Posted by bwb 9 hours ago
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.
Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.
One bill for all the things is convenient.
I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).
If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.
Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
So if they were restricted to some reason to use their own only, they would be fine.
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next potential bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.
e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
It is debatable if everyone but John Bolton and Donald Trump knows this. After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
Anyway, it is smart policy to expect the worst and plan for it instead of being surprised by another insane president voted in by the people of the USA. Call it risk management if you like. It would be negligent of the leaders of the EU and its member nations to not account for that. The EU has to reduce dependence on unrealiable trade partners, this is true whether we are talking about warmongering Russia, dictatorial China (probably the most reliable of the three!), or unpredictable USA.
So, let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The EU can't change it if preparation harms US economic interests in the long run. That's on Trump.
>What emotion best describes how you feel about Donald Trump’s presidency so far?
Of Republicans:
40% Satisfaction
24% Enthusiasm/pride
6% Hope
5% Relief
They are loving this.
For sure -- the bottom 41% of economic literacy are so misinformed that they have no clue what they're talking about. But those voters aren't picking the nominee for President from among a circus of general morons, the party elites are, and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age. Without Trump just flailing around like an idiot, they'd be content to do things that preserve the status quo in a lot of areas. They pander to the unsophisticated Trumpists where needed, but it's lip service, since a lot of them, for instance, love open borders because of how it depresses wages and gives them a compliant workforce. They talk a big game about the debt or the deficit, and also work to make sure we increase defense spending and funnel as much healthcare spending as possible through a bunch of private insurers who add a huge margin to our healthcare costs.
European politicians need to wake up NATO was really an exercise in helping the US with its proxy wars their support will not be reciprocated
Not with trump and not with his successor
They all knew who he was by the end of the first mandate yet they still elected him again.
Why wouldn’t they find another « trump like » when trump goes away ? Vance or someone else, the list is long.
I see no reason for things to change and that’s if the USA doesn’t become an autocracy in the meantime. Trump already did so much in a year, that’s fascinating. He just need to boil the frog a bit longer but everything is in place.
That's how you sound. Crying about blue hairs is the worst reason to vote fascist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
> "We will never fucking trust you again."[0]
It doesn't matter that Trump will eventually no longer be President, and it doesn't matter that there are still members of the American political establishment that support the old way of doing things. Trump does not act alone, and there is rapid attrition of those older bureaucrats who valued the USA's allies. Trump's allies in the GOP will continue to be in power, and perhaps worse, the partisan appointees that have inundated the public service will remain.
The USA has burned its bridges. There is no more trust to be found.
0: https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucki...
- 1 part petty corruption: stupid stuff like deals that enrich Kushner, his Trump company itself, and that of his close personal allies
- 1 part vanity: stupid stuff that serves no purpose but to exact revenge against people who humiliate him. And let's throw in silly stuff he says just to 'troll the libs' to this group too.
- 1 part just pure inexplicable stupidity. Things like pointless tariffs, or the idiocy around Greenland, that hurt nearly everyone and especially the US itself. Honestly some of this may be just the petty corruption part, where someone who stands to make a fortune from the chaos has cut him in on a deal we don't know about.
I simply don't see that same motivation triad coming from anyone else, even among Republicans. Other Republicans are driven more by political ideology, their own goals, their own ideas about the culture, their belief that X policy makes the economy stronger, etc. So, while you should judge us by what we do in the future, and bearing in mind that more idiots of his caliber may be discovered, I think and hope that you'll find out that Trump was simply the perfect storm of moron, and can never be repeated.
What you refer to as vanity I consider vindictiveness, and as evidenced by his continued support is something that appears strongly associated with Trump's supporters. Vindictiveness is the point, and it's what they voted for.
And stupidity, well, PISA performance doesn't bode well for most nations. There's a steady decline witnessed the world over.
First and most importantly, I don't think it should be considered a given at this point that there will be a democraticly elected successor to Trump. It's clear from past attempts and current declarations and actions that the Trump regime will try to maintain power instead of ceding it at future elections - whether they will succeed or not will depend a lot on American institutions and the power of the people.
