Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
I know people in the US are focused on DOGE, but over here in Europe, the impression is that the US completely destroyed its soft power this week. The expectation is that especially US tech will be weaponized, so people are switching search engines, studying dollar alternatives. If you think I am exaggerating, read the FT, Times, etc... Are people talking about this - do they take it seriously or believe there is no alternative to US tech? What does it mean for US startups, California and global tech?
For what it counts, I deleted my Amazon account today (and lost all my Kindle books in the process), I'll never buy anything from them again. I'll close my S3 storage account with a US company in the coming months : I'll switch to a German service. In the coming weeks, I'll also delete my GMail account (my devices are already deGoogled since many years). There a lot of European alternatives that respect our privacy, our values and principles.
From a software developer viewpoint, my biggest worry is about GitHub, owned by Microsoft. I self host my open source code with Forgejo.
Can you explain what exactly your worry is with GitHub? If you have your repos locally, you can always go somewhere else if/when something happens with GitHub. Except if you rely on things like Github actions or other features that are harder to move.
Well, one day MS could shut everything down or charge a lot of money to continue using the services. Almost all open source projects are currently hosted on Github (and rely on their services).
Yes, the code is replicated on thousands of machines around the web, but this concentration of control by a single company is extremely dangerous in my opinion.
The way events are unfolding these days, I'm really worried about what could happen.
Take for example Starlink and Ukraine... The USA threatened to shut down the internet service if Ukraine won't sign the rare minerals deal. A deal that would make Ukraine a colony of USA.
The contexts aren't the same. You aren't a captive audience with GitHub, and the "concentration of control by a single company" makes it sound like they forced us to use their service. We chose to gather there because of critical mass, similar to ig, FB, etc.
Starlink is a legitimate concern because in some places there were no other choice, hence a captive audience.
Sure, but the strategy of US companies has been the same for many years.
Take for example Gmail: I remember 10 years ago it was free even for companies up to 100 users, then 50, then 10, then 0... The same with Google Maps, before it was free and later, after reaching a large user base, they changed the terms and above a certain number of visits per month it is a paid service.
Nothing wrong with that of course, but once you are inside their services, they make it really difficult to change providers. It is possible, of course, but in some cases it requires a relevant effort and many prefer to pay after being lured with very different promises.
I recently read the story of how Google took over Yahoo! as a search engine, they used a "Troy horse" ... and when Yahoo! discovered what happened it was too late.
Back to Github and MS ... MS has a very long history of trying to boycott Linux in any way possible (and I also remember what they did to BeOS) ... I think these are very valid reasons not to trust them. They didn't buy GitHub because they're nice and want to help open source ... the first thing they did was kill the Atom IDE. VS is full of trackers,yes it is open source, but also a mean to steal data and information directly from the computer of the developer.
The main problem for me here is the lack of principles, values. The only principle they follow is to try to become overly rich in some way. The US companies have a long history of trying in every legal and almost legal way to avoid paying taxes.
Until a few years ago, Amazon was always in loss in Italy because they transferred the profits (as inflated costs) to their subsidiary in Ireland and the Italian taxpayers gave back every year millions of Euros to Amazon as tax credits. This is not capitalism ...
Thanks, yeah the problem is the things done beyond code-hosting: Authn/z, issues, PRs, community, links pointing at Github URLs.
I wish there was a way to automatically mirror those things to Codeberg as a backup. For issues/PRs that shouldn't be too hard to do.
Gickup mirrors most of these things. Not sure about PRs, but it can mirror issues, wiki, and all your branches.
GitHub Actions, the issues system, pull request history, discussions, wiki.
Truth is, GitHub has a whole suite of really great features that's hard to move. Especially for open sourced projects/communities
The number of people who don’t know git is decentralized and instead equate git with GitHub is staggering. Glad to see that’s not the case with parent, but seeing people thinking you must have a GitHub account to use git at all is very common.
Launchpad.net offers project management and git code hosting and is run by a UK company (Canonical).
> launchpad.net
Are they still alive? i am somewhat hard-opponent of git, and still use bazaar - now breezy - as main repo storage, and only keep github as copy for PR, eh public relations, i.e. for jobhunt.
Are they still project-based? instead of person-based? It's the Person-based thing a-la-social-network that rocketed github into skies.. not git or MS
For your first question yes, Launchpad.net. For all the others, go have a look :)
I'm with you there. I still use Github regularly, but I recently spent time setting up Gickup to mirror all my repos to codeberg. I'm also looking at the git-sync tool to just backup all my github repos locally.
Great thing about git is it's distributed. I use Gitlab as my main repo, but I set Github as a remote, and I keep a copy on my hosted version of Gitlab. If Github disappears tomorrow I'd lose my issue tracking but that's about it.
I'm in the U.S. and doing the same. While EU laws don't protect me as well as they would someone on the correct side of the pond, I do still benefit from better integrity and transparency.
Would you be up for making recommendations?
Sure ! Here you can find a list of alternatives :
https://european-alternatives.eu/
I self hosting almost everything, but for a complete suite of services take at look at Infomaniak : https://www.infomaniak.com/en
Protonmail (https://proton.me/mail) or Tutanota (https://tuta.com/) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen (https://filen.io/) for encrypted Cloud Storage
Filen is becoming pretty awesome not only as worde alternative but as best sync storage period (and its e2e). They dobt have teams/bussines yet but its comming for sure.
Infomaniak is great email.
for plain e-mail, recommend migadu.com (swiss) . They do only that
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one thing that seems tricky though, is smartphone OS software. Apple + Google is on like 99% of everything. i went few years with Sailfish, all fine.. but they support only 5y+ old devices, for a reason or another.. and i got tired of waiting, and switched to Android. hmmm
Fastmail as well. they are Australian.
Beware if you want to use Hetzner's s3, they had a massive repeated outage over the past few days and don't offer any reliability guarantee, not even something like 99.9%. Maybe you're thinking of something else, or don't care if you can't upload/download for a few hours here and there - just wanted to warn as I was surprised by this as a user.
Yes, I was considering Hetzner or Scaleway, I have a few months to decide before my current prepaid plan expires.
Thank you for the heads-up !
I've had 0 issues with Hetzner's servers, they're great at that. I hoped this would translate to cloud services as well, but it turns out (not surprisingly in hindsight) that offering a fully managed service is something completely different than cheap and easily administered server.
They launched recently their S3 Storage, so I think some initial issues are inevitable.
True, but then they shouldn't claim "High availability" as an empty promise without even a non-binding expected number, like 99.9%.
Also, it's not good that they do not have any status tracker that shows summary stats on uptime over the past, say, year so one can get a quick idea of how reliable the service was historically.
The status monitor only has entries for incidences from the past 7 days. It could have been down for 10 days a month ago, you wouldn't know this unless someone wrote about it.
_You_ know the service is new, but this isn't mentioned on the landing page either. They don't say something like "only 4 months old, public beta" - in that case I wouldn't feel negatively surprised.
I just had a look at their page. Their S3 is different from Amazon. In AWS, it is global - they synchronize the objects between locations which menas it's eventually consistent but it has amazing SLA. Whereas Hetzner clearly states: "Currently, Object Storage is available in the following locations: Falkenstein, DE (FSN1), Helsinki, FI (HEL1), and Nuremberg, DE (NBG1)." So if I wanted HA, I'd use two locations or more.
As someone who has been managing his own servers (and also hosting services for his clients) for many years, I can understand the issues, problems and difficulties that can arise, so I have learned to be much more patient and understanding.
I learned (the hard way) to have a plan b for everything. I'll study an emergency solution in case of a prolonged downtime.
