I'm pro Ukraine but treason has a specific definition in the us Constitution, so until Congress declares Russia an "enemy" and not just an "adversary" it's not treason. Would be very strange to have ISS missions and rideshare agreements with an "enemy".

> In a normal world, this would be treason by an illegal immigrant to the US.

As other comments have stated, this is not treason. However, a private individual/citizen should not have the ability to dictate national security policy:

* https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/its-time-to-take-starlink...

> In a normal world, this would be treason by an illegal immigrant to the US.

Not a lawyer, but wouldn't an illegal immigrant owe no allegiance to breach and therefore couldn't commit treason?

We’re also fighting a war for another country and the president’s son in law is brokering deals with foreign nations for personal gain. I don’t think treason is being prosecuted anymore.

There is already the European Eutelsat alternative to Starlink, with 600 satellites currently deployed (vs Starlink's 6000). They provide satellite internet, and video, both for consumer, business and military/government use.

Apparently Ukraine does use already use Eutelsat in addition to Starlink, but it's utility is limited due to number of satellites and bandwidth, as well as the current weight of terminals (presumably an issue for weapons-borne receivers).

Baffled by this framing and that of the article, where Europe is sitting on its hands not building a copy of starlink because it’s easier to just use Elon’s.

The reality is nobody had that vision and built the rocket company first to make it happen. Even after seeing the trick done it isn’t likely to be replicated by Europe or a European company within 30 years.

It's not treason if it was a White House decision. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/order-limit-starshield-...

Europe would have to not only build the satellites, but launch them, which rocket program do you think exists in Europe that could do that? The pace of Ariane launches could not accelerate quickly enough

It was the case maybe 50 years ago, but there are no systemic factors that support strong building/innovation/ entrepreneurial processes anymore. Maybe with some occasional exceptions.

Have you seen what crap cars even german manufacturers produce lately?

> They'll bicker for some time, but in the end, they build. To Americans it looks like they don't but they do

  There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
  There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face.
  And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
  No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

  The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
  He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
  And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
  And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

  Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
  The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
  And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout...

This comment reminded me yet again to always wait for HN comments to settle down after several hours because the first sentence is immediately wrong in multiple ways as people have pointed out such that I'm not sure why one would bother to believe the rest, even though I do have thoughts on how exactly Europe would build, or not.

All humans with > $100M net worth need to have 99.5% of their wealth forcibly seized.

What's great about this is the are 2 ways to read this:

1. Ukraine is in an offensive position

2. Ukraine is in a defensive position and thus it was indeed Musk

To me these are both very dumb stances. Lose lose statement

Wall Street Journal has reported this was ordered by Musk directly:

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-starlink-elon-musk-trump-d...

Not sure why so many people here are defending him as though his word is authoritative. The guy's as big a liar as Donald Trump.

Musk constantly LIES, a tweet from him means literally nothing

Well there you have it. Elon is so good at his word. Totally trustworthy nothing to see here /s

Hilarious that you believe words that come out of Musk’s mouth. How embarrassing.

Until they can match Falcon 9 launch costs (the internal ones, not what SpaceX sells it for) it will be very difficult to compete with Starlink.

Exactly. Deep and sophisticated capital markets are the #1 advantage that US tech companies have over their EU competitors. The difference in cost of capital is huge, especially for something as capital intensive as SpaceX.

When Ukrainian officials say they use Starshield, they probably use Starshield.

So... the free market is fixing this. lul

ICEYE from Finland is valued at 12 billion USD

Telesat launches are still on SpaceX Falcon 9s. So the non American alternative still depends on American launch capacity to get there.

Don't forget that US can always strong arm Canada and make it bend to its will. We are too dependent on them. It's nearly impossible to disassociate with United States due to our proximity.

The timeline has changed before, like the ASIC issues pushed full service into 2028. Also scale and capability obviously differ, but it could be a good starting point.

Regardless, I think Europe is better served focusing on its own tech like IRIS and Eutelsat.

Telesat is a different product than StarLink. My understanding is that Telestat is for telecom operators and large network providers which cannot run fibre cables to their cell towers.

Lotta "Europe is already working on it!" points in here, missing the fact that it's been in the work for a long time, and maybe let's wait until it's actually deployed to count the cows. Over the past decades a lot of things have been "in the work" in Europe and never really went anywhere. It's very easy to "put things in the work".

Replacing dependency on one foreign power with another foreign power is better how?