Secondly, your assertion that only Trump and Jon Bolton agree with the current policies seems deeply wrong. First of all, the VP (with a real chance to be President, given Trump's age and apparent health), seems very much on board. Secondly, much of Trump's policies are based on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, including at least some of the foreign policy decisions. Thirdly, a desire to re-orient US foreign policy away from Europe (and thus NATO) and towards China exists in a large part of the traditional foreign policy establishment. Fourth, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the last election, looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt rather than what alternative solutions they can promise to the American people.
Every official or aligned pundit in the GOP is obliged by Trump's universally-known vanity to make a show of supporting literally every dumbass thing he does, knowing he'll purge them if they even question things. So I will say we can't actually get a read on what they truly think until Trump is gone, preferably by passing away peacefully of old age rather than hanging around live-tweeting his takes on the next administration's actions. Of course this means I'm speculating as well, and I admit that.
I just think that I've never seen anyone approaching the Trump levels of pettiness, vanity, and most of all, what looks to me like pure foolishness. Including even his inner circle. Most of them are single-issue extremists.
I actually agree that re-orienting foreign policy and military toward China is just plain smart. But it's idiotic to do that by picking fights with allies, and anyone less dumb than Trump can accomplish a pivot to China while at minimum not causing hostility across the Atlantic. Ideally the West should instead be firming up our alliance and working together to counter Chinese influence, plus, it'll be better to have NATO intact leading up to a potential hostilities with China when they invade Taiwan. Of course, China is working hard on amplifying and promoting division inside the US to destroy NATO in the hopes that Europe will run to their arms economically and thus be unable to oppose China. Kind of like how much of Europe has/had dependencies on Russian petroleum which complicated their ability to respond to Crimea and the rest of Ukraine invasion.
> leaders of the Democratic Party ... looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt
I haven't witnessed any adaptation at all from the DNC. It seems that all their beliefs are still summed up as "We ran a perfect candidate and she ran a perfect campaign. It's the voters who are the problem!"
I can't emphasize enough how collossal the DNC's screwup in 2024 was. We have a system that has been running for hundreds of years where the idea is a primary election gets you two candidates who are at least spitting distance from electable, and then we have to pick one of those two in the general election. It's wildly imperfect in that it entrenches exactly two parties at a time. But the DNC in 2024 took this system and operated it with utter incompetence by just installing the biggest loser of the 2020 primaries as the only alternative to Trump. Many people were so disgusted they stayed home. If they've admitted this, it hasn't been publicly.
It was an open secret that the USA was a transactional unreliable ally, now it's just common knowledge.
Even the most ardent "look West" politicians have stopped talking about avoiding China.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/software-m...
As a response to the tariffs we were told to use Canadian companies, and lo and behold, all of our big name software companies were magically Canadian.
Companies are supposed to compete anyway, without having to get pissed off first.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
I guess I’m not alone, gold is exploding.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
You could apply this to Slack vs Teams as well. Slack was already good, Microsoft just duplicated their work, came out with an inferior product and won. So, was it worth it?
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely.
Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"
US: "please do not support our advesaries" EU: "builds nordstream"
US: "stop killing innovation" EU: " more regulation"
Now:
US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
US: "our tech companies will not listen to you" EU: "omg big bad america, we should try to make out own"
I don't like it but at the same time, it works? Let EU rally against US who cares as long as they actually do something.
Simply put absolute best thing for US is a strong EU. China is an advesary that will take the entire US system to challenge if EU can handle the rest then it's a win.
What this meant between the lines for 60+ years is “please increase military spending on US overpriced weapons that we gonna sell you, weapons will be degraded versions of native counterparts and don’t think about making your own independent military industry. Oh by the way bring those weapons when we will do 20 years of failed occupation in Middle East, because we are the only country in NATO that triggered article 5 and bunch of Euros died for nothing. Because that’s the deal, we protect you, for the economic price of helping our imperial hegemony since 1940s stay at the top, but suddenly we decided this is a bad deal after all.”
The EU can't realign itself with China because that would destroy the last fragile bits of the EU economy that are left. They are already having issues with the excess supply lands on their shores even since the USA started tariffs with China. They can't deal with this long term.
