Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors(ciphercue.com) |
Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors(ciphercue.com) |
I know companies that will tell you "I'm not gonna put any of my data in cloud, especially not American ones" but they are perfectly fine using any major cloud based office suite (mail, docs, chat/video apps, ecc ecc) where they voluntarily and deliberately load any kind of data.
TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco...
There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc.
I find it laughable.
Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform.
Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that?
Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what?
Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise.
But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is.
People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again.
And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?
Let the yellow man put some more tariffs on imports from the EU. Let him ban EU citizens from Visa/Apple/Microsoft when they disagree with MAGA. Maybe give east Europe to Russia, the west half can be the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states.
As long as there are no options we have no freedom.
But then okay, say you want to do more.
Then do more. Not some letter from EU.
There is a focus here on office and javascript... why?
Okay if you want an EU M365, good luck.
We were and are the best.
Self-hosting mail infra is a forgotten skill, indeed
Right on the front page...
And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola.
Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany.
IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
Didn’t even Microsoft say that they can’t guarantee that they can follow these laws? Because the US laws take over. So, legal entities are just some smoke screen. They don’t help if the US government wants access to something.
I’m not sure what has happened since then or the legal status of this issue.
I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.
And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.
I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders. That's why things like Amazon's "EU Cloud" isn't really interesting to anyone in EU and Europe, ultimately there is a US entity that easily folds in favor of the US government, and there isn't much you can do about it unless you stay 100% clear from US entities with your data.
Not that I think our governments in Europe are much better, time and time again they demonstrate they don't care one iota about personal privacy of individuals, so I wouldn't be surprised European companies wouldn't resist even requests.
https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...
It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.
Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?
Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.
Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)
Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?
I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.
I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.
Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?
This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.
I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.
> For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.
Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.
If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down.
Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.
On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.
However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality.
Source: I have access to better data.
Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).
There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default.
Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.
The top 5 CDNs in terms of popularity are all US-based companies. However, Bunny and other providers are growing and becoming real market competitors.
Switching from Microsoft, Amazon, or heavy Google-based infra to on-prem or other vendors is much more complicated than switching the CDN.
CDNs are a very replaceable component. Basically a DNS record update away, and a bit of config.
There aren't many completely european solutions, but there are more than zero.
OVH is great value, Scaleway can handle lots of traffic, hetzner is so cheap...
So it's "nobody gets fired to buy IBM" all over again.
Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I am an American, and I don't like what I am seeing the last few years, but further balkanization doesn't seem to be a sound strategy.
I don’t see the US as willing to do the necessary stuff for that to happen honestly. Last threats on Greenland were this week, as were last threats on Spain.
Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
-data is kept in EU,
-lower latency for SSH if nearer
-most companies's are not global, and so most of their customers are going to be in the same country or nearby so makes sense to keep near the serves close.
What exactly were you looking for? APIs?
Here is a hint: quite many companies need a certificated provider who not only is certified but also has - 99,999% overlook this fact because of ignorance - enough insurance and can theoretically be held responsible financially for services being not reachable.
EU regulation requires such settings.
While I highly value Hetzner and Strato, they don't want to deal with such companies, which is reasonable.
Also what you see is just the visible part, not the internal APIs or due to failure safety different APIs serving in a failover scenario.
Internal networks are huge. And masked or hidden behind quite some intrusion detection as well as layers of protection exactly for this reason.
In other words: you did an interesting posting however it is meaningless without knowing why these what you called churn occurs.
Usually you don't simply migrate from one cloud to another.
Accenture for example had a partnership with Amazon, and use their services. So maybe during the development phase or whatever there appears to be a spike.
In other words: it was a planend. Times series need to be observed for many years.
But nevertheless a nice posting.
It is just that sometimes "facts" from the outside lead to speculations, an insider can only chuckle about.
Before I joined a huge global bank, I thought any startup would eat them alive, think N24. Remember N24? No? Well...
I was part of the senior management, dbCORE as a hint.
Maybe repeat the study, make it run over years, or even better: observe something you know for a fact and see how things change, not the other way around. You would have needed to conduct interviews etc.
By design there is a paradigm called security through obscurity. That's why torture for example seldomly helpful. Is the poor soul lying or not? You need to verify first, in any case.
Outside observation is just that: Platon's allegory of the cave. Useful or not, you never know. That's why I laughed a bit about your disclaimer ("Limitations").
Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...
Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar?
I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.
Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me. Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?
But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?
For payments I've used Mollie, which is EU based and has good DX. It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service. Adyen is also good.
You're a bit generic on other fronts but Scaleway is an excellent EU-based cloud provider. Haven't missed anything from AWS so far.
> Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
Why would you even want such a product? Managed postgres for cheap in the low 10s of Euros will scale to lots of users.
If your problem is scaling you have the best problem in the world, and one that most cloud vendors offer solutions for out of the box.