Around the time where Hetzner was all the rage ("Just host your own server for $8 a month!") I was trying to sign up. They had a multi-day outage that prevented even signing up. I think I was lucky to experience that before I started using them.
Its great service. I cannot say a bad thing after years of use.
Wait, so is it available now? They had it in free beta for some selected customers, I had no idea it's available already!
Would you mind sharing some of your favorites for us Yanks? Some of us like privacy too.
Protonmail and Tutanota are the two big ones with e2ee
This site is great for finding alternatives to any piece of software (not just OSS)
https://alternativeto.net/
Protonmail is pro Trump.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
As a starting point I enjoyed https://european-alternatives.eu/
I don't know how to degoogle at this point. 90% of my registered accounts across the internet are with my Gmail account because I didn't want them tied to my private email.
One at a time.
If you have the time and are interacting with the account, take the second to change it away from gMail. Insisting on doing them all immediately is setting up a Herculean task that'll almost certainly leave you demoralized. This gets your most-used (and presumably most important) accounts first,and feels much smaller and more manageable.
After 6 (or 18, whenever) months of this you can summon some motivation to change over the last 20 accounts and be done with it.
My family has <ourlastname>.com that we registered in 1996, but for email, I mostly use my own mail-related domain name (<word>mail.com), which I use for all pseudonymous accounts.
You should probably spend some time on changing that. The only thing keeping me inside the Google ecosystem is my university and I hate that since they are paying for it anyway, so it makes absolutely no sense if not for it being the lazy way of doing things. Why choose to be lazy when it's clearly doing more harm than good? I managed to install android with microg and it has worked flawlessly for 4 years now. There are many options to do this of course, but they all require a lot of time to set up. Still a better alternative than being locked up under Google.
There's an entire subreddit dedicated to helping people degoogle. One of the hardest things to get rid of is Google Maps as there's no real alternative that's as good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/
I haven’t touched Google maps in ages - I use Apple Maps which is decent these days (not the dumpster fire it was at launch - and even so, I used it back then, if only to de google a bit).
If the point is to avoid US companies this won’t be useful, but if the point is to avoid Google specifically, it is an option.
Open Street Map has come a long way. It's no Google Maps, but it's serviceable.
Years ago, when I saw the invitation "Sign in with your Google account" popping up on every site, I suspected it was a trap to hold users hostage. Take a private email address and move away from Gmail one service at time.
I'm a US Millennial and my impression is that the US has spent my adult lifetime destroying its soft power, and this week is really just a culmination of that. US tech firms do not and have never (at least in my time working for them) cared about anything other than a pathological pursuit of profit that borders on nihilistic paperclip-optimization.
I believe that US firms see European tech companies as slow/lazy and think that good engineers only seek high compensation which is available to them in the US. Certainly there are some who are motivated by that, but I have known some great engineers in Europe which was one of my reasons for cautioning my American peers about pushing too hard for WFH; if they can do the job from home, then so can others in countries with lower costs of living.
> US tech firms do not and have never (at least in my time working for them) cared about anything other than a pathological pursuit of profit that borders on nihilistic paperclip-optimization.
If that were true then people wouldn't worry as much. It's because there is a fuck-you-and-the-world nationalistic theme going on and US tech companies are unable to escape — that makes people worry. No company in the world is a vehicle to pure financial rationalism, and no human or collection of humans are either.
I'd say (as a European) most of the tech firms were seen as positive, for most of my life. Not perfectly so, but net. Even Facebook. Heck, even AirBnB and Uber — much as they also upset local communities that didn't want unregistered hotels, and taxi firms that weren't ready for app-based competition, people here made use of those apps to get trip options and travel options they didn't have before.
“US tech firms do not and have never (at least in my time working for them) cared about anything other than a pathological pursuit of profit that borders on nihilistic paperclip-optimization.”
Ahem … large US tech firms, that is.
FWIW we have had two customers (apologetically) terminate service in the past month citing nationalist concerns.
I've sold all my holdings in US companies to instead invest in STOXX Europe 600 alternatives. I know others here in Sweden that have said they have done the same.
In Sweden, Russia has always been the enemy.
My prediction is that France and Germany will soon join the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and it will be the end of NATO. UK will probably join the Maximator intelligence alliance.
The death of Five Eyes and NATO in 2025 was not on my bingo card. Good luck with your new alliance with the Russians, Americans!
Enjoy underperforming the markets
I'm a dual citizen (US, Spain), I moved to Spain 1 year ago. I need to completely divest from the US.
I am European and I've never even seen anyone talking about it outside the internet. Majority of people do not know and do not care.
Thanks for this, as an American I was stressing out. But if it's only Europeans with internet access talking about it we should be fine. Let's just hope Europeans don't start using the internet.
Assuming that you commented in good faith and legitimately didn't understand:
Their point is that OP likely underestimates the effect of their particular filter bubble on their perception of the universality of the discussion and sentiment.
It's only the terminally online Europeans.
This is the reality. Most people even in the US don't care.
When you ask the extremists, like some of the people in these threads, to list specific concerns about specific things that the USG is currently doing that they're unaligned with, they struggle. The biggest concern is, I guess, that we've banned trans men from womens sports and removed the X option from gender forms? Look, I think its a distraction for either side to be worrying about this so much. Those actions are a very, very far distance from anything remotely resembling human rights abuse. We've been playing world police since WW2 and we're $35T in debt; we have bigger fish to fry.
If you're mad that the United States is asking your country to contribute more to its own defense; or that its no longer going to get that $50M USAID contract for gender fluidity studies or whatever; I don't know what to tell you. Growing up is hard, but necessary. Europe can't keep relying on the US for everything.
If its ending the war in Ukraine; I think judgement should be reserved until we understand the terms of how it ends. Ukraine could lose some territory. Sucks, but again, America voted and does not want to be the world police anymore. Supporting peace at the cost of Ukrainian territory is not automatically "omg Russia and US are allied". Its a sad, horrible outcome of Europe utterly failing its neighbor; but sure, they can blame the US, part of the job of being World Police is also being World Scapegoat.
Most everything else the Trump admin is doing doesn't impact Europe. Its vague generalities about "vibes". You're oversocialized, and those vibes are probably courtesy of Russian/Chinese disinformation propaganda, not reality. Its hard to hear, you aren't going to believe it, but please just log off the internet and orient yourself on what really matters in your daily life.
> The biggest concern is, I guess, that we've banned trans men from womens sports and removed the X option from gender forms?
Really? The biggest concern? Not wantonly cutting long-running programs (even international commitments) with no regard to consequences, just to see what happens?
Well, that's the thing; I don't know what peoples' concerns are. I hear a lot of complaints about vague generalities (like what you just said) and ominous future-fear about a dictatorship, but I struggle to connect any of those concerns back to specific orders. Much of them just sound like an expression of a generalized anxiety disorder tbh.
I think the spending cuts are generally justified under something akin to "we don't have the money to spend on a lot of this stuff", because we don't. I haven't heard any argument on how deficit spending is sustainable, and obviously Americans are tired of mortgaging their childrens' future for short-term gains.
I suspect we'll rebuild a ton of the programs, and I hope we do; but we need to reach a place of fiscal sustainability first.
Tesla FSD wont be authorized in Europe, this will be one direct consequence of all of that.
In addition, tariffs will be put on cars coming from the US.
Plus, US is now recognized as a very unreliable partner in terms of defense, that Europe regrets buying their systems.
I have a Tesla with so-called FSD in Europe, and it still feels like it’s ten years away from being road-safe. It can’t even recognize speed limit signs correctly.
I bought this car six years ago paying for the FSD feature upfront, and since then Tesla and their CEO have been constantly lying about it. I’ll never buy another car from this company just for this reason.
