It’s certainly doing the first, not so sure about the second.

If the Us imposes sanctions such as "no more login to any Google/Apple/Microsoft/... accounts from EU citizens until they give Greenland".

Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.

EMP attack

Here in Belgium voting is mandatory, so the clowns we have are who the public decided were the best candidates. The only excuse we can make is that single-vote list-PR is worse than ranked voting.

Can you elaborate how this statement led you to your conclusion?

Also the Canadian MP is involved in deploying surveillance[0] on his own country so I am not sure why people are giving him props. He is part of the problem.

[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...

People need to stop buying into propaganda.

They might not need it if they started today. But once you have a few hundred TBs of data in Sharepoint, you've foreclosed any alternatives.

> I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.

And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.

Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.

What the hell are you talking about? Canada is in a pretty bad state themselves, just as much as we are in the U.S.

Those were different times. Right now Holland has been governed by oligarchs for the last 30 years. The country is unrecognisable.

Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder

It's adding the property that it's an all-in-one turnkey solution. Which is an extremely attractive proposition compared to having a dozen separate tools. And to paraphrase the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.

There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.

I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.

> what's the sell of Microsoft 365

> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap

You answered your own question.

The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?

And frankly, MS Word is really bad. So are pretty much of all their services.

Not sure whether Excel is still good.

If Europe were capable of doing this, Europe would not need to do this. They'd already have active and vibrant tech scene compared to US one - EU is bigger than US by population, and certainly not less smart - in fact, a lot of people live in EU and work for US tech companies. So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not? They decided their political model must work differently, even at the cost of not having big tech. So now they don't have big tech. And no amount of committee meetings is going to change that, even if all governments would want it really, really hard.

The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy.

Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.

No, the last thing we should do is transform Europe into a neoliberal stronghold like America. It's not all about making money. It's about creating a civilisation for citizens, not business. Business is just a means to an end.

The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)

> making the creation of billionaires a policy goal

Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.

In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.

> They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?

The big picture isn't that different in Europe. Most EU countries are also oligarchies, just with a lot more bloody histories and national traumas. The social safety net is kept to the level of remembrance of those traumas. Once people start forgetting them, the oligarchs will take away the rights one by one.

The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.

This is a tired old trope that really has no basis in reality. There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed. In two out of the last 3 elections, the major corporate money backed candidate lost. The government is run by the 24 hour news cycle and the attention economy, not by the decree of billionaires. We operate firmly under the tyranny of the majority.

The problem are not Trump or the billionaires, but the majority of the American people who support them. They knew what they were getting.

It likely isn't over with him. Trump is just the frontman and possibly fall guy for project 2025/federalist society. They are his entire cabinet and their plan was to replace all government workers with their own loyal people.

I'm talking about provisions to increase competition in the free market - not classical "corporations bad" regulations.

Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft thrive off competition barriers.

For example;

Why is Asahi Linux on the MacBook not daily drivable? Because we can't write drivers and require non-scalable geniuses to reverse engineer hardware from photos of circuit boards.

Why can't you install an alternative to Android or iOS on your phone? Because we can't write drivers and/or the hardware blocks you from even trying.

Preventing monopolies from ring-fencing empowers the free market through competition enablement. Ultimately, it's impractical to tell us non Americans that you need to build a hardware and software stack entirely from scratch and have that be competitive within a few years.

Without those barriers - perhaps the EU would have a homegrown mobile operating system. Perhaps Linux desktop adoption would be bostered enough to justify further investment in OSS initiatives.

That is a document. Show me reality.

I'm hopeful that it can work if:

- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".

- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.

Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.

One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

Prompt: generate 15k in tax-deductible open source code contributions.

Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.

> the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

That sounds like performative bullshit though? A "feel good" thing just like plastics "recycling".

Are people actually choosing to pay fair price for a non-American product? Are people choosing to invest in or start local competitors to those American products? Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? And so on.

Ok but parent's question stands: why didn't you get the message the first time?