The problem is the EU is still suffering startup drain to USA entirely because of market and regulatory burdens. We just saw this most recently with Heart Aerospace. They warned EU regulators repeatedly that it was very difficult to develop frontier technology in Europe. And then they eventually just relocated to California completely.

https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...

These are political and societal issues that are very difficult to solve. Not to mention that energy insecurity and cost makes Europe non-competitive from the outset.

> during next economical cycle

what and when is the the "next" economic cycle?

Europe itself a collection of nations. The US was traditionally an ally and for the better part of a century we've been comfortably building out a host of projects together, from military to science to cultural goods. That the US has apparently stepped away from working cooperatively is genuinely surprising and disappointing, but we shouldn't let it normalise the idea that we can only ever trust others of our own nation. Especially in Europe where you obviously have countries like Belgium that aren't nation states to begin with.

Most countries are roughly the size of a US state. How many US states could be entirely self-sufficient on defense infrastructure?

Not just infrastructure. Europe has depended on the US for its entire defense apparatus for decades. Everyone loves to scoff at the billions America throws away on fighter jets until Putin rolls out of bed and invades your nextdoor neighbor.

Only if you ignore the last 100 years of geopolitics. But, fair point.

Because until a certain orangutang broke it, the new world order was doing rather nicely.

Powerful people got together and decided the world would be a nice place if everyone worked together. Their solution for ensuring that happened whilst taking human behaviours into account was global capitalism.

Despite its downsides (some of which we're only starting to see the consequences of) you have to admit that it was doing its job. Countries were cooperating because it was in their best interest. It was always a delicate thing though, and the orangutang broke the trust it relied on.

It might seem naive now, but "bro, of _course_ you can rely on us for service X, why are you even asking?" was an believable response before the orange.

One infinitely sad purported reason was that Starshield has "unparalleled end-to-end user data encryption".......

Because, yes, you get E2EE by having the operator do the encryption :facepalm:

https://flasharmy.com.ua/en/vneshnij-gps-dlya-starlink is definitely not a device Starlink's ToS allows the use of. When Musk says Ukraine were hacking Starlink to override its policies, a change implemented by the engineering department to enforce those policies server side would easily explain the apparent confusion amongst all parties who seem to think nothing happened. From Starlink's perspective there was no change in policy, just a change in how it is enforced, and there's no specific reason Musk or POTUS would be immediately aware of that.

Load of horse shit. Politicised post and not cited.

There's a rule of thumb that a mature tech business in the US will earn at least half of its revenue outside the US. If that stops being true, it halves the early stage value of tech companies in the US.

I'm thinking America (and Europe) was buying soft power at a price it could not sustainably afford. A correction was necessary. Trump took it too far though.

Ukraine uses Starshield, which is paid by Germany (with current contract ending in April 2027). What you describe in regards to chip hacking so it reports location as static, it is how nazi invaders got it working in a small chunk of time during 2025, before whitelisting was introduced for the terminals.

Used to be. Zelenskyy was basically hand picked by the US

US companies dominated in part because everybody thought they could be trusted. That seems to be falling by the wayside.

There's definitely a difference there, though we will have to wait and see if the American AI industry didn't make those losing pockets too deep.

That's why the famously over regulated California doesn't have any sort of tech scene. All the best big startups usually start somewhere more business friendly like Mississippi or Tennessee

When I read "I don't want to follow safety regulations", I always think "WOW that dude must really have some great product I must get!" -_-'

What would you like to see less "legal paperwork" about? What regulations would you want rid of?

Do you think you would stand even the tiniest chance of hiring European tech workers into a company run the way they are in the US?

Absolutely. That and the lack of accessible and agile VC funding in Europe. No idea why someone would downvote the above comment, it's spot on.

So if they don't let corporations trample all over people then their society will obviously collapse?

No, this article gets its core premise wrong: labor laws are not the main issue. The issue is that if I wanted to found a new company, I'd be confronted with lots very strict regulations with lots of implications and induced overhead. The list is too long for a HN comment.

It's not impossible to overcome, but it is an added commitment for any new company. Founding is not very attractive and that's why we don't get that many crazy wild bets here (Tesla was one initially too).

> Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers

Yep, so saying Europe can build software is pretty much like Western factories trying to compete with slave or child labor in some developing part of the world.

I mean most Americans probably don't want to open their own sweatshop garment factories. But it does mean that if we start ww3 that shirts may be harder to come by. I think it's probably a good thing that the entire world is too interdependent to want to start shooting at each other? (G10 at least)

Let's just assume your claim is true, and it is impossible to build software in Europe.