The US wants EU to be a vassal, but got tired of paying the protection money for that. Now they are trying, and failing, to keep the EU under their control despite bringing less to the table every day.
> US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
It's in both the EU and the US's interest to ensure NATO is the strongest partnership possible and the US's actions over the last few weeks have undermined it almost perfectly.
This is an interesting take. You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
It ignores the fact that, on the rare occasion the Trump administration was not actively trying to undermine the EU, their "helpful advice" has always boiled down to "you should be more like us, and not being like us means you're failing."
My opinion, which I believe is common among Europeans, is that the opposite is true.
The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff. Now what the president of the US achieved is that we want to spend more to develop our own local alternatives and improve them, not buy more from the US. Why would we buy from you if your president threatens to invade Greenland?
Also - military spending was increased not because Trump bullied us into it doing it. It was seen as necessary because of russian attack on Ukraine. Trump was not some genius diplomacy mastermind. He is a man child that is pissed of for not getting the Nobel peace price. How childish is that? This is not some person who can be taken seriously in any way.
Regulation is good, Micro-USB and USB-C for phones and computer chargers is better than the dozens of different chargers that was before. Only Apple was unhappy and didn't want it. We don't want big US tech companies to steal our personal data and do whatever they want wit it.
Also - now trump is pissed off at Canada for trying to get a trade deal with China, when it was he himself who first said Canada should become a part of the US, started with random bs tariffs on canadian goods, etc. What else can you expect from Canada, why should they not try to find a more reliable trade partner? How can it be rational, what Trump is doing?
Have you ever stopped to think that maybe a large number of Europeans look at the lack of US regulation with disgust?
Am I missing something? [1] lists Guangzhou’s GDP as 435,746 M USD, while [2] lists Russia’s GDP as 2,173,836 M USD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
Sure, the US admin wants a strong US military, for example, ideally with 100% US weapons. Etc.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
So after Russia fails "a strong EU" is no longer needed? Also waiting for Russian economy to fail may prove to be forever and not even desirable. Changing the system of government to one that treats people like it should is much better goal
Until then, starve the Russian economy of fossil fuel export revenue (which funds their war efforts). They have liquidated a majority of their gold reserves and have exhausted a majority of their military hardware stockpiles. If we wanted to wrap this up, we’d be bombing their oil and gas export facilities, but it appears we haven’t made it to that milestone yet.
Russia Liquidates 71% of Its Gold Reserves to Finance War Effort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738690 - January 2026
EU countries give final approval to Russian gas ban - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-countries-give-fi... | https://archive.today/wOHeR - January 26th, 2026
> Under the agreement, the EU will halt Russian liquefied natural gas imports by end-2026 and pipeline gas by September 30, 2027.
> The law allows that deadline to shift to November 1, 2027, at the latest, if a country is struggling to fill its storage caverns with non-Russian gas ahead of winter.
> Russia supplied more than 40% of the EU's gas before 2022. That share dropped to around 13% in 2025, according to the latest available EU data.
> The European Commission plans to also propose legislation in the coming months to phase out Russian pipeline oil, and wean countries off Russian nuclear fuel.
Ember Energy: The final push for EU Russian gas phase-out - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-final-push-for-... - March 27th, 2025
Considering Russian's invasion started February 24, 2022, it's fairly impressive Europe has only needed ~5 years to disconnect entirely from Russian gas supplies. Better late than never. They've proven they have the capacity to achieve these objectives in a timely manner, when motivated.
You mean 2014.
But thank you for proving my point. 2014 - 2027 just a short 15 years (assuming it actually happens I have my doubts).
China and Canada Energy Pact as Canada Aims to Cut Reliance on US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640932 - January 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919165 ("This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline." -- tick_tock_tick - November 13th, 2025)
I'm confident you could make more factually accurate and less emotionally driven comments if you tried. Please consider it. Very little of the information I rely on for my comments is paywall gated, they are web searches away for your consumption and mental model enrichment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919580 (citations)
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.
From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its succeeding at it.
Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
In addition to that, since we're on the car angle, Chinese EVs are basically just privacy nightmares. I mean, all cars are at this point, but that's why we definitely don't want Chinese ones coming across the Canadian border and ending up all over the place.
