alt Hacker NewsEurope wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology
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In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude. "US big tech is so entrenched we'll never get away". "European cloud will never be good enough". "There's nothing like Microsoft 365". At my work they don't even want to think about alternatives.
I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
The tax authority in Norway alone employs 500 full-time software developers. If all of Europe followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles for all publicly funded development - and prioritized open formats + protocols + interoperability - it would within only a few years be possible to greatly improve software reliability for all nations.
Then invest in and attract people to build it. I'd move to Europe if the salary was competitive.
IMO start by funding the living crap out of open source projects. Mandate that hardware sold in the EU comes with unlocked bootloaders and documentation sufficient to develop drivers from.
Relax IP protections so developers are allowed to reverse engineer products and build derivative works from them (extending the life of, facilitating compatibility).
Ban security systems used by big companies that enforce OS conformity (like kernel based anti-cheat, or banks disabling tap-to-pay on phones running beta android/rooted).
Double down on platform interoperability - e.g. Allow me to write a chat app that uses Facebook messenger as a back end.
Hey-ho there you go, European competitors to Android/iOS will pop up overnight. Asahi Linux and other OSes will get a shot in the arm (ha).
Everyone wants to, and not just from the US, but China too. Digital imperialism is real but nobody is confident yet how to effectively fight it. India especially is kind of trapped because our IT service industry is deeply entwined with the US and our government doesn't know how to safely untangle it from the US without harming our economy.
With the current speed of things, Europe will need a hundred years to effectively and totally set free from the US digital dominance. You will know if this timeframe gets shorter if a torrent of change, news and enthusiasm floods almost any European company, either IT or not, mobilize vertical and horizontal government agencies and a large share of the population actively participates.
we in America would love to see Europe break free of its suicidal regulatory straitjacket and do enough innovation and building to carry its own weight
I've got no horse in this race, but, didn't they say the same things during the current US president's first term? Both about technology and defense. What came out of that?
Support a dictator, and one day he will come for you.
Have they tried more regulation of the kind where your investment agreement has to be fully read out loud and in person by the notary to all parties?
Well they've finally awaken. Better late than never. I think this is one of the best decisions China got right.
Yes, it’ll be much easier to put the surveillance measures they’ve been trying so hard for into EU-based companies.
Most of this stuff is routine technology now. There's no reason for it to be centralized.
Does the EU regime grant its subjects independence from chat control? Or do bureaucrats try to force it on the sovereign again and again?
The scariest part of US internet dominance isn’t vendor lock-in, it’s executive branch chaos engineering.
Europe should end its dangerous reliance on Russian gas and oil.
I think all this nonsense can be traced back to USA abdicating its industry to China and over 20 years being completely hollowed out.
It's more than just internet technology, though. Europe has no digital sovereignty at all. Every operating system is in US hands, most office and business software, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, all social media commonly used, and so on. The list is endless.
As they should. It’s an incredible opportunity to develop technology natively and by extension wealth. The US has proven in this one year that it’s not to be trusted let alone relied upon. Unfortunately the tide once set in motion cannot be u done and the damage done in this one year is irreparable, may be now the tech billionaires will speak up and to use a phrase from Carney - take the sign down from their windows
Like the life-long couch potato who wants to exercise daily and really get into shape...there is that dratted gap between "wants to" and "does"
At this point they’d be insane not to.
Headline could be “every country wants to end all reliance on US” and it would be the sane thing to do.
I think they should. Let’s kick off some meaningful economic growth in Europe and provide a counter to the increasingly hegemonic, anti-human US tech oligarchs that have reaped all of the financial rewards of algorithmic radicalization and surveillance capitalism for the past 20 or so years. Maybe Europe can imagine something better.
A long ongoing discussion;
Related recently:
European Alternatives
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731976
AWS European Sovereign Cloud
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640462
I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427582
Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635
Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902
'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'
Europe wants a lot of things that they end up never actually doing.
By the time the idiot EU bureaucrats get to do something, they'll be replaced by right-wing loonatics sponsored by US tech giants: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1916422/us-tech-giants...
First, get rid of whatng web engines and google/apple apps... wait.... mmmmmh... how many devs fully subsidized to dev and maintain some "replacement"?
On this matter, the only way out, technically simple protocols but doing a good enough job allowing a small team of average devs or even an individual average dev to develop and maintain an alternative software with a reasonable amount of effort. That with some hardcore regulations to allow them to exist. Remember that nearly 100% of the only services were fine with the classic web, aka noscript/basic (x)html web (and if you add only the <video> and <audio> elements you are getting dangerously closer to those 100%)
Don't forget, you cannot compet on economic grounds and international finance, their thousands of billions of $ will wreck you. And china is on the other side of the spectrum. You will end-up crushed on both sides.
And first thing first: some high performance EU silicon (design and manufacturing)? But we all know the state-of-the-art silicon tech is an international effort.
defence grade effort at EU scale... oooof!
Fascism and business are poison and catalyst
Trump has been trying real hard to get Europe to stand on it's own, maybe they do it out of spite. Would be awesome if we could maybe kick Russia (which is much weaker than Europe I'm told) out of Ukraine.
I mean good. The U.S. is currently run by a pedophile ring and has legitimate Nazi elements in its employ.
Also O365 just sucks. We can do better. We've had better. Please stop using MS products and technology stacks.
>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout
Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.