The thing is that we had been allies for many decades. So the US and the EU are very entwined. You only mention one side, those chips are made using ASML machines from The Netherlands (with lenses from Germany), the latter two use an architecture licensed from a UK company (owned by a Japanese conglomerate). It was a very successful cooperation between two continents, but since the US wants to throw that under the bus, we have to become self-sufficient.

It will take time to untangle the mutual dependencies and become more independent. That said, ARM also designs full ARM64 cores (until recently Qualcomm cores were based on ARM cores, until the new cores based on the NUVIA acquisition) and they can be fabbed in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung), and hopefully Europe in some years.

Besides that, it's true that if you are running Linux, you rely on US firmware and Intel/AMD chips, but assuming that Intel ME doesn't have a bad remote kill switch, you can continue to run on existing hardware.

I think there are different forms of dependence that result in more or less severe carrying costs. Hardware is only a problem when you need to replace it or create new installations, so its carrying cost is rather low. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is subscription-based, induces vendor lock-in with a whole software/hardware ecosystem, and is updated on a whim from the vendor with next to no customer control; its carrying cost is enormous.

All that hardware (with chips) is made by machines from ASML. Mobile devices? That's all ARM. Mobile infrastructure like 5G? Mostly Nokia or Ericsson.

Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks

Yes. EU citizens should not let others (or themselves) talk them down. Yes, it will be an enormous job, but it's how you tackle any job - step by step. And there are a lot of things that can already be moved, like e-mail, code forges, databases, etc.

Ford actually makes vehicles in Europe. Does BYD?

If push comes to shove and Europe needs to part ways with the USA, to greater or lesser degree, there will still be machinists, mechanics, and actual facilities in place to keep making Fords. That is a positive from the standpoint of European sovereignty.

The EU probably has rules in place to strongly encourage US manufacturers of automobiles to put facilities in the EU. The US has similar rules and many Toyotas, Hondas, &c, are made in the US, using US suppliers for parts.

It's not hard to imagine an approach to digital services that trends in a similar direction. In the EU or Canada, the US parent company would supply technical data, software, specifications, &c, to a domestic company with its own facilities and operations. It probably requires a combination of regulations and regular stress tests; but nothing prevents the domestic company's operations from being as de facto severable as a car factory.

Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.

Replacing one non-ally by another. We have a VW ID.3 and it's great. Some people will argue that the on-board system is better on a Tesla or BYD, but a small loss of convenience, but a huge win for independence and the internal market. (Most of the criticisms are also outdated, the platform improved a lot since earlier generations.)

I have never seen some person or organization that couldn't ditch LLMs in an instant.

Are you talking about some other kind of AI?

Fairphone with Murena is another Euro-friendly choice on the mobile front.

I mean it’s their money, not yours. Stands to reason that if you have a silly amount of money you can afford to spend it in silly ways (and if you don’t, you don’t). Sometimes you even hit it big then you get to tell everyone how much of a genius you are!

You might benefit from LMArena's Leaderboard. It does not have Danish (yet), but German and English evaluation might help: https://lmarena.ai/de/leaderboard/text/german

Openrouter.ai shows the location of providers, you can find just a few European services, but also Singaporean and Canadian. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to filter easily.

Just go for Qwen or Deepseek. They are both very good.

You can also watch it at CCC directly: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification...

As much as I am for freedom and hate that DMCI or whatever it is called the guy is delusional. Not because he propoese to repeal the act (I am all for it) but his ideas that one can have some profitable business doing circumvention and selling software / hardware that unlocks whatever one is trying to unlock. As soon as you try to sell one it will be hacked and released for free.

> [Republicans] [seek] to deport 100 million Americans (basically all non whites), invade allied nations,

You think these are statements of fact?

Do you think a lot of US tech workers feel the same?

From my personal interactions these past few days on HN it is very disappointing how ignorant and devoid of facts the arguments are which come from people who seem to be US tech workers.

The downside is that this tech stack is also being rolled out to Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Venezuela to build their own local versions of the Great Firewall. It is currently being used to crush dissent and imprison anyone who disagrees with the regime.

I guess if you consider that “winning” then definitely continue to support Chinese dominance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637463

Euro tech already exists. Add in Nova custom and Star labs. I understand many components are still made in China but this is the first step.

There's a German saying "Vom Regen in die Traufe", I think the English version is "out of the frying pan into the fire".

China is a good alternative for a lot of hardware, but in terms of software it is not an option.

How would this lead to sovereignty?

Is China a better country to rely on?

It's already built, now it only needs to be used.

Hasn't really been true for the past few years with a whole separate infrastructure emerging around BRICS Now.

> 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.

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).

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.

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

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.