I think Musk probably sees the writing on the wall. Tesla’s brand is destroyed in Europe and they can’t ship these promised advanced features in this market. But he doesn’t mind giving up the European market because he’s got a sweet deal at home where his businesses are now part of a 1930s-style union between corporations and authoritarian government. The gains from that arrangement far outweigh the headaches of trying to sell cars globally.
Don forget that while Musk talks trash about defending freedom, the US government, and astronauts he says nothing about China with whom he has very unique business arrangements (not as strict as most US companies there).
Counterpoint, I helped my father buy a model Y and it helps him do the 2 hour drive to visit his grandchildren. The FSD marketing has been a bit over the top but it’s still the best system by far.
In Europe?
I believe it works better in the US. Elsewhere in the world it’s still practically useless, yet they’ve been selling it for years on the pretense that it’s just around the corner.
Cruise control on a Volkswagen is smarter than “FSD” on a Tesla. It’s just sad for a 7,500 euro feature.
They probably should not have offered it in Europe until they figured it out in their home country. Too many different things to handle in all the different countries.
There's already 10% tariff on cars from US imported into Europe. But somehow I have feeling that even if it would be reduced to 0%, it wouldn't make a big difference Cars of US brands are generally terrible, not sure how they fulfill EU emission standards, have poor MPG which with EU gas prices are very expensive in maintenance. Maybe Japanese, Korean or EU brands manufactured US could do better.
Fords are very popular in the UK and my Mondeo hasn’t missed a beat in years. the European models aren’t made in US which speaks volumes
They probably fulfill EU emission standards the same way Volkswagen diesels did. (Joking)
Given the constant promises and slow rate of improvement, there's a high chance Tesla's FSD was never going to be authorised in Europe even absent this.
I think this is true. Given the regulatory environment, it's hard to imagine FSD ever getting approved -- even if it actually does get truly safer than the average driver! Europe does not want innovation. And it will not take the (admittedly non trivial) risks required to have it.
BlueCruise and BMW's systems are both approved. The truth is Tesla is simply behind on self-driving tech. In part due to Musk's insistence on relying solely on cameras without use of radars
Tesla FSD should never have been authorized in the US tbh. The safety record is horrifying. The whole reason Google didn't buy Tesla out early on is because they found out how much of their autonomous driving tech claims were all just marketing. Mercedes-Benz and many other vehicles are way ahead of Tesla on this front but Tesla still goes the most in on marketing this feature
Will this really happen? Or will the US prevent Europe from doing that by saying “then defend from Russia all by yourself?”
The US has basically said that. It doesn't matter though, because at the end of the day, dramatic foreign policy shifts and realignments only make the U.S. even less attractive as an ally and a partner. Decades of relationships are being strained in the attempt of mending ties with a state that never really did much to advance America's interests in the modern era. And it could all be completely undone in four years. The whip lash of back and forth, radical shifts in policy, are as damaging as the acts that directly alienate America's global partners.
That's already expected. Right now, preparations are made for nuclear (re-)armament of europe. Germany in particular is working towards that at this moment [EDIT: politically. not in the "actively preparing weapons"-phase.].
Also, france has a first-strike policy.
So even without US troops, europe will be fine.
A sizable part of the population has wanted the US out of especially germany for a looong time now, so those movements have become pretty popular again. I haven't heard "ami go home" in a long time, but right now it's common.
> Right now, preparations are made for nuclear (re-)armament of europe. Germany in particular is working towards that at this moment.
Can you provide a source for this? It would be big if true, in particular the Germany claim. I've not heard it and couldn't find things with a quick google search.
Germany is currently already doing nuclear weapons sharing with the US, i.e. they have access to US nuclear weapons though of course with some restrictions.
What you wrote sounds like Germany would be working towards having new nuclear weapons to be produced in Europe without US involvement and shared without US restrictions.
Sure, here from a german public broadcaster[1].
The political work for it is being done right now. However, I reread my comment and realized, it could be interpreted as "actively working at the weapons" instead of the political framework. My apologies in that case.
[1] https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/nuklearwa...
Thanks, that's helpful! To break it down for others: Germany is considering making a similar deal for sharing with France as it currently has with the US. So it wouldn't really be a (re)armament, more an increase in resilience by not just relying on US for sharing but adding France.
I think that's quite an important difference from your original wording.
I don't know, I think lately there's a massive flaw in first-strike and MAD policies. Does it ever really make sense to destroy the world and yourself because an ally(Baltic states for example) or even your own state is being invaded? It's certainly not going to improve your situation even if the alternative is invasion by a foreign power.
A powerful conventional army capable of proportional response is the only realistic deterrent.
The purpose of MAD is to never have to launch a nuke.
The entire point of the doctrine is that any sane person in charge of a country('s military) would never risk getting their own country nuked just to attack another country, so having nukes on your side means that no one else will attack you.
This...does somewhat break down when we end up with people in charge of nuclear countries who are not sane.
>>france has a first-strike policy.
It's served us well having a member of NATO saying they'll go full-on nuts. One of the best deterrents ever. Thanks France, with love, USA.
> Germany in particular is working towards that at this moment.
Edit: seen your other comment, that clarifies: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/merz-consider... -- this is already a surprise to me, even though it is well short of self-made nukes.
France (and the UK) having an independent nuclear deterrent is because they (/we) didn't want to risk someone like Trump when the USSR was still around:
“The General himself had asked whether we would be ready to trade New York for Paris.” - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v14...
> Will this really happen? Or will the US prevent Europe from doing that by saying “then defend from Russia all by yourself?”
If push came to shove, the only ally Ukraine needs to equal Russia (as it is today) is Poland.
They'd rather not have to as it would be expensive, but Poland could match 100% of current outside assistance for Ukraine[0] for a smaller fraction of their GDP than Ukraine itself is currently spending on the war[1].
The USA and Russia agreeing with each other to carve up Ukraine would be a much harder battle.
Well, it would be harder unless DOGE actually does make good on the claim of $2T cuts, because the only way of reaching $2T without touching the "mandatory" budget (mandatory = social security etc.) is to delete the entire armed forces and the CIA (and basically everything else) and just under half the interest payments on the loans, which in turn means they'd have no power to carve anything up.
[0] $380bn over the first 2 years according to Wikipedia, so lets say $190bn/year
[1] Ukraine plans to spend ~$53.7 billion in 2025, about 26% GDP
Poland's GDP is $915, 26% of that would be $237.9 billion / year.
This is already the expectation from our leaders. It is the belief of a good % of EU leaders that, if Russia were to push into Poland and the Baltic states, and Article 5 was invoked, the US would not respond. Or at least not without some Versailles Treaty-level extortion, as they're trying to do with Ukraine.
The US is already effectively saying that.
Yeah when you unilaterally give up your largest bargaining chip, you stop getting any say in what happens.
Which ironically means the US also loses it's leverage. They're already threatening to functionally (if not actually) withdraw from NATO and economically split off via tariffs. The next step is actual invasion, which while sorta-kinda has been talked about with Greenland, probably won't happen.
I can see Trump putting hostile troops in Greenland. Tiny population despite the size, and I think Trump (at least) does not believe Europe would respond seriously.
I don't even know how Europe would respond to that, and I live in Berlin.
Canada… not so much. For all the talk, he'd be absolutely screwed if he tried. If you think Fentanyl is a problem now, wait until it's supplied for free by drones sent by Canadian civilians paying for it out of pocket because they've never heard of the Geneva Convention or the Chemical Weapons Convention.
(Harder done than said, of course; if it was that easy to mess with populations, western Russia would be high as a kite right now).