European companies can still build software in different countries. Nothing stops them from building their software in an US subsidiary they fully control. A lot of good software developers are currently looking for a job.

I would call this theory "No tech leadership without enshitification."

Or maybe, just hear me out, that's an American delusion, promoted to justify the oligarchy here.

Yeah, because US companies are forced to offer their services in the EU, right? And they definitely don’t do so because it’s incredibly profitable. Plus, the US definitely hates that the EU depends on them for so many things, giving them huge power and leverage.

What a great point you’re making here!

Indeed. Ukrainians should have talked to the Kurds before relying on the US

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”

Come Democrat control of the house in a couple of week, subpoenas are going to be flying.

If capability is intellecutal capability, then no. If you mean systematic capability, then yes, exactly. There are enough smart europeans to build anything. But it is rather - a lack of risk taking (i.e., culture), - a lack of incentivizes (i.e., if you take a risk, and it plays out, you benefit rather than everyone complaining how you can be rich at the expense of others), - a lack of funding risky ventures, - a lack of allowing risky ventures (i.e., politics don't allow you to do stuff because any kind of rare bat might live in close proximity). These rules make it way tougher than necessary, take longer, more compley, costly you name it...

That is the reason why europe is falling behind. System. Not people.

Nonwithstanding the incompetence, maintaining the French Guyana so far away from France costs much than maintaining Cape Canaveral in the homeland. I wonder whether salaries aren't be cheaper on our aircraft carrier than in this remote land, where everything needs to be subsidized to maintain legitimacy for the rocket launchpad.

90-95% of the european friends I have were scared shitless on the first term, the second one was closer to depression.

But honestly, even well before that.

When did Doctorow coin enshittification?

When did Zuck call his users stupid fucks?

When did Amazon start comingling counterfeits with originals?

When did Google buy DoubleClick?

When did Google start reading your Gmail?

When did Boeing start skimping on safety?

This is a decades long trend. Don't be giving Trump credit he doesn't deserve, otherwise the lessons of history will not be learned. Blaming Trump is yet another easy answer that allows for all of the other things to be swept under the rug.

Hobbling starlink, dropping Russian oil sanctions, blocking patriot delivery etc. isn't rhetoric.

A lot of the war developments have been unexpected and would have been difficult to plan for. I mean

1 - Putin was thinking of invading. I thought US/Biden would say no or well attack you but it was more I'd prefer you didn't but won't do anything so invasion.

2 - People thought Ukraine would collapse but no

3 - Tanks and artillery - people thought that would be the thing but no

4 - Drones render tanks almost useless

5 - Starlink becomes a thing on naval drones. Also not expected

6 - Become used on things like the Hornet AI drone made by Eric Schmidt - not expected

7 - Musk/Trump recent flip not wholly expected

And many more

Well, it’ll take years to bring capacity back online, so that ship has sailed.

I agree it's probably more a Trump+Putin thing.

Let me guess, you get your news from Fox?

Are you saying EU with its 450M people is lacking "money" and needs 350M US to do it for us? Because somehow "money" is what makes stuff to happen. Not labor.

Maybe, but I think the likelier outcome is that they will also be working on alternatives in the background.

Sure looks a lot better than the US or China or really where else though, doesn't it?

> It might have given a reason, but it’s not like that will actually create anything in Europe.

Oh we absolutely are building replacement stuff for a lot of American things. IRIS2 for example is our Starlink alternative. OVH, Hetzner and a bunch of other smaller players can provide hosting. Mistral is our AI model. Cars, trucks and farm equipment can be/are made in Europe. We have our own nuclear weapons, warplanes, navy, tanks, satellite based surveillance, and sooner rather than later (via Ukraine) viable replacements even for missile defense. That is the last thing we truly are depending on the US, but eh, after Trump wasted the entire US stockpile on the Iran clustercuck they again left us no choice, and the Ukrainians are busy by necessity developing something useful.

A lot of the major players in software are Europe-based too. SuSE, GnuPG, KDE, LibreOffice and I think also Samba are German. VLC is French. MariaDB is at least partially based in Finland. Spotify is Swedish.

The only thing we do lack is a fully integrated hardware and software manufacturer similar to Apple, but I think we could set up something based off of the open source parts of Framework and Raspberry Pi should the need arise.

> The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps.

Have you walked alongside the Isar river at least once in your life? I personally am happy to no longer see plastic bottle caps littered around, and the magnetic ones can be picked up easy enough with a magnet. I don't see the problem.

> They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.

The laughing stock of the world is the US President who regularly shits himself in his diapers.