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Comment by chvid

7 days ago

The Chinese have alternatives to American services. Europeans could have too if we wanted.

Unless you have a magic lamp, “wanting” is not enough to achieve effective change.

What Europeans need is pragmatic governments and politicians. In fact it might be easier to find a magic lamp than an honest politician.

  • US big tech companies are dominant because they are monopolies not because they are technological marvels.

    If we were to ban US social media, European alternatives would emerge very fast.

  • The TikTok case in US might be a good playbook for the future. Require markets that US based companies have a near monopoly and require them to divest on EU and onshore operations. You solve tech hegemony and tax evasion in no time.

China has goods and services, but don't underestimate the language barrier for services. Language is a barrier between EU member nations providing each other services, even though machine translation is OK between those languages and most of us learned one of the other nation's languages in school; The gap between Chinese and Latin-Germanic languages is much larger.

I'd give an example, but every time I have previously shown an example of machine translated Chinese to demonstrate that AI is bad at translating English into Chinese, the responses miss the point of the example — criticising the translation whose very errors are meant to demonstrate how bad current AI is.