Europe will respond with drastic economic sanctions that will act quickly. Tariffs are slow to make a difference, but EU have prepared what they call an economic “bazooka”, that will very quickly hit US economy if force is used against a member state.
Sanctions, even well targeted ones, as the only consequence for an invasion, seems to me to likely be a risk Trump is willing to take.
Even if the sanctions would include, e.g. all Trump assets (like the Scottish golf course) being seized.
That's not a problem, US is doing that, effectively marginalizing the importance they will have in the future.
Bidens aid undoubtedly moved the needle, but that’s over and from what I’ve heard weapon deliveries have already stopped.
So I guess my question is aren’t Europe already by themselves?
Trump can still make things worse, e.g. explicitly saying "If Putin invaded Estonia, US would stay out of it" or things like this. He hasn't said that (I hope) so there's still some strategic ambiguity - i.e. it's not clear for Putin if Trump is just uttering empty words re letting Europe go or whether he would in the end do defend.
Oh, we're already looking at the likelihood of Trump arming Russia and joining the war on the side of Putin. But for some people, although probably a minority, that just increases the resolve. They simply will never be part of something like this: https://bsky.app/profile/doctoroxford.bsky.social/post/3liqw...
I think it depends a lot on what happens in the elections 2 and 4 years from now. The world may forgive or may be very well justified in their turn. I’m in the enterprise space and there’s not a lot of open acknowledgement of changes yet. I don’t think my particular company thinks there’s a way this is good for them.
To some degree I think it’s being treated as yet another line item in the long list of things that need to be managed in global companies of a certain size. I presume that the threat of retaliation (see story about X advertisers) is keeping voices quiet too.
It’s different this time… it’s going to get weird. And possibly dangerous. Talk of third term, crashing the economy as a pretense for parting out the assets of the federal government, finding a reason to cancel the next election, and being the war machine for our enemies may not feel like the purview of technology companies even as they angle for federal contracts to “support” some of these things.
We need more bodies at protests. Not everything announced has gone into effect, but they’re testing all the things they want to make happen. And they’re persistent.
The public haven’t yet seen the spark that may light the next resistance fire. It may not feel like we have moves available to us, but public boycotts, protests/ marches, calls to our politicians, honking for peace, supporting our neighbors — these are all reps in the resistance. They are recruitment and rallying measures. They are all little tiny sparks, from which something may alight. Look for something happening today and show up.
People keep mentioning elections in two or four years, I guess assuming that the MAGA mafia could lose and be ousted. I think it’s 100% wishful thinking. There is no way they’ll let go of power peacefully. But my bet is they won’t even technically lose, thanks to an arsenal of massive disinformation, voter suppression, gerrymandering, intimidation, up to jailing opponents and so on.
My money is on some kind of made-up "crisis" happening in 2 years or so, which means the elections would need to be postponed or cancelled.
I’m not discounting that at all, but I shuttled that into the weird and dangerous part. The DNC is an impotent agent for its constituents. And democracy. A spark needs to alight there too.
Musk is already pretty unpopular. A lot of the damage will hit MAGA territories. It may unravel the base for the GOP. They conspired well for a long time. It’s a daunting situation.
Also a lot of the trust damage cannot be easily undone. Even if a more stable government does get appointed in 4 years, it might be too late for restoring the previous status quo
I said this else where, but, dramatic foreign policy shifts and realignments only make the U.S. even less attractive as an ally and a partner. Decades of relationships are being strained in the attempt of mending ties with a state that never really did much to advance America's interests in the modern era. And it could all be completely undone in four years. The whip lash of back and forth, radical shifts in policy, are as damaging as the acts that directly alienate America's global partners.
Switching search engines to what? AI-powered search also created by American companies?
America's image is toxic to everyone right now (including its own citizens). But I don't really see that many valid alternatives. It's not like Europe has done much to cultivate any kind of relevant software industry.
LLMs are something everybody can reproduce with enough money, as shown by Musk itself recently: in one year they have Grok3 which is a SOTA model, without having particular talents or innovations, just following the recipe everybody else is using (and this is why you see new companies competing with established companies: all are training transformers with a lot of tokens, basically). So Europe can have their LLMs as well: the important thing is to relax this stupid AI act, that the biggest countries in Europe didn't want (Germany, France, Italy) but that somewhat passed (and it is not impossible that there are external influences and corruptions). About the search engine: Google at this point is almost a joke, to the point it is simpler to redo it right than trying to fix it from the internal. Remember that a lot of key technologies are created by europeans: from Python to Linux, to MySQL and so on. Europe has all the potential needed if the right choices are made to do everything needed.
> So Europe can have their LLMs as well: the important thing is to relax this stupid AI act
But you're kind of showing here why Europe doesn't have the software innovation America does.
Americans are not inherently smarter or more capable of doing innovative things than Europeans. It's just that whenever a European wants to do something interesting, there's a handy European regulation making it harder or less profitable to do it.
If this American administration is the impetus for that to change, that would be good! But I doubt it.
I believe that certain drives for certain regulations that are clearly shooting themselves in the feet were approved with less clear processes than needed (remember corruption cases of certain European politicians recently for the Olympics? If it happens for minor stuff like that... go figure). This was acceptable even if many countries were unhappy as long as the US were believed to be a strong partner. Now this changed, and it is likely that certain regulations will be relaxed.
I don’t understand this notion suggesting Americans are the only people on earth capable of software development. This comes up in various threads about China, too.
For independent indexes, Brave’s search came from a German company and Yandex certainly isn’t American.
There's a certain irony in switching to a Russian search engine... because America aligned itself more closely with Russia.
It would indeed be ironic, even though it also serves as an existence proof.
As a European, completely eliminating corporate US tech doesn't have to be an all or nothing goal. Switching from Google to DDG or Kagi is an improvement even if they're just a frontend for Bing.
It's a massive opportunity for European-based companies to compete. I expect a lot more funding to start materialising here as a result.
You're right, but cooperation and centralization emerge under external pressures. It's almost like a natural law of social systems. (I could say more but don't want to digress, let me know if you'd like some pointers.)
In other words, Europe's weakness and dividedness is a consequence of the soft power the US used to have. The EU has the capital (human and economic) to be a world power in principle, but never needed to.
This has all changed very suddenly. Whether Europe can rise to the challenge I don't know, but it's the first time in a very long time that there is a possibility of it happening.
I find the game theoretic view quite interesting here. Even if we interpret Trump's action in the best possible light, that he knows what he's doing and playing the madman strategy to get others to comply, the destruction of trust that this strategy causes makes it impossible in the long term to build mutually beneficial cooperative structures.
Maybe this will galvanize EU into actually creating something instead of just importing and regulating American tech.
Doubt it though
As an European I can confirm this is partly true. I wouldn't say it's completely destroyed it's soft power, but politically we do feel betrayed so whenever possible people would be looking to switch to non-US product. However, in business we're so intertwined with the US that it's hard to tell right now if there ever will be a justified switch.
In terms of pensions - I think 99.9% of us have a huge chunk the S&P, so even though we're upset I doubt there will be any movement on that front at all. Money will win in this battle.
Personally I do feel betrayed as well and for the first time in my life I've started looking for where the product I consume come from. About a third is from the US. Stopped buying them, found a European alternative.
To all the Europeans out here - let them live how they want over the pond, let's use this opportunity to promote our industries and products as well as become as independent as we possibly can given our current financial and political constraints.
No hard feelings at all, live and let live.