In the end there are in fact legitimate national security concerns that the tariffs address and Canada risks weakening those. So, that is the actual answer to why.
Kind of proved the point of America being an un-reliable partner which is what I inferred from Canadian PM's speech & his call for middle economies to connect with each other and strengthen together to have more leverage overall.
The previous Canada-US relationship is gone. Months ago I wrote on HN that purely by virtue of having to weather this storm, the nature of Canada-US relations will be irrevocably and fundamentally altered. Even if Trump and his cronies were jailed tomorrow, it's too late. The rest of the world understands that Trump is just a symptom of the disease affecting America and it's going to get worse, not better.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
It is so difficult we still to get a working visa into Western EU. The way this is done is by total bureaucratic nature of Ausländerbehörde.
When he was CTO from Netflix, Gaurav Agarwal Could not get a visa to relocate to Germany. (No more with Netflix)
So even of one has > €80K salary and working in Apple or MS hq in Munich it is pain in the arse.
On the other hand this is encouraging people to apply and get passports. I for one would have never naturalised as German if the residence permit was quick and easy.
In summary, there are encouraging people to migrate.
Many of people I know (or friends of friends/brothers) are migrating from America to either Europe or shifting back to India.
I don't think that America can particularly do something about it. Trust's pretty fragile.
You’re (deliberately?) confusing the issue with e.g. illegal immigration or asylum seekers who often come from poor, war-torn areas with little education and possibly a very different mind-set.
I haven’t been accosted by roving gangs of well-educated IT Indians, I find the thought funny ;)
I have heard this deal be described as EU beneficiary from EU sources.
Ah yes, I feel like what you want for an EU is a connection with America which has been a very unreliable partner would even be an understatement in today's geopolitical environment.
It's saddening to see if you are from EU who actually believes so. I am more than happy to answer your queries in good faith but this just feels like pushing some of your own agenda or straight up racist.
We come with open arms even though the massacre of jallianwala bagh is still in our memories. There is just no question regarding the fact that EU primarily british forces had extracted immense wealth from India and India had to primarily rebuild it from scratch healing from the scars of its colonial past.
There's actually an internal pushback from some people i feel like who feel like EU is still imperialist & want to shut down this deal from India side given India hasn't lost much after the trump's tariffs compared to EU whose greenland was in some serious sovereign threats.
But I guess the point is that EU India deal is inevitable in this multi polar deal. India wants EU to be the financial hub where EU can then reinvest in India and India can create technological innovation.
I have tried to respond with as much calm as possible but I must admit that your message felt like a must admit,ragebait to me in start but I hope that this detailed message can help clear up on the details.
If you have any reasonable questions man, feel free to ask!
I wouldn't consider it a rant per se but rather that India's trying to move towards an multi polar deal and EU and India actually has a more net negative and Indians are wary of this deal even more so but on aggregate the deal would be extremely beneficial if seen from both sides with reason.
Also isn't UK trying to pester back into the EU again. It's super complicated to follow even as someone who follows geo-politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_re-accession_of_the_...
> I mean perhaps, yea I must've got sidetracked by India's colonial past but for the average Indian I would consider for that passage that they generally equate UK to be part of EU usually. (Perhaps from the pre-brexit era's or just in general)
When I started writing about jallianwala bagh I probably got distracted because I used to be part of drama club and we had this act when we were young and literally the amount of people dying and everything truly shocks one & genuinely disturbs one.
I recommend this documentary to know more about Jallianwala bagh massacre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9JZJx67cvo
I think my point which kind of got muddied up is that India wants to cozy up to EU and build things together but not to UK so much. India's extremely sensitive regarding UK given its past and in this deal,is cautious about EU and UK making ties again or any such discussions too.
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
What is the reason Linus lives in Oregon? By his own admission, 90% of his workday is reading and answering email. We have email in Europe, so that can’t be it.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
What failed with Mistral?
Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
To be fair this example does look a lot like insanity.
Nothing is truly irreplaceable
I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.
Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.
Before or after the bubble pops?
