> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation, private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest.

Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.

If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".

Yes, think about that and how the shares would drop in an instant.

Good thing european governments and industries start to work on real technological and financial independence. It is high time for cutting ties with a country that is acting as irrational and self centered as the usa.

If they did that, their pension system (in huge parts built on stock) would collapse. The American tech market is largely saturated, and needs room to grow. The EU is a market of almost 500 million people with a lot of money. The US simply cannot ignore it.

We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.

> Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services

That would be the single best thing that could happen to the EU.

I think people would be surprised by how quickly European and international companies and governments can rid themselves of the American tech stack. They use this stuff because it's convenient, solid, and cheap, not because it's the only option.

> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

Yes, both in the EU and the US, initially. It would also force the EU to finally invest in its own tech stack and end the US's ability to sell software globally.

People seem to believe that America's global economic dominance is a law of nature that will never change, regardless of what the US does. But it's not. There is no American exceptionalism, other than what America worked for.

If you continually kick your customers in the face, they'll eventually stop being your customers.

> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

Today, yes.

The possibility of this, combined with how seriously Greenland was taken, means the EU is collectively saying "as a matter of urgency, we need strategic independence from the US".

This will take a while. Ironically, access to AI will make the transition much faster.

However, this is currently mutual interdependence: if the US actually cut off non-AI cloud to the EU, the US would screw over one of their major suppliers thus preventing them from supplying stuff, and leave itself entirely at the mercy of China. If it cut off AI to the EU, there goes a big market for tokens and the current data centre supply looks even more sketchy than its effect on electricity prices has already made it look. (But one bit of good news is that US electricity prices would come down).

> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

temporarily yes, then EU will be able to build them on its own.

But what would also collapse is trust in all US companies, whole world will start working on their own solutions, no more AWS/GCP/Azure hegemony in the world. Everyone would close their internet, just like China did and develop own solutions

You can do that, once, if you want to trigger an avalanche of realignment away from the U.S.

Not only would you lose the 450 million odd EU customers, but the rest of the world will reconsider doing business with you as well.

And achieve what exactly? EU being dependent on US cloud services also mean EU being a big part of their revenue. Parts of EU public and private sector may collapse but they will also switch to their own alternatives, the broken trust and lost revenue on the other hand will definitely not be recovered by US companies.

It would hurt the EU more than it would hurt us and they're in denial about it.

Humanity has lived for thousands of years without cloud and AI services. We can definitely live without those. In fact, considering the damage that is being done to the environment (and thus ourselves) in name of those services, we’d very likely be better off without them in the first place.

A large reason US services have such a presence in Europe is that their flagrant disregard for rules and the pursuit of profit at all costs gives them an unfair advantage. If those US companies cut off their services, in the long run the ones in the EU would have the room to expand within the rules. That’s the opposite of the doomsday scenario you’re describing. Though of course an abrupt cut would be momentarily disruptive, countries in the EU are already taking steps to reduce reliance on US services (for example: LaSuite).

The EU would counter that threat with the anti-coercion instrument. Shut Trump up really fast when he was last talking about annexing Greenland.

> Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

I think the EU member states would declare it a matter of national emergency and nationalize the relevant assets, with every other country these American companies sell to taking notes and considering doing the same pre-emptively, providing a huge investment boost to EU tech companies (and almost certainly China) while tanking the US economy, and poisoning the ability of the Americans to sell to Europe for the next hundred years.

The end goal shouldn't be "monopolies, but European", the end goal should be no monopolies.

*ad companies

I think you might need to reconsider how open Android actually is given the recent moves.

> Google made Android open source for free

And Hitler built the high ways and Germany. What does that even prove? They can still abuse Android for vendor lock-in, or as a sales funnel to their commercial offerings, or as a data source for a myriad of things users did never really consent to.

> As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely.

Yawn. Last time I looked, big tech is still wholly present all across the EU, only that I have the option to install apps from alternative stores on my iPhone. Also, the EU as an institution isn't the same thing as European companies. Go check the machines in any factory near you, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a German one in it.

> Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system?

You might want to look up where Linus Torvalds created Linux.

The EU's concern is less "is it technically possible?" and more whether Google's licensing and commercial agreements discourage effective competition.

In particular:

- Google forced every manufacturer to have search and chrome on every android phone if they wanted access to Google Play. No technical reason, just forcing their position. This is why Samsung, despite investing on their browser, was still forced to ship with Chrome. Browser competition on mobile was rigged by default.

- Manufacturers signed agreements making it de facto impossible to ship Android forks not approved by Google. If you want Play Services, you can't ship a fork Android did not approve, no matter whether you're Sony or Samsung. Again, no technical reasons, just forcing their hand.

- Google paid manufacturers so Google Search was going to be the only search option on that phone, preventing competition.

None of these practices make the landscape better for the user or incentivize competition when the game is rigged at contract level.

As for the rest of your post: Europe (but also Japan or South Korea or pretty much the whole world) does not enjoy the corporate laws, abundance of capital and risk prone mentality the US does. Those are problems. Over regulation (or better, inconsistent one across EU) is also a plague.

But that's unrelated with the fact that companies living in monopolies commercially abuse their positions. US regulators themselves have found the practice of paying Apple to ship Google as default search engine to be questionable.

Two words: Google Play.

That seems like a corcular argument.

Is this not chiefly a complaint about the rules? Saying "if Google doesn't like the rule it can leave" is a non argument.

> It's a shakedown. Nothing more.

Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ, or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.