There’s really not a neutral position here that involves just ignoring what happens in the US, that is entirely wishful thinking but completely detached from actual geopolitical realities
Perspective from my side of small automation business ownership We started cleaning out company dependents dev stack from not necessary components starting mid last year. This activity just picked up full steam and we're planning block stuff like .microsoft.com and .GitHub.com in our main mikrotik router next month. My engineering team did amazing work divesting our development stack from windows. It is very hard to achieve in automation business. Most software development packaged for windows only. They did so much work replaced hardware vendors who did not work with Linux. Some work good with wine and we keeping them. We have internal company's gitea. We mirror EVERYTHING from GitHub we need internally. Even debian repositories! I expect that we can soon operate without internet connection for core business (install software on company PCs, develop automation code, etc), Company trucks all have 4TB hard drives with everything necessary for work outside the office. We have email and calendar on proton. Highly recommend amazing service and support. US companies cannot keep my company hostage anymore. It is hard to achieve this. But you can do it. Even we did in the field where windows OS is king.
Canada too. Border crossings down significantly over the recent long weekend:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fewer-canadi...
Wow those numbers don't lie.
I ditched my Google account a while ago. That was tricky because I used it to log in to several websites.
I fortunately also got rid of Facebook a while ago. This gave me a lot more time back. It's difficult at first, because there's a little fomo, but now I am very happy.
I never started with all the other social media. No Instagram, no Twitter. So that makes it easy.
My computers have always run Linux, very happy with that.
Streaming services are next. At least the US ones.
Replacing whatsapp with signal also. I noticed a lot of my contacts are already in there, just not actively using it. It's a question of just starting communications and groups there.
It's quite doable, but you have to really want to "vote with your wallet" so to speak. I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice. In fact, it rids you of psychological warfare, reduces anxiety, costs less money and gives you your time back.
If you think about it that way, it's a no brainer.
Signal is us based too though?
I don’t think most Americans care about how Europe sees us. Instead, there is a thought that Europe uses America to protect its own interests instead of putting its own resources on the line.
America itself has its own problems. America is spending too much money. America has an inflation problem that led to one of the most unpopular presidents ever getting elected again. Many Americans think it’s time to solve America’s problems instead of being feted in European capitals. If that means the rest of world won’t use Gmail, YouTube, or Facebook, so be it. Those companies can take care of themselves.
Economically that's really foolish. America is an increasingly unimportant market. Most countries have domestic versions of things (such as cars) and they are extremely lousy and noncompetitive.
America is voluntarily stepping down from the international stage by imposing tariffs, ignoring treaties, demonizing foreigners, bowing out of powerful organizations and then saber rattling about the rise of China as the world looks elsewhere for leadership. It's clearly an intentional agitation and eventual war footing by naive self-destructive idiots.
They end up achieving the opposite of their aims. They say they're going to lower egg prices, which is caused by the H5N1 bird flu epidemic, but instead they think it's from DEI hires and defund the USDA and organizations tasked with controlling the spread of bird flu and then egg prices go up. They then think "aughh! more wokeness! it's everywhere!"
This is happening everywhere, with every bugaboo they care about. They blame it on nefarious acronyms and then dismantle the institutions trying to fix things. This is really the time to leave. Start packing the bags folks.
They probably know it very well but there's not much they can do about it since the Democratic party lost so thoroughly in the last election, leaving them little ability to influence the course of events. Even something as utterly disastrous for US tech companies as the proposed tariff on semiconductors is, as far as I can tell, largely being met by silence. That's how bad the situation is.
The majority of Americans do not care and do not really want US tech to be global. The majority of Americans are ashamed of US soft power and the way we meddle with other countries constantly. While loss of dollar hegemony will have economic implicatiosn for the US, American's just don't really care about having dollar hegemony. We don't care about any of these things or what Europe is doing.
> "The majority of Americans do not care and do not really want US tech to be global."
They will care very, very much when it bites them in terms of higher prices and loss of jobs because of decreased tech exports. Dollar hegemony has benefitted the US economy tremendously over the past few decades; money rushed _into_ US dollar denominated holdings in the 2008 crash as one big example.
Correction, ignorant and misinformed Americans don’t want these things and do not care.
Let’s stop pretending that the individuals who voted for this administration actually wanted most of what it is doing. The majority voted off of feelings and will not like the end result. There is a lot of explaining away the stupidity and I find it really annoying.
It’s not a difference of opinion that Tariffs will cause a rise in prices, no matter what the current administration says.
Tbh it's the same sentiment in Europe as well. We really want to stop caring who is your new/next president what side of the bed did he wake up on.
I think tech firms for the most part are just saying what they need to in order to not get too much scrutiny from US leadership. In their eyes, medium or even long term damage to foreign market interests is secondary to a more existential risk faced at home.
As for the US dollar, floats against the euro and yen are still roughly in historic high territory, though not at peak, and recently edge up. If the US actually tries to default maybe there’d be significant flight to other currencies. Otherwise any large institution is probably going to wait out 4 years, possibly find the next bubble to pump up during likely deregulation of markets, and probably have it pop in time for the political right to blame it on progressives if/when the public pendulum swings the other way and they hold office again. The other way the dollar fails is if there is general wide spread world chaos in & out of financial markets, but in that case I’d expect little in the way of an alternative world reserve and more in the way of regional reserves, more insular and isolated.
I think you are hugely overestimating the impact in Europe. Some politically aware are switching to non-US big tech, if possible. But the vast majority either doesn't care about politics, think it's too much effort, or even agrees with what is happening in the US right now.
I was just thinking today how long will it be until Windows is turned into a weapon. I know I know, but its not really paranoid to think that anymore is it? Imagine the chaos around the world caused by Windows machines simultaneously reformatting hard disks except in America.
Windows is already a weapon.
This is a strange statement given it's the UK, not the US, that currently poses the greatest threat to OS weaponization via what they're trying to make Apple do with backdoor access.
UK is trying to use it for surveillance. While it's hypothetical at this point to suggest the US mandating a built-in mechanism to wipe any specified hard drive by remote command, the economic danger from that is much greater than the damage from spying: the latter allows unfair competition; but given how widespread systems are, the former shuts down a country, could kill millions by starvation just from messing with logistics systems.
It's really funny to me that people are so partisan. You only worry about backdoors under Trump? As if the CIA has not be orchestrating coups around the world for half a century?
Of course they have, but not usually to their supposed allies. If realignment severs the ties between Europe and the US, then that no longer holds. Nothing partisan about that.
I guess Microsoft would like to maintain trust by their customers. The attack vector is the other direction, if Trump missteps and tries to use force on EU member states, EU will use its economic “bazooka” which for instance would especially target firms like Microsoft.
Considering they are trying to economically extort Ukraine for resources using Starlink access. Probably not too far away? The US does have a history of this, it's how anti-drug laws were exported to much of the world, they were pressured with economic threats by the USA to adopt them.
Any links to read what people in EU are saying?
I wrote about it yesterday: https://rewiring.bearblog.dev/usa-big-tech-grip-on-europe/
It seems clear to me now, that the dependency on US tech needs to be reduced _a lot_, and I sincerely hope this current political storm will bring renewed interest in protocols and European tech
Check out Andreas Klinger on Twitter, and people he's retweeting and talking about. That should give you a good overview.
> on Twitter
It's like rain on your wedding day
X.com is just godawful branding. I'm doing it a favour by even mentioning it.
The FT Editorial Board: "America has turned" - https://www.ft.com/content/1511aa42-a9ad-4952-99c8-98bea07d0...
Max Hastings: The trauma of Trump: can we still do business with his America? - https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-trau...
FT: US tech will pay a price for Donald Trump’s approval - https://www.ft.com/content/2347e5d3-cbc2-4128-a108-bb89558e3...
FT: How Washington plans to defend the dollar - this is about Crypto - https://www.ft.com/content/bfafb8f7-bd1c-48bb-85f4-8ba25475c...