What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
Realistically there is zero alternative to US tech/online dominance in sight in Europe and the credible competitors are more likely to be Chinese (tiktok, temu, shein, etc.) What is happening is EU politics.
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU or US
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has a GDP of:
Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont
put together.
That's the equivalent of 18 states.
Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.
Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
This is not correct as of 2024. In 2024, Ontario had a GDP of CAD 1.17B. [1] In USD, this is (at .73 exchange rate, which is favorable for these calculations) this comes to US 854B.
In 2024, the following US states had greater GDPs [2]: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and tied with Washington. GDP growth in 2025 was worse for Ontario than these states, and it would be expected Ontarios' position to continue to decline.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/248023/us-gross-domestic...
Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.
By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?
What do you mean?
I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
The regulations were insane.
I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
- signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)
[1] https://www.zerowaterfilter.com/blogs/zerowater-knowledge-ce...
And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.
There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.
If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
It was good enough for the US.
For electronic products, it should be enough to get the CE mark on your product, and it can be sold in any country. That is the point of the EU, that any company can sell it's products or services in the whole union, there are regulations, but they are union wide, not specific for each country.
Unless you were making something very special, that each country wants to and is allowed to regulate separately.
Taxes can be different, the VAT % is different in each country. But so is it also in each county or town in the US, and your people claim that this is the reason why you can't include taxes on prices in grocery shops, which is difficult to believe here for our people. So dealing with different tax rates shouldn't be big news for you? I mean... there are lots of online shops that know about different tax rates, it's not difficult. Or you could let someone else handle it for you.
The US does not have that.
A lot of things good enough for the US are not considered suitable or safe here.
Correctly so, I might add.
If your government is not concerned with public safety, why should the EU adopt the same stance?
Hope you don't accidentally fall off a historical ledge that can't get a handrail.
Without being more specific, the only thing I can presume is that you were unwilling to follow regulations here.
I furnished and equipped my home a couple of years ago, and I had plenty of options for dishwashers, from multiple brands. Many different models at varied price points.
This tells me that serious companies have little problems to follow regulations to compete here.
This all really sounds like a "you" problem.
And to clarify, if there was a single regulatory body, it would be fine. I just didn't want to deal with each country.
Probably a shame since it was totally safe. Too much regulation causes your costs to go up and features to go down.
I don't blame your attitude here. If you can't get something, you want to come up with something that makes you feel better.
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Basically all videoconferencing (except teams) is built on the back of French open source software.
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards! Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Or here's the linked article:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
And here's the app, Visio:
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
Have you used Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
And for all its many flaws it does have some advantages over Meet (which is what my company switched to it from):
* Remote control of other people's desktops (except on Linux unfortunately). Meet has no solution for that. Endless "no up a bit, left.. no you had it. Third one from the top. Here let me share my screen instead".
* Conversations you have in meetings don't disappear into the aether. In fact for recurring meetings it's even clever enough to use the same chat.
* You can directly call people. Meet requires you to create a meeting and then invite someone.
Ok that's all I've got. My list of complaints is much longer, but even so it just about makes it to acceptable.
Kind of crazy that Google hasn't just solved this though. Clone Slack, integrate it with Meet. Make a high performance desktop client (not web app) with remote control. They'd make a fortune.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
So it's not just a failing of Teams.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
Export tarrifs aren't really a thing, particularly for software. Making US cloud more expensive would only make transitioning away from them faster.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
In a multipolar world you don't critically need that if you can order your hardware from party I when party C or U shuts you out.
Remember that China is running their own Android island with Huawei and Xiaomi. Yes, a lot of Chinese people flash the Play Store, but it isn't strictly necessary. Not hard to imagine the EU and India creating their own islands too.
Kind of wicked we have to think this way though. I much prefer a world with the maximum healthy amount of open trade and travel.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
It pushes money into the market, creates skills and business and, crucially can look beyond quarterly profits (for better or worse).
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
And then build out Google App suite, Office 365 exquivants
If AOSP is suddenly the only acceptable smart-os on phones for 600 million people, I think it would work out yes.
It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.
Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all the US wanted. Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days.
