulgarians, and to advertise to them than it is to do the same for everyone in the US. And it’s not just the tech companies, the individual content creators on the platform have the same comparative problems.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-no...
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...
> 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
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?
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.
Elon Musk spent $290 million to elect Trump. Are you saying that had no impact? How do you know this?
https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/118th-congress/hou...
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.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
This isn't about who wins campaigns -- this is about who influences the issues they campaign on. Since the Citizens United decision politicians have had to switch to the Super PAC model to be competitive, which gives drastically more power to dark money donors. And unsurprisingly, as cited in that study, the influence of average citizens on politics has been completely surpassed by businesses and economic elites:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Doesn't matter anyway because the poll doesn't mean shit. Most people are idiots and will answer the poll completely differently if you actually give them a realistic question like "would you accept a major tax increase to get universal healthcare?"
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.
Yes!! Misusing Excel as a database is really part of the problem. It also causes so many issues. Having multiple data elements within one cell. Someone overtyping a formula in a column of 200.000 values leading to one cell no longer being updated. Needing 32GB of RAM just to edit a spreadsheet with a measly 500.000 rows.
All stuff that never would happen with a real database. Microsoft never really put much effort into making Access approachable.
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?
A family member has recently written a book on the latest version of MS Word. It's not their first book written with MS Word. It's also not the first time I give a hand to make sure that typography matches publisher requirements. I find that using style sheets has become more complicated, more limited and better hidden with successive versions of MS Word.
Contrast with Apple Pages, in which style sheets are so well integrated in the UI that you barely need to think when you create a new rule.
In fact, I find that even LibreOffice is much better at style sheets these days.
I remember the (not necessarily good) old days when I used MS Word to create character sheets for my tabletop RPGs, or in-game newspapers, etc. These days, I would hate doing this with MS Word – and not just because I'm an open-source aficionado.
Although MS themselves apparently don't realize that, considering how they push the web version which doesn't support them?
Good source of money for contractors as OP said.
I don’t see how your point disagrees with what I said.
Mostly though: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-billionaires-publicly-ba...
Headline: More billionaires are publicly backing Kamala Harris than Donald Trump