FT: Donald Trump considers tarriffs to counter Big Tech service taxes: - https://www.ft.com/content/558b5a20-c25e-483d-8fdc-bbfd2923a...
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I suggest you expand your information sources to include contrary perspectives. These read like the typical hysteriaporn to freak normies out. It would be equivalent to my sharing supporting links from the NYTimes or WaPo.
In my experience, the Financial Times aren't terribly biased one way or the other, and do a good job of presenting the relevant facts and views.
If you have similarly significant, unbiased sources presenting some contrary view, it would behoove you to share them, rather than chiding.
If you just want to share your personal views, that is also welcome. The tone-policing and attacking reliable, unbiased sources is pretty empty, though.
I honestly believe the only way to get at "unbiased" sources is to triangulate all the bias. Mainstream publications are largely staffed by paid propagandists. To get at my opinion, you would need to hold all the propaganda in your mind at once, consider "qui bono?", and then find the point of common sense that all these positions are talking around. I would also avoid contemporary professional opinionators except as points of reference. Literally nothing said in such a context by such a person should be taken at face value. Go back to books on history or reflections/memoirs by people who were in the room when decisions were made to get a sense of how political reality operates. Long story short: there are no unbiased mainstream media opinions. If they were unbiased, they wouldn't appear in those publications.
/r/Europe on reddit for, at least, some partial info.
Look at https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/top/ with timeline=last_month.
It has many links to articles with an European viewpoint.
But you have to read between the lines as EU media does not like to write "this is too crazy to be happening, what are they thinking?".
E.g. a title like "Macron calls emergency European summit on Trump". How bad do you think it has to create a EU summit solely for handling the new US relationship?
tldr: large increase in EU military and which has to be EU made. US is seen as ending "rule of law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law) and has become an unreliable partner, great loss of soft power and prestige.
From a European Saas firm. I am reviewing technology partners for my firm, and due to the possible trade wars and polticial climate we have started to treat US-centric partner as a negative.
That is just the business part of things, the removal of DEI at all cost in conjunction with the Russian dealings and the statements from JD Vance are also a bit hard to be positive about.
We like the companies but the noise increases risk as opposed to European partners.
Good headlines for sure, but i wonder:
Suppose the war ends. Will the Europeans keep boycotting the cheap russian gas?
Tarriffs are a nuisance to the US - the US doesn't export much.
The United States, by total value, is the second largest exporter in the world, with $1.86 trillion dollars in exports in 2023. https://oec.world/en/profile/country/usa.
> Suppose the war ends. Will the Europeans keep boycotting the cheap russian gas?
How fast can Ukraine scrap the parts of the pipeline going through their own territory?
Even those countries that would quite like access to Russian gas, may just not have a choice in the matter.
And given we've already seen some spectacularly poor decision making by whoever fires the various missiles[0] that end up hitting multiple different nuclear reactors in the area, there's a non-zero risk of the entire border region suffering catastrophic (though likely not Chernobyl-1986 level[1]) radiation leak incidents.
This also makes it somewhat of a moot point to consider any mineral wealth besides oil, or even a return to normality for food output, at this point.
[0] Zaporizhzhia: both sides blamed the other, and irregardless of who did it, the nature of the damage says it was done by shelling; more recently Chernobyl's outer barrier was also hit.
[1] I think Russia still has some reactors with positive void coefficient in Kursk (near where Ukraine's counter-invasion was), but Ukraine itself has decommissioned all their positive void coefficient reactors.
So it's not impossible for another Chernobyl, but it's really unlikely.
I believe the stark realization over here in the EU is, that strategic dependencies we created either towards the East (Russia, e.g. gas) or the West (the US, e.g. defence), are making us too vulnerable.
Is the EU prepared for shale gas/oil? Willing to exploit the dutch oil fields or cyprus' giant gas fields. So far it has said a decisive no to those.
> Tarriffs are a nuisance to the US - the US doesn't export much.
Technology, services, social media... the US export A LOT to Europe. Any iPhone sold in Europe is money that goes to the US, any app sold in Europe is money that goes to the US. Any Ad seen on the web/social in Europe is money that goes to the us...
"Apple recorded sales of over 101 billion U.S. dollars in Europe during FY 2024, reaching an all-time high across the continent. " [1]
If Europe would start tariffs on those, it would be a lot of money.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/349086/apple-net-sales-i...
> Suppose the war ends. Will the Europeans keep boycotting the cheap russian gas?
I think they absolutely will, yes. It will cost some money, just like spending more money on defense will, but from what I can see, no one in the European politic elite imagines a world where we can go back to buying gas from Russia.
Exports are not consumer goods only. Imagine a car is assembled in Mexico, but seats and wheels are made in the US: the pieces count as exports. If you see a table with export/import data for the US, you are going to notice a lot of Mexico and Canada, because that kind of capital goods move a lot between the three countries, well before the consumer good is finally created.
Aerospace is a big deal. Airbus relies on P&W and Collins Aerospace (both part of Raytheon).
The global supply chain is enormously complex. US companies depend on European companies as well, which makes the whole thing much more stupid.
The US imports way too much and our economy has been slowly dying since the 70s. Tarriffs are only a nuisance for the upperclass, they're a boon for middle class Americans because they allow more industry to come back to the United States.
Tariffs suck for everyone except for the few that suddenly see their sector protected by them.
For starters, they will shock well greased supply chains, that will cause shortages and thus price raises. Who suffer price raising the most? Then, protected industries will have quasi-monopoly power to raise prices (this is the populism behind tariffs). But other industries will suffer because they can't import their resources and have to switch to more expensive and/or lower quality locals. As an example: suppose that car makers are happy with tariffs protecting them from japanese cars, but now they have to buy expensive US steel, and have to move their assembly lines back to US where today is hard to find experienced and cheap workers. Because everyone always claim to want industry back, but then nobody wants a blue collar job if they can get a white collar one.
Over what timeline will industry come back? And are $5,000 or $10,000 in 2025 dollars washer and dryers acceptable to Americans?
It’s possible all economists are wrong. It is more likely they aren’t. Tariffs are going to hurt middle and lower classes.
Did you mean the opposite?
US to EU gas trade is insane right now due to pricing and a 20% tariff won't change anything.
It really depends on if Europe hates America more than they hate China (or even Russia). Once Europe embraces Chinese tech over American tech (eg alibaba over Amazon, WeChat over Facebook, baidu over Google, BYD over Tesla) it’s all over for the USA as a world power. If they still hate China more than the USA, then it’s somehow salvageable.
I’m not making this up. I was thinking about posting the exact same question an hour ago. I am questioning my entire tech and communication stack. The first thing I did was download all my emails locally with offineimap. I can’t deny that I’m worried to get rug pulled by US companies any moment now.
Wishing and doing are two different things. Integration of US products and services is still incredibly deep in Europe, as is political cooperation on all layers. I don't think this can be abandoned on a whim, even if people wanted to.
(Same goes for the other side of the geopolitical aisle: European politicians would have liked a much faster and much more comprehensive economic decoupling from China since at least the start of the Ukraine war. But feedback from the private sector was pretty clear that this would have been economic suicide. Hence the official stance is now "de-risking" instead of "decoupling")
That's what they said about the German economy and Russian Gas
They don't realize anything and they don't care, all the leadership in these companies have no vision beyond goosing the next quarter's numbers. They have been promoted to the top because of their ability to meet targets, nothing else. If they see weakness in Europe they will compensate by pushing more ads, lay off some people or increase prices to keep the number go up.
They are all sitting ducks for black swan events, but I don't think getting roasted in Europe will be enough to trouble them.
My experience is in SaaS marketing.
