Is US tech even good anymore? Do none of us not encounter the massive amount of shit from companies like Google, MSFT, Apple, Amazon, etc as users? Truly terrible bugs or user flows from engineers that clearly don't care while everyone is just collecting their own share of blood.

I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.

All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).

> To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.

All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.

And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.

Literally in the front page of HN: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/16/patch_tuesday_secure_...

You absolutely can fight market forces. China did it for decades with their car industry. Chinese people were financially forced to buy inferior Chinese cars to support a domestic industry until it learned to compete in the global market. Very difficult to do this in a democracy, though.

Better? It just needs to be cheaper I think.

The US tech power is a bit like the US political soft power, it's there because it's huge and has momentum but it's not like it'll be here forever, especially given the current trajectory

Good thing that US Tech is building the worst technology possible. Should make things a lot simpler

You’re getting downvoted because you touched on a sensitive spot with some folks, but you’re right.

If other countries want to stop their reliance on US tech then they need to build better tech. Your BlackBerry quote shows that playing out in reverse. A non-US company dominated the market, a US company built something better (the iPhone) and the non-US company imploded.

This is such an American take diametrically opposed to reality. You literally could not be more wrong. The correlation between "effort to fight market forces (i.e. protectionism" and "independence from US tech) is 1:1. It's China, then Korea, then the rest of the world which is all 100% dependent on US tech. China is independent entirely thanks to protectionism and banning right from the staft, Korea is inbetween thanks to the exact same.

The only thing that works is throwing up huge barriers against dumping. This is the norm for physical goods. US big tech, and really Silicon Valley, is based on dumping - burning VC cash to become a monopoly. This is not a hair better for a domestic industry than being flooded by physical goods that are cheap thanks to burning through (let's say Chinese) government cash. In the latter we love to call this "artificiallly cheap", though for some reason I've never heard this adjective used for US tech based on monopolizing by burning VC cash.

No, you have to build something that can work reasonably well, get rid of being fucking dependency slave in strategic areas and then try to catch up. Of course does not work for small countries

Only if you think that government's only purpose is to look pretty. Economies are planned. You can either plan them as governments, or let your oligarchs and foreign oligarchs plan them together ("market forces.") These only look the same when you allow oligarchs to determine your governments.

At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating.

If some guy in Canada builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.

edit: "Our ambition cannot stop there though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools, and other public institutions—not to mention private businesses—are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest."

This has always been the only answer, but it requires a relatively clean government. The government has to maintain ownership of these things, and cannot subcontract out the work.

You talk about "market forces" and you don't seem to understand them at all.

"Confidentiality", "Integrity", and "Availability" are a foundational concept of security (the CIA triad).

For non-US citizens "Integrity" and "Confidentiality" have been compromised for a long time, but these things have no day-to-day impact. They are only relevant as kompromat material once you become powerful and they want you to act in US interests.

What's new are serious, escalating threats and actions against "Availability". This is the most important pillar of security, and a whole different beast. Microsoft has blocked email accounts of international court of justice due to political pressure. Buffoons in US tech leadership such as Cloudflare CEO feel so emboldened that they openly threaten to cut off Italy. After TV performances by Musk, Thiel, Tim Apple, Zucky and Bezos in favor of trump there is no doubt they would cut off another country as form of pressure - and if it is only for a week.

In this week, our markets would be offline and nonfunctional. The market has a very high incentive to untangle from this mess of shitty bootlickers and impulsive convicted criminals.

It will take some time, but the market forces are clearly following the new incentives.

What surprises me here on HN that people who are seemingly US tech workers are quite ignorant to how it feels to be on the receiving end of this totally reckless, unprompted and idiotic behavior.