Neon is a great solution..which fits a handful of use cases.
US definitely enjoys an apex position in cloud services, but there's little to no core irreplaceable products beyond leading edge AI in European offerings.
Cloudflare might be an exception if latency, ddos protection and global reach are important.
Africa and the middle east have the least, something like ~100 or so.
Some DNS servers can cache their zone information [1].
I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.
Maybe going beyond cyber alternatives is whats needed
And you know their infra generally works, you know when it's not on fire.
And when it is, well you are not going to be the only one down.
After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for European base and EU is trying hard to clean up the field with things like EU-inc, digital Euro, common markets etc but its not happening fast enough to make a difference today.
Maybe if all goes well and Trump can finish his term or even invades Greenland then EU can have its "tech", but for now its happening slowly because its primarily driven by the hypothetical risks that are convincingly real but but costly to act on.
I think this would highly depend on the country. With a solid business plan, I could easily get funding via banks and literally start a company with the press of a button in web portal, in Sweden. Similarly, Estonia seems to have made it ridiculously easy as well. In Spain it's slightly harder, I have to fill out some forms, but with stable income, very easy to get a bank loan even for business ideas that probably shouldn't.
Sure, you won't attract multi-trillion VCs that route, but is that exclusively what you're talking about? How much easier can it be to start the company than the press of the button, since you seem sure it's much easier in the US than all the countries in the EU?
USA population: 348 million
The problem is that many of europe's top talent moves to USA, and also that American funding for European startups is huge, and many are made to relocate/IPO in USA too.
True. Also: the landing page and all the other corporate boasting are often run by a marketeer or similar, who knows nothing about the technical part. They just have a design, and outsource implementation. So it just ends up somewhere.
Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?
If I never actually noticed it, it wouldn't be slop, that I'd agree with. But in this case, I did notice, so it is slop.
If the article was written by a human it would be valuable feedback for the author. Because the article was written by a LLM it was just the commenter being tricked to be engaged by generated noise.
Yes, it's INFURIATING. I hate, hate, hate this. :(
Can we start flagging shit like this, please?
While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters.
You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.
Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by blocking their access to that tech (it has happened).
The "sovereignty" part here is a net positive for anyone living in the EU. Net negative for anyone living in the US of course, because being in a dominant position does favour the US.
I live in an EU country and care deeply for the right to erasure and our consumer rights. The EU legislature does some good things on that front. I "care" for EU tech companies as much as I can care for any company currently. I think technological sovereignty is and will be important moving forward, for our economic resilience, infrastructure stability, among other things.
BTW "EU nationalist" just sounds like an oxymoron to me.
But clearly you don't care, so understandably that choice doesn't make sense for you, that's all fine and good. But still you have to understand other people/organizations than you might have different requirements? Or is that a very foreign concept?
> there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated
Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both.
There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare.
> On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.
That's a bit of a feature, I don't think the EU should want TooBigTech monopolies. Doesn't mean that there cannot be successful services in Europe.
I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue.
Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.
This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.
I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.
Companies also move to the US (e.g. Stripe) or are bought big American companies (e.g. Deepmind)
Exactly, EU must guarantee that there's no going back even if the next US president is likable, cooperative politician and not this thing that Trump is. Otherwise all your investment can perish if switching to MS, Oracle or Palantir or something becomes acceptable again 2-3 years.
A Trump invasion or something just as hard to fix needs to seal the deal.
Hetzner can do the same as long as you have a valid VAT code.
Idk where you would even buy registered DDR5 dims right now. Newegg shows $Request a quote money and that its built to order ... for a 64 GB stick lol.
I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open. I know there are some US entities who have public carnary style notices ("We have not been visited by a government agency, ..."), with the idea being that while they can compell you to not say a thing, they can't force you to say a thing. How well that would work in practise, I dunno, but it shows that some in the US anticipate the issue and at least signal to care about it.
But in the end I agree with you, the safer route for people in the EU is to not deal with this risk to begin with.
I wouldn't rule that out either, but also to be entirely realistic, AFAIK, there been one (Lavabit) company in the last twenty-or-so years that went the way of quitting the business instead of just complying. People nowadays seem even less to give up profits in the name of principles, so I'd also wouldn't be surprised basically no one actually doesn't fold.
It does have all the features and API craziness other processors offer but you don't have to use any of it.
Dig +trace shows the recursive lookup (forwarders) used for your NS.
They almost always end up Arin and arpa. I've troubleshot some connection issues between different data centers and transit providers and found root hint oddities I just escalate to my supervisor
If the concern is that the US would somehow break the root servers and disrupt many trillions of dollars of trade I guess that is technically possible but probably unlikely given the amount of trade, tariffs, tax revenue that would impact would end anyone's political career and things would be reverted quickly in my opinion.