EMEA has always been a soft market for tech. And it's always been a cost center for regionalization and compliance.
A move away from US tech is not necessarily new or surprising. But it's also not as damning to the bottom line as one would expect.
I will say that the tech sector in Europe is not nearly as robust. While alternatives exist for some products, they are not likely going to find international markets of their own. (Overgeneralization, obv).
IMO, this is a great wake-up call for every country out there that over-relies on US tech and considers them a messiah. On the short term, this is going to be painful if US continues to bully and holds tech hostage but in the long term, trying to be as independent as possible will only prove to be advantageous (if done seriously and done right). China is a good example.
> the US completely destroyed its soft power this week
Soft power sounds like manipulation to me. So if we destroyed our manipulation, great. The United States has put its fingers on too many scales rather than respecting the rights of individuals in other countries to manage their affairs the way they see fit.
I welcome tech competition from Europe. Let the best products and services win.
Yes, and.
Something like 40% of the humanitarian contribution in the world came from USAID, and Thanos just fingersnapped it out of existence last Tuesday.
Until that gap is filled, there will be tons of unnecessary suffering. A "more humane" way would have been to slowly wind down over a period of months/years, giving the market time to react. Even better would have been to work with foreign powers to spin off USAID-backed initiatives and transfer control+funding responsibility to them, but I'm just a girl with a unrealistic dream at that point
I think it's not talked about enough that some of the new president's policies are going to lead to actual people dieing. Not just overseas, but in the US too. Maybe the folks cheering him on don't realize this, or maybe they just don't care.
There's a big difference between sending a foreign country vaccines and organizing protests in foreign countries to further a political or economic agenda. I'm all for the former, not the latter.
The thing is, you don't get to choose. Once somebody is elected, you get the whole package.
> Soft power sounds like manipulation to me. So if we destroyed our manipulation, great.
Wow. So hard power -- literally killing others -- is OK, but "manipulating" them is not?
The fact is, power is power, "soft" or "hard," and we are discarding ours for nothing.
Also, alliances are not "manipulation." Working together against a common foe is not manipulation. Trade agreements are not manipulation.
> Wow. So hard power -- literally killing others -- is OK
I'm not sure where you read that in my comment. That's not something I wrote, and it's not something I believe.
As a US citizen I can only hope that this kickstarts alternatives and paid for options in the spaces big (ad)tech dominates here. These bloated monopolies with short lived products or soon to be acquired competitors are getting old. (And these constant layoffs and shareholder/promo driven development to a smaller degree)
I’m an unhappy American. With D-ump’s anti science and education stance Europe (and china) will have an unprecedented chance to lure some great talent. With grants being suspended, colleges, government science, and technology professionals will have to find employment, Europe would be very attractive to a lot of educated people in the USA. My daughter holds a phd and is on the chopping block, I plan to tell her and her husband if they get job offers in Europe, I would gladly sell everything here and move to Europe too!
Never thought I'd live to see the end of Pax Americana and yet here we are. To give up this amount of control and soft power just to cozy up to the corpse of the Soviet union is not the universe branch I expected to find myself in.
You yanks might think this is some display of your upper hand. Just wait until the civilized world turns its back on the greenback as the reserve currency. You will be so fucked.
I think it's more a blip for Pax Americana for four years or so.
It'd take a lot more than that.
EU has lagged US due to systemic issues like over regulation and limited investments. See Draghi's report.
Something definitely doesn’t smell right for Trump/Musk.
If Europe somewhat deregulated startup stage businesses an countries issued more visas to engineers it could probably turn a lot of things around. So far European founders have been moving to US. But these days I imagine I'm not the only one who doesn't want to work in the shadow of US technofeudalist oligarchy and receive money from people like Marc Andreessen.
I believe there is a lack of startups in New Zealand (the example I'm familiar with) because it simply doesn't make any financial sense to begin a startup[1]. The rewards are not enough to cover the risks.
The USA has a culture of startups because there you often get financially rewarded for winning. Startups are mostly a loser's game in New Zealand (Disclosure: I'm a very minor winner at the startup game over here - I have at least some skin in the game and some practical learning).
Improving regulations would help - however governments seem to lack the skills/incentives/motivation to choose good compromises.
> receive money from people like Marc Andreessen.
Money doesn't actually have morals: the point of money is it allows all of us to choose between morally conflicting choices based on prices and our bank balance. Money is a fungible representation of limited resources. I've never met Marc, but his writing seems fairly disagreeable to me.
Part of the reason Europe is economically losing is that Europe doesn't play economics to win.
Systems have their own emergent properties and Europe seems hell bent on regulating their systems so that European countries gift control to the USA for critical things.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099056
[dead]
I feel it impacts mostly medium to large brands, which have resource to euro-wash themselves anyway.
Is there a European alternative to HN.
Trying to start a flamewar on HN will get you flagged, my friend.
It's unfortunate that the thread was flagged, I did not want to give the impression of trying to 'start a flamewar'.
I am a real transatlanticist - I was on the green card path (5 yrs with H1Bs), but returned to Europe for family reasons.
I don't want this split - I want to know, if people see it as an issue and I want to know the possible consequences and workarounds and how we can work together.
[flagged]
Any big cloud vendor in EU?
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl... lists a couple - Scaleway and UpCloud come to mind
Stackit also (which I see there at the bottom :D).
The big companies do, thus the pressure from Vance earlier this week on the EU dropping any regulations the US doesn’t agree with. Obviously that plan is questionable in terms of efficacy and morality, but it’s definitely in progress
Is the backlash worse than the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003? Is it worse than the first Trump administration? Genuinely curious. The reality is the 50% of voters who DID not vote for the current president are just as shell shocked as the Europeans. Only we KNEW it was coming.
Not a European, but yes. The US is actively siding with Russia against Europe during the largest war in Europe since WWII, and using the threat of revoking access to American tech (Starlink) and weapons to force them into a terrible and exploitative agreement whose only beneficiaries are the US and Russia. Europeans now need to realistically consider that working with US technology companies is like relying on Russian gas, because those threats have actually been made.
Meanwhile our President also keeps threatening to invade sovereign territory (Greenland) of a NATO ally (Denmark) and using language w/r/t Canada that is almost indistinguishable from how Russia talked about Ukraine a decade ago. And Canadians are fucking pissed about it.
It's very, very different than his first term or even Iraq.
It's totally different. There was negative public sentiment, but the diplomatic relations still were stable and good. Germany wanted to be convinced, but could not be. Tony Blair went with Bush.
This time it is diplomats that are raising the flags. It actually has not yet arrived in the public sphere as drastically as it has in the policy side.
It's much, much worse than both of those. And we view it more like, only 1/3 of Americans have voted against this while 1/3 voted for it and 1/3 was ok with that. So yeah, the resentment and anger towards the US and it's citizens is growing.
Yes, it's much worse than 2003. Back then, multiple NATO countries took part in the invasion of Iraq, as US invoked Article 5. Now, 22 years later US is saying "f... o..".
In the first term Trump was unprepared, now they had 4 years to prepare and it seems they are very methodical in dismantling US global influence, and but also dismantling structures internally.
As far as I'm worried about security of Europe or Far East allies (Japan, SK, Taiwan, Philippines), I'm worried about future of US itself.
It is much worse. Europeans are seeing Trump say and do things seen in Nazi Germany, including the failed coup years ago, the current removal of key government officials, and filling their positions with loyalists. Not to mention siding with Russia.
Europeans see this as treason, and it is.
Belgian here: way worse. Wars were always far away, and some of the things US did in the past were "oh boy :(".