>the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

And the app is running on a phone with an OS coming from which country?

Like sibling said, this feels like performative BS.

It's not a technical problem (well, it is, but not primarily). It's a social problem. Replicating a technology is one thing. Getting thousands and thousands of organizations to migrate is in a whole different universe difficulty-wise. The costs would be astronomical.

>Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system

The MIR payment system started functioning in 2015, long before Visa/Mastercard pulled out of Russia

>Android app store

Initially there was some fragmentation because several companies raced to develop "Russia's #1 answer to Google Play Store" but everyone eventually settled on RuStore developed by VK (Russia's Facebook).

Generally, Russia already had replacements for most major American services long before 2022, and with better market penetration: Google => Yandex, Meta => VK, Uber => Yandex Taxi, Amazon/eBay/Craigslist => Ozon/Avito/Wildberries, etc. Lack of own app store was more like an oversight. Europe is at least 20 years late in the game.

Sorry but that reply is verging on the delusional and it's ironic, if not typical for social media, that you accuse me of ignorance. Linux vs Windows doesn't even matter. I'm a European who has been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 20 years and I know that the majority of popular Linux distros are mostly in US hands. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding and I wasn't clear enough about the scope of my comment. I meant it to apply to a situation in which the US is really no longer trustworthy and Europe needs some almost complete independence, not just about increasing digital sovereignty a little bit away from US products.

If there was a real conflict between the US and Europe, whether an open conflict or "cold war" type, you could be absolutely certain that every supply chain you're using is going to be mostly under US control. Open source is irrelevant for that issue, you're not compiling your own Linux distro and all software and your compiler toolchain and use your own repo hosting (and switch off all undocumented backdoors in your CPU's "management" engine). Funny enough, even if you did that, the hardware on which you run all this is almost certainly fully under US control. Guess where American Megatrends, Phoenix, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Intel are located. The same for every phone operating system. Binary blobs nowadays either come from China or from the US and their chip manufacturers (e.g. in Taiwan).

This is the point of time in history where the people usually start a revolution. Do that.

Exactly. I live in the US but I'd like to switch from US apps and services controlled by US oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Zuckerberg to European alternatives.

I don't know, you might be underestimating how much damage the orange in charge is really doing to the interests of the US. Change is slow, and the subtle things set in motion are always perceived too late. A simple example would be a small county in germany saving 5+ million a year thanks to moving away from microsoft. Add that to the budget of the many (largely european) opensource projects out there , and you can see things can shift, slowly, but rapidly once noticed.

With decades of education cuts, top STEM researchers leaving the country, and immigration coming to a halt, I think you overestimate the future competitive position of the US.

How do they compete for actual tech then? Like Airbus.

- 35h a week, doesn’t prevent engineers from working more legally (most do) - with the age of AI code velocity is no more about time spent, but fresh brain - And much much more important, it is significantly more efficient to have an employee 10 year in one place than 2 years in 5 places. What could explain higher US turnover than europe, you think?

No we do not need to roll back on our humanity. The US population however really need to wake up and start unionize and vote for politicians that are not big orange incompetent babies.

Here’s the difference between US and Europe: in US tech, productivity gains due to AI will lead to lower employment and higher expectations for the remaining employees. Salaries will remain the same and any increases in profit will of course go straight to the capital owning class. It will continue to be great for a vanishingly small number of people. On the contrary, Europe’s “socialism” makes them well-prepared to deliver the same level of productivity with AI using more people working fewer hours. And their “socialist” attitude toward where that value should go will result in an increased standard of living for everyone. You know, like the AI utopia we’ve all been promised.

Which is why he sold weapons to Ukraine that the Obama administration refused, allows Starlink internet to be provided to Ukraine, orders the navy to seize Russian oil tankers, and allows US provided weapons systems to be fired into Russian territory? Maybe Trump isn't supporting Ukraine as much as you would like him too (and I feel the same), but this conspiracy is childish bullshit.

Russian propaganda folks.