Who are "they" in this case?
Now if that company was using services based in Germany, then only Germany could access that data, which is obviously much less of a sovereignty problem (Germany interfering with Germany's affair is just a normal government).
In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands because that is where the infrastructure is. They also happen to be countries with world class intelligence agencies.
We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
Did you actually try searching what I told you you could use as a search term? Have you looked into Mollie, Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Quickpay, etc? The list is quite large, there are options available but again, it requires you to proactively review and compare them, not just throw your hands in the air proclaiming "It's not Stripe".
> Mollie for UK
- 1.2% + 20p for standard cards
- 2.90% + £0.20 for corporate and European
- 2.50% + £0.20 for Amex
- 3.25% + £0.20 for international
> Stripe for UK
- 1.5% + £0.20 for standards cards inc Amex
- 1.9% + £0.20 for corporate uk cards
- 2.5% + £0.20 for international within Europe
- 3.25% + £0.20 for International + 2% if fx conversion
[0]https://www.mollie.com/gb/pricing#psp-block
[1]https://stripe.com/gb/pricing. (scroll down for list)
So do you have more information about normal payment processors in general which are more competitive than Stripe. The comment below by @khurs for example shows that Stripe is actually a bit cheaper than Mollie for Amex cards (which you respond with the point that most European demographic doesn't use Amex cards etc.)
but I am non-european, non-US so I have no skin in the game and I wish to support those which are mutually beneficial to me in terms of providing me a very decent deal and hopefully good support as well. So what do you suggest me some more resources about and would there be anything better than Stripe.
I absolutely know that AWS and others are so overpriced that I sometimes even used to wonder why people might buy it if OVH and Hetzner exists (before price increase, perhaps it can still be price competitive sometimes though)
But interestingly, I didn't believe the same for Stripe, so I am re-thinking my belief about Stripe and payment processing in general too (which to be fair, tangentially might also perhaps be the same way some people might feel about AWS). So I'd be curious to learn more! :-D
Edit: just did some more digging and as an Indian, we have UPI payments which there are some providers of but there is an option iirc for us to directly have a bank account and do a lot of payment processing so much more easier with UPI ourselves and basically pay 0% for Indian specific traffic as India heavily uses UPI (its really good to be honest!) and there are some providers like carefree/razorpay as well which can accept UPI on their side at 1.6-2% if you want API and are just starting out
But I am curious about accepting European/American/Canadian cards though. It seems that carefree/razorpay are recommended if targetting Indian markets and Helcim for American/canadian and Adyen/Mollie are recommended for European centric markets. So I'd be curious to hear your opinions about it.
I looked but couldn't find any. Adyen does not do this on its own AFAICT, only with 3rd party addons that implement recurring payments on top of it. Mollie claims it does this but is woefully incomplete (no failed payment retries for example), and appears to be all in on slop.
> Mollie will retry the failed payment up to 5 times.
> god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US
What? That doesn't make any sense. If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU, than just starting a Swedish company and selling directly to Danes inside of the EU.
This is starting to sound like someone who never done intra-EU B2B or B2C at all. Where are you getting this from?
> If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU
Starting a US company from EU costs a few hundred dollars depending on the broker etc. and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients). This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US. So it depends.
Maybe things are easier from Sweden but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example? Do you by chance require residence and have residence-related obligations and costs? Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
Basically, depends on how you setup the company in regards to liabilities (which I'm guessing is true in the US too), and the exact terms of the loan.
Or, to put it another way, do you think any Americans use Microsoft or Apple products out of patriotism or fear of being dependent on technology from other nations?
Yeah, I have to doubt your perceived reality here. Can you name some of these "hostile foreign influences"?
The big competitor to Apple is Google, whereas the big competitor to Microsoft is Linux/FOSS IMHO. I'm sorry to be blunt, but in the current political climate I couldn't care less what any Americans are using and for whatever reason. EU citizens on the other hand sure got a few reasons during the last decade due to foreign American politics.
The name is the European Union. It is the foreign entity to Europeans. If you doubt that there is a big portion of Europeans who aren't pro-EU, then I guess you doubt that there are Americans who aren't pro-Trump?
Anyway, there were referendums in many countries on the subject of joining the EU, and you can look at those and see that not 100% of the population voted yes.
So it is a false assumption that Europeans would by default have any loyalty or goodwill towards the EU, although I'm sure that a big portion of them do. Especially in some countries.
You can open a company in another EU country, but if you don't live there, your domestic tax agency may/will interpret the company to be under their jurisdiction based on your residency. Now you have double the paperwork, and likely a more complex tax situation to deal with.
And in Sweden it's free, if that somehow would stop anyone anyways.
> and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients
Agreed, if you have US clients, US customers and generally like the vibe of the US, then makes a lot of sense to incorporate in the US. For basically anything else, it doesn't.