I think you’ll find the EU doesn’t have much appetite for this sort of thing. They’ll take the risk at face-value, and put mitigations in place going forward (including if necessary, divestment from US tech firms)
You did not need any more strengthening of any military treaties with Denmark, the US could already open as any military bases on Greenland, there was nothing stopping you from doing that, sending more of your army there to deter China or Russia, or whatever else. Here, https://people.com/donald-trump-wants-ownership-greenland-ps... He is saying he needs to own it to personally feel good. How does this make sense diplomatically?
Any excuses you make will not make him look better or make him look like he can be trusted. If you want to achieve something in international politics have to be made carefully, not by threatening to annex Canada or parts of your allied countries.
Your president is just destroying the good image and goodwill towards the US with his 'negotiation style'. His style is childish bullying and temper tantrums, he can not be taken seriously as a reliable partner when he can say one thing today, and tomorrow say something totally different, even if you think you have reached an agreement with him on something.
This is what someone would say if they only know Donald Trump from TV.
Everyone who knows Trump from his NYC real estate days knows that he's (and this is possibly the worst insult any New Yorker can hurl at someone) "a bum." There's a reason NYC would never vote for him.
He doesn't pay his contractors, reneges on legal agreements he himself created, and uses legal threats and fights to screw over anyone he pleases, especially if they can't afford the legal fight. It's a lie-cheat-steal mentality, and might makes right.
It's not like, some hard-nosed NYC negotiating strategy. He's a crook. There's really not much more than that.
The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.
Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.
Trust has been eroded.
There is a difference between a nation (USA) and its president having the theoretical power to shut down whole parts of your infrastructure which everyone agrees “that would never happen” versus it having happened multiple times already. Then the setting up of separate boards, basically retreating from NATO/NAVO, the military threat against Greenland. It doesn’t inspire confidence. He has been breaking with “things that you just don’t do” for a while now.
Good luck meeting China without friends. Clearly brilliant statesmanship. Europe is able to read, the room, the situation, and the National Security Strategy, which makes it pretty clear that meddling with European democracy is a important foreign policy.
Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.
There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.
We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.
Not to mention that threatening to go to war with an ally as a negotiating tactic is crazy regardless of how inconsistent you are about it.
Tariffs + coercion via-vis EU tech regulation + Greenland are rapidly making the transatlantic tech status quo untenable.
There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.
Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.
But I think we can agree that an ally by definition is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
But I suspect that is developers the main problem for the bootstrap phase (ie: that is already the case here in LATAM)
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-go...
- https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.
Now everybody realises you can trust no one.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
I assume, then, that culture would be doomed to fail.
If providers like OVH play their cards right, they can use this sudden influx of cash to both scale up, and improve their offerings. There's a lot of money on the table right now.
AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
The problem is when US decides to ban sales of compute hardware to EU (like they do to China). Then it will be clear who's really in power.
If China closed the door overnight to the US, it would also be clear who's really in power.
The US simply does not have the capacity to replicate the manufacturing domestically.
Even if it were possible, "100% Made in the US" would end up costing at least 20–30% more.
And the US does not have a plan B. Sure there might be India .... one day....years away.
I keep wondering though. Is insane amount of compute really that crucial? Aren't most real computing needs served well with not so cutting edge tech? I am 5-10 years behind on most of my machines. Servers we have at work are very modest (and outdated) yet the software these servers power are still valuable. Maybe EU could run on some domestic RISC-V cheapo chips.
The worst thing in the long-term for American hardware makers is for the US to block other countries to purchase from them and having that money invested in alternatives.
Not true.
But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?
Transparent pricing.
EU company: Yes, you really can accurately calculate to the nearest cent how much your compute instance will cost you and exactly what you are getting for that money. No surprises.
US company:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network "up to" ? And then of course the big "I DUNNO" in relation to "how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"
EU company: Of course we don't charge you for LIST etc. on S3. We only charge you for off-network GETs and the associated data transfer, on-network is free.
US company: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?
You know what else I like about the EU companies ?
At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.
Yes that's right US companies. It IS possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an "oops I just spent a million dollars overnight" moment.
Which they are.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
They already did it for the Ministry of Education with [La Forge](https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/). Used to be forgejo, now a GitLab instance.
This can go as far as we want )
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite