> I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU.

> Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.

Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?

It feels like whatever you're saying today could be said the other way in the past, so why does it really matter?

The fact on the ground is that people don't trust the US overall as much, even less the leadership of the US, so whatever dependency has been built up over the years, has to be fixed, no matter if the "local" technology is shittier at the moment.

I'm sure Americans felt the same about printing presses back in the day, where some things you just have to be able to do without needing the permission of others far away.

Governments can nudge. If they swear off American tech, they will be using something else, and have influence on how that goes. They can put money into getting what they want, and open sourcing it.

The more they invest, the more corporations will be able to switch.

What is cutting off the ICC if not restricting. I think that was a pretty blatant move, and is a large part of the chain reaction we're seeing now.

Who cares about fine details of quality if you are at permanent risk of on/off, and a very real one.

Not every company needs, wants or has room to become google scale. Stability long term is something we hold dearly in Europe, not everybody runs in 10 seconds attention span.

bbb b b but Spotify is European :)

I think it’s important to focus on the momentum. It’s not easy to redesign and re-engineer systems that have taken years and decades to develop and span many layers of integrations. There is also the issue of retraining as everyone is happily used to whatever system they currently have. It’s unfortunate the US decided to go back in time rather than look to the future but eventually, very few (if any) services would rely on US corps.

Not to mention 95% of all mobile app installs are through App stores controlled by 2 US companies.

There is none. Despite the less stable environment if you are Talent by far the best place to be is the US. If you are an ambitious entrepreneur by far the best place to be is the US.

Some of us in Europe are ready to drop Russian oil imports whatever the cost. It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever and governments have to tread lightly all the time in order not to let power go to all those far right parties who would just buy the cheapest oil coming from anywhere as long as it allows them to remain in power.

Surprisingly, when you depend on Russia oil and gas for your refineries and industry for decades, you can't always turn it off instantly, it sometimes takes many years due to infrastructure and for come countries, pro-Putin politics.

Being anti US isn't 'trendy', it is a response to the US being anti-EU at the moment, and justifiably being seen as unreliable, mercurial and even dangerous.

I have also met the attitude that using hyperscalers is the right way to do it, and running anything of your own that you could outsource to them is weird and unprofessional.

Time well invested. If you are a publicly-traded company, the executive level is financially irresponsible to the stakeholders if they leave the company's data at perpetual risk of just vanishing.

> The one where "free" countries like Denmark push for encryption backdoors?

In a free political system, anybody is able to push any agenda. What matters is what gets adopted. I agree that the EU is not perfect, but you cannot just take a government’s pet project and claim that it is a failure of the political system.

Lmao, westoids having hard takes on Slovakia after reading headlines on reddit is the funniest thing ever, if only you knew how wrong you are

Quick example, people who stop at headlines keep talking about Fico yapping about stopping aids to Ukraine, yet they give more as a percentage of their gdp than Germany, France, the UK, &c. Fico's a piece of shit but don't stop at what he says, half of his bs doesn't make it further than headlines in western medias

How can Hungary or Slovakia do the same? Literally, how could they? What mechanism exists?

While there are fascist leaders in those countries (especially Trump modelled is remodelling of the country after Orban's autocratic and corrupt Hungary), those are just 2 of 27 - so far far from the majority.

And many decisions in the EU do not allow for their veto votes anyhow - Orban's Hungary has been withhold now for years Billions of EU investments because of how the countries institutions were hollowed out by him.

I won’t go that far…yes, the West Coast of the US is dominant, but it’s not “literally the entire tech industry” or even figuratively. We’d have a hard time buying new hardware without Chinese and Taiwanese companies. South Korea is a powerhouse in consumer tech; think Samsung and LG. Japan doesn’t have the dominance in tech it once did, but Japan is still a major player with many large tech companies like Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sony, NEC, and many more. Plus, if “tech” isn’t limited to software, then there are plenty of players worldwide in biotechnology and automobiles.

And let’s not count out Europe. I’m actually typing this in a BMW dealership’s waiting room in the Bay Area as I get my brake pads updated. BMW definitely qualifies as technology, even if it’s not a software company.

No Korean government services rely on US hyperscalers (which is the subject of this post). I'm 99% sure the same goes for financial institutions. Those are the key infra and they're sovereign. A lot of big companies do have some things on US hyperscalers, but even that is a relatively small percentage. Overwhelmingly things are on prem.

And now someone will link "but there was just a fire that resulted in many online gov services being down for weeks!!!". Yes. And having that happen once in a decade, after which measures will be taken so that from now on it happens once in 3 decades, is absolutely 100x preferable to depending on US hyperscalers like EU governments do. As we just saw, it's not like AWS and Azure don't go down.

Sure, they don't have their own OS. But even much of China still runs on Windows. China might manage to get entirely rid of it at some point but not yet.

Doesn't Intel depend on ASML when their chip machines break? I don't think there exists a single country in the world that can currently produce a significant amount of full-stack, modern compute. If there is one, it's definitely China rather than the US.

>Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him

The great thing about Linux is we don't need to care where Linus lives. We obviously have — in principle — the tech, the workforce and the money to build an alternative tech stack. Most of it is open source at this point.

It's just political will. If we had the commitment and sense of urgency to unwind from America we could. Just like in military affairs we don't do it because we have a mental blockade to break with the existing global order.

> The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude.

But then again it's increasingly being made by Indian migrants, right?

How far away the critical state is, who knows. Could it be in this presidential term? Would it happen within ten years of the coming imperial takeover of the presidency? Perhaps.

But when the valley loses its dominance it will likely happen pretty quickly: huge numbers of the people who make it happen will go home, go back to their home states, or just go to live somewhere cheaper. The US is not educating people fast enough or deeply enough to replace them, and there's no sign that AI really can replace the ones that matter.

Just because nobody can see exactly when this will happen doesn't mean you don't start planning for it to happen. Because it will happen, and when it happens it will happen fast.

The US tech industry is still built on the idea that the USA is a comfortable, friendly, open liberal democracy. And that is over. I mean, on a basic level any individual H1B placement in the future exists at the whim of the executive. Who do you have to donate to, to keep it? And any skilled migrant who might come over, work the hell out of a job that is beneath their level of education in the quick-e-mart and then start something of their own is not going to come.

Europe has its own problems with pasty-faced, bad-haired weaselly proto-fascists, but it's still fighting.

> Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource.

If its outsourced the downtime is someone else's fault.

People prefer opex to capex.

You are right at a technical level, but short termism and personal incentives trump those.

* "The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires." by John B. Sparks: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200375~3001080:The-Histomap--Four-Thousand-Years-O), https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.... (4194 x 19108 pixels, web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg) via https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net... (web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg); https://archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915c... (4194 x 19108 pixels, archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915cbd50a.jpg) via https://archive.ph/1wEk8

* "(Covers to) The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires.": https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200374~3000299:-Covers-to--The-Histomap--Four-Thou)

"The world without hegemony" "As Pax Americana ends, a multipolar order is emerging. The history of Southeast Asia holds lessons for what’s to come": https://aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us... (aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us-about-a-multipolar-order) via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771497 ; https://archive.ph/wBrLt

I’m the last person you can call a fan of US foreign policy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...

But for global stability it’s best if there was some kind of entity with a legitimate monopoly on force. It’s like I don’t want to live in a town where everyone has guns, I’d like a police force with accountability.

>Now that the USA has become isolationist, if not a threat to the EU, those favors/checks aren't being cashed anymore.

Trump could threaten tariffs.

open source is pretty global, i'd say. it's also a theme in the linked article.

US companies seem to sell into Europe just fine?

Amazon, Google, Microsoft - they all make tens of billions of revenue in Europe.

Why wouldn't a company based in Europe be able to do the same?

EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.

The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.

Here is a subreddit on the topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeanFederalists/

The US started this way... Europe must be careful about how much power is given the EU or it will end up the same way.

Like https://www.stackit.de/en/ which is the cloud offering of Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl?

Hetzner is not a publicly traded company.

I know actually that LibreOffice specifically has lamented xlsx, apparently it’s a hard file format to design for.

The idea of poverty wages in China is very outdated. Labor isn't even necessarily "cheap" anymore in China. But why people continue to manufacture there is because of the infrastructure there.

China has a long-term vision for sustainable devlopment [1]. China is excellent at long-term planning that looks 50 years or more into the future.

As for renewable power, China is adding capacity at an astounding rate. China will likely ween itself. They'll likely end the use of fossil fuels in our lifetime.

As much as housing and food affordability are now very real problems in the US, utility prices are going to get so much worse in the next few years with the administration killing renewables, increasing LNG exports (we're now heavily reliant on natural gas) and we're allowing privatized utilities to price gouge.

[1]: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-06-05/President-Xi-s-key-quo...

I agree with you regarding "Euro tech", but not on "Chinese sw/ tech", they are at least as data-stealing as the US and they have even less democratic controls over there.

It's just that this isn't like raw resources like oil. there is no "good" or "superior" oil. it's just oil. and there are some differences, but there is no "american refined gas" that is superior.

But with tech, there is a question of quality and superiority. People that use M365 suite can work and collaborate more effectively, if not for actual superiority of the product and its OS integration, then simply because it is so well known and users prefer it the most (it does not repel talent as much).

Why give talented european skilled people more reasons to leave the EU for US, as if existing issues aren't enough? Why not instead directly compete with Microsoft and Google. Why isn't the EU investing in that? They're caught in the "open source" trap. I hate to say it, but they need to make closed source proprietary software that is commercially competitive.