> This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example
You misunderstand what "EU single market" is referring to if you think it's supposed to mean pensions and similar stuff is shared across the entire EU. Of course it isn't, and no one of us who actually live and work here have that fundamental misunderstanding you seem to have.
> example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US
Your arguments here make zero sense. Say I'm a Swedish resident, open up a company in Sweden and hire a Finn, now I need to ensure this employment is fully legal. Same goes if the company is in the US, and in fact, would add additional things to do, as suddenly it's not only within EU and EEA, but the legal entity is outside.
> but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example?
I don't know why you would? EU and Europe isn't like the US in that it's many states under one country, we're all different countries with our own laws and so on, there is no "EU-law" or whatever, it's just an umbrella for us to unite under. Why on earth would an German start a company in Greece, if there is nothing particular about Greece in their business? The question doesn't even make sense.
> Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
Ireland and Malta are the "Delaware of Europe" which are popular to incorporate, but generally, I think people prefer to own businesses in countries where they already live, incorporating on the other side of the continent just doesn't make sense.
They do cards with airlines where the customer can earn free flights and other such reward schemes to attract customers.
Well, call me surprised! Which democratic election ever achieves a one-sided 100%?
Still, the majority of the EU population seems to in favor of the EU, whereas the majority of the US citizens are pro-Trump, or they were during the last election at least. So I don't really understand what you're arguing for here.
International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.
Name one country with a large military force that done more good than bad with it? Seems to come with the territory that if you have a large military force, you somehow need to use it for something as otherwise it falls into disrepair, and that "something" tends to be trying to spread your culture one way or another.
Come to think of it, seems China is the only country so far (in modern times) that haven't abused their military to enforce their will on smaller countries, basically every other superpower been abusing their military to make the world worse.
Philippines would disagree with this one.
That's... how EU works, intentionally? It's a decentralized union more or less, we're still independent countries with our own laws and what not, each country have their own command and control structure for their own military, on purpose.
Specifically, the problem of how those states can individually choose to plug their forces into a practiced system of military coordination.
Today, they can do that with NATO, but if they want an alternative, it doesn't exist and it will be difficult to build.
I was investigating this 5 months ago and the answer their slop machine gave was:
> Does Mollie retry failed payments (dunning) and track subscription states? Mollie does not currently provide automatic dunning or retry logic for failed subscription payments. Subscription states like active or past due are tracked, but you need to implement retry and notification logic in your system. This is a common feature request and may be on the roadmap, but no official release date is available.
From your link, note though:
> If your subscription payment does not succeed, Mollie may attempt it again up to 5 times (once a day), depending on the failure reason. After all retries have been exhausted, the subscription will be cancelled.
If there's a payment issue, I would not consider cancelling the subscription 5 days after the first failure as reasonable. I would expect the subscription to go into "past due" state, and to keep retrying.
They may but it's not out there in the wild.
We're not talking about having hyperscalers in each country, but I could totally imagine each country having infrastructure.
> In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands
Having the choice between 3 European countries is already a lot better than giving all the data to the US. The US has been a lot more hostile to European countries than "the intersection of hostility from France/Germany/Netherlands".
> We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
Sure, I agree with that. But one doesn't prevent the other. Typically it's not practical to run LLMs in a privacy-preserving manner, so it's a lot better (in terms of sovereignty) to run a server in a place you trust than in a hostile country.
History shows conflict seems to be inevitable. You can't assume all European nations will be friendly forever. I'm American, but my hope is that this knee-jerk reaction to just move everything possible to EU has more thought behind it. Improving upon what we currently have especially with respect to privacy so that everyone in the world may benefit rather than just clone American tech and calling it a day.
- IF you can choose to rely on one of [France, Germany, Netherland], then you would need to be in conflict with all three to be screwed.
- IF you can choose to rely on a service in your country, it's better for sovereignty.
Overall, it's all better for competition. The best would be competing services sharing an open core (or even everything).
> this knee-jerk reaction to just move everything possible to EU
The thought is that if you are in the EU, in terms of sovereignty you are better off giving your data to EU services. US companies give their data to US services, so of course it is much less of an issue there. And Americans are not the last to complain when US companies give their data to non-US companies...
Not being able to stand on our own feet is going to be a major problem because of the implied soft power. It nerfs our ability to ever have a spine on any issue.
I do remember the last time the USA did. It was hours ago at a NATO summit.
or Tibet?
You are comparing sensational trolls with actual geopolitical history.
Should we casually throw around all places the US invaded too?
-MAGA Right before Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, militarily occupy US cities, annul various amendments, start the Iran War, etc.
And admittedly I didn’t realize Taiwan was in Europe. Sorry.
no one take Trump seriously
You might not take their words as a true statement of fact, but the situation going on is still pretty damn serious!