This war is in Europe, killing Europeans. We know Ukrainians, work with them. It's absolutely horrendous what Russia is doing. And now you have Trump and his billionaire buddy kicking Ukraine, trying to loot them when they are down. Taking advantage of the situation. I understand we still have lots of friends in US, but another part of me says: want a holiday in Europe? Go to fking Russia.
This is a betrayal, a backstab.
I'm Canadian.
We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)
We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?
And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.
Now we have a dim view of Americans.
There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.
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You mean during the war of aggression when many Americans pretended to be Canadians when on vacation abroad, be it out of shame or fear of reprisal?
And mind you, that was without any Hitler salutes or calling astronauts "retards", that was "just" war under the pretense of being very concerned and wanting to avoid "a smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud". We knew that was bullshit, but at least there was this pretense, that kinda softened and muddled things a bit. This time, it's also war, but it's in Europe. And there isn't even any tribute paid to decency even in the form of bald lies and hypocrisy, there is just a deranged snarl.
I use links2 and lynx web browsers.
The issue in EU is Big Tech has many "minions" in public administrations and local critical online services (many dominant online services are theirs anyway). They manage to make hard dependent the "web" on their cartel of whatng web rendering engines (and their SDK).
They will be back.
What did the US do to Europe this week? Are you referring to Trump withdrawing support for Ukraine?
Vance came to Munich, and promoted European fascist political parties.
I wish I was kidding.
Sorry for putting this as a reply to you, the other comment is flagged and dead but I'm so upset I just need to throw this adjacent to it so people who are reading know just how bad faith this person is...
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It's beyond clear that the AfD are a far right fascist group. So clear that it has caused the majority of their leadership to change - explicitly citing them being anti-democracy and pro-russian and extremist - and the actual government's protection arm to consider then a threat to the nation's democracy:
> In January 2022, after a lost power struggle, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate effect and left the AfD, as he claimed he came to acknowledge that the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the liberal democratic basic order. Former party chairman and co-founder of the AfD, Lucke, had left the party in 2015 with the same remark.
...
> When party founder Bernd Lucke had left the AfD in 2015, he cited, among other reasons an "anti-western, decidedly pro-Russian foreign and security policy orientation" as well as increasing calls to "pose the 'system question' with regard to our parliamentary democracy" as reasons for his departure from the party.
...
> In March 2020, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (German: Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) classified AfD's far-right nationalistic faction known as Der Flügel as "a right-wing extremist endeavor against the free democratic basic order" and as "not compatible with the Basic Law", placing it under government surveillance.
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That other commenter is either ignorant to the point of negligence or a fascist themselves.
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Many things
Example: Using starlink as extortion of Ukraine to allow USA to colonize them to retroactively pay for support.
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-could-cut-ukraines-acces...
Extortion and classic colonialism and imperialism.
Ukraine has been fighting for their life the last 3 years. And now USA opportunistically join with a new front.
Vances speech in Munich to Europe, and Trumps apparent selling out of Ukraine.
I can tell you that the media cycle and conversation here (The Netherlands) has been very much about how we can move forward without the United States. People around me have been pulling out of American social media, dropping WhatsApp (which has been the biggest chat app here for a long time), and stopped using American exports.
It's even overshadowing the German elections, which would otherwise be the biggest news topic, as the election in Europe's largest economy.
A lot of people here have lost a huge amount of trust in the US, and I don't know if it can ever really come back.
Good information, and I see no sign it has been noticed in the US (which is why your report is good info).
The first question is how broad is this shift; is it really everywhere on the street or just in the "early adopters"?
The next question is how durable is the trend?
The things I've noticed here are reports of AfD rapidly losing 5% in the polls after Vance spoke in Munich, and a French right-wing leader cancelling his planned speech at CPAC after Bannon did a Nazi salute in his talk. When the US wannabe-Nazis are too toxic for European pro-fascists, that is saying something...
Trust build slowly and erode quickly.
I don’t know about people usage of tech.
But it’s now really clear that the US is not a reliable ally. ( not even getting into politics, just stability wise : it’s clear that a change of regime can have the country do a 180 in term of foreign policies. And it’s not a good look )
I suspect it is far too early to tell. In 6 months the data may be an indication of something. Right now, it’s just not sufficient amount of time to conclude.
The shift is not that broad at all. True, in some politically and technology aware circles, a lot of people are shifting. But the vast majority of people isn't aware of what's happening, doesn't feel like putting effort to change, or even agrees with Trump & Musk.
> do they take it seriously or believe there is no alternative to US tech
There isn't, broadly speaking. Oh yeah, gonna use OpenEuroLLM? Have y'all made the ePhone yet or is that still stuck in committee?
Other countries will moan for a bit, no one likes having their free money and handouts taken away, then realize that US technology is still broadly the only option, and its actually quite good and even other US companies cant compete with US big tech with all of the free money here, let alone the tech-backward eurozone. Right now its the UK forcing Apple to remove Advanced Data Protection for UK citizens (not the eurozone, to be clear, but adjacent and culturally aligned)
The "boycotts" are great for headlines though (don't worry, Apple's revenue this year will be larger than ever, as always). If y'all don't want to buy Teslas though, I get that; I feel the same way.
Things won't happen overnight, but this is a big push for Europe to get its act together regarding tech. And if Europe can't manage it, there's also China. If the US becomes a dictatorship, then Europe might as well turn to Chinese tech, since they at least seem more stable and sane.
Oligarchical & oppressive dictatorships do tend to have some guise of stability; though whether that aligns with Europe's values more than American values depends most on how far Europe has fallen, and how much gaslighting they're willing to do to themselves and their people. I tend to believe Europe is better than that; as JD Vance said in Munich this week: If your democracy can be bought for a few hundred thousand in online ads, it must not have been very strong to begin with.
Europe also has the express disadvantage of having a rather combative and expansionist nation to their east, who is allied with China. It relies on the United States for something like 70% of aggregate defense spending in NATO. I think we'll see those numbers shift, I hope we do, but as you say: It won't happen overnight.
But sure; if you feel that the country which participates in the systematic forced labor imprisonment and forced organ harvesting of ethnic minorities is a better cultural ally than the United States, even considering what the United States has done recently... well, maybe JD Vance is right.
My hope is, genuinely, as you first say: Europe needs to get its act together and become more self-sufficient. That's been a major topic of Trump's, and it would ultimately benefit the world, most of all Europe.
iPhone is a bad example. It’s built by 10s of company accros many, mostly Asian, country.
Most stuff is. Even some people and companies in Europe had a hand in building it; at the very least I'm sure Apple has software teams there, and ASML is dutch.
We're a deeply interconnected world. Few parts of it can be self-sufficient while retaining the standard of living they're used to. This is true for no region more than Europe. Europe, broadly, relies more on the productivity, output, energy, and innovation of America and Asia for their standard of living than any other region, including America and Asia on each other or on Europe.
The iPhone is an interesting example because Apple's Asia sales did drop last quarter; but that drop was compensated for by a ~$3B increase in European sales. That's the trend I'd bet money on continuing. Europe doesn't have any other choice, and except on some fringe issues Europe's purported culture and values align far more with even Trump's America than China. Europe cannot afford to not pick a side in that adversarial relationship.
Tbh, Europeans broadly trying to boycott American companies gives real "toddler throwing a tantrum because his parents made him eat broccoli" vibes. At best, its unserious. At worst, its only going to harm Europe. Europe should make efforts toward reducing its dependence on the rest of the world, but their leadership is deeply unserious about doing so, and even if they became serious it would take many decades to reach even the only America or Asia is at.
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European here.
It doesn't matter lol
That's honestly happening here, too. So many of my acquaintances are dropping big tech reliances. Some of us are building our own tools as work around where we can.
I thought that people on HN always did that as a hobby anyway?