Comment by Quothling
12 days ago
I've spent a couple of decades in the Danish public sector of digitalisation and in the private sector for global green energy. 10 years ago people would've laughed if you talked about leaving Microsoft and iOS in enterprise. Now we all have contingency plans for just that, and a lot of organisations are already actually doing it. So I would argue that there is more of a crack, but I'm not sure the post-american internet is going to be all that great. Because unlike the open source and decentralised platforms which are taking the place of US tech, the EU is going to regulate the internet. There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies. Which obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but it's how you can view the EU. With one hand they do so much to protect consumer rights for us citizens, but with the other hand they build a survailance state.
Of course that is how democracy works. You'll have multiple factions working toward their own goals with very different ideologies, and the EU has a lot of that. For the most part what comes out is great, because compromise is how you get things done when there aren't just two sides. For survailance, however, there are really just two sides and the wrong one of them is winning.
The idea that EU surveillance is greater than US surveillance is almost certainly mistaken.
In fact, a huge reason that the EU is looking to move away from U.S. commercial providers is that they can’t guarantee they won’t be giving the U.S. govt information about EU users even if they setup completely independent EU based entities.
The reason why it might appear that the EU is more heavy handed is because the EU is actually passing limited tailored laws, publicly, that explicitly state the limitations of those laws.
The US govt, on the other hand, has already passed broad blanket laws that allow them to get any data from any U.S. corporate entity with the flimsiest of warrants which those entities are not even legally allowed to publicly reveal.
The U.S. govt doesn’t need to pass any surveillance laws because they already essentially have unlimited power over the data being collected by US corporations.
I just assume it doesn’t matter where you live or who you are- anyone can have your data. It’s not admitting defeat. It’s just being safe and sane.
To the point of the post though, please note that saying the internet is American (it’s not, it’s global) or publically giving up on the U.S. because of POTUS, three letter agencies, attitudes, etc. is not helping you win the many Americans over that may join you in some cause.
My POV is Americans are not an ally in any case, and all efforts must be made to increase self-reliance and disentanglement from the US. Both parties of the US disrregard european interests.
An argument can be made the Internet is actually Chinese because the atoms your bit relies on are mostly produced in China or Taiwan.
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I don't mean this flippantly, but it's an odd framing you present. As in, when you yourself comment on the internet, do you think about winning Somalis to your cause?
I just mean... the point of marginalising reliance on USA and USA companies is that others don't need to care about winning American citizens to any cause they pursue, because American infrastructure has minimal [or no] power over their lives. As in, your response comes from the old world ppl are trying to leave behind, no?
The reason is money and control. That's it. Believing otherwise is foolish. They don't really give a shit about privacy or whatever is the supposed agenda of the day. It's about not paying as much to the US and being able to control the infrastruscture.
I trust EU govs less than I trust US companies. At least I know that for the companies it's just about making more money and there isn't that many downsides for me outside of having to pay one way or another. EU govs are fundamentally destructive, so whatever they end up doing you can be sure it will terrible for everyone but themselves.
... and the reason why the US doesnt pass strong federal privacy laws is, the tech oligarchy has stronger lobbies or political ties in the US. It could be the other way around, if the US had a weaker tech sector and was leaking wealth/data to the EU, they could be protectionist. This is the common denominator. I disagree with your angle, that the EU is more corpo-sceptical, they are the same, just different lobbies.
> The idea that EU surveillance is greater than US surveillance is almost certainly mistaken.
Well yes, but that doesn't mean we want EU surveillance to replace it.
If my choice is an American company which does tracking, and a European company which does tracking, then I as European prefer the European one. Because they can be held accountable in a court of law. In Russia or China, that isn't the case. And it doesn't seem like it remains the case in USA. SCOTUS, for example, has been a political instrument for a long, long time.
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> Well yes, but that doesn't mean we want EU surveillance to replace it.
I agree, but what choice do we have? If we look at the way things are going, we see that the US is expanding its surveillance apparatus, China is expanding its surveillance apparatus, Russia is expanding its surveillance apparatus and the EU is following suit. Or at least is trying to, because previous attempts to implement surveillance policies have tended to reveal the incompetence of our representatives. Even leaving the EU is no guarantee that we will not become a surveillance state, as seen in the UK.
The only way to circumvent surveillance is to create and use communication channels where the government nor companies have any influence.
Regulate (censor) =/= surveil
Surveil ⊂ regulate.
What about censorship?
What the US media (and Elon Musk) call EU censorship is actually a request to follow EU rules if they want to operate in the EU market. What, exactly, is controversial about that?
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There's a clear winner of surveillance in the set of the US government, US companies, and the EU government and EU companies.
Not only is the EU miles behind the US, the US is accelerating faster towards more surveillance. Historically PRISM and the US Cloud act. More recently DOGE's recent actions in centralising data and a new crop of private enterprises working on surveillance tech like CCTV facial recognition.
I don't see the federal government applying any breaks on this development. However, I note some states are. But we do see clear attempts from the EU attempt to attempt to curb this. E.g. parts of the AI Act.
While I'm not enjoying the development certain factions are pushing through in the EU either, it is hyperbole to say that the EU is attempting to make a surveillance state, especially in this context.
People also sometimes forget in this debate that the NSA is allowed and has a mandate to spy on non-US citizens and companies as they deem fit. Anything is allowed, including mass surveillance and hacking into systems. There are only restrictions when US citizens and companies are involved. European agencies probably have similar permissions but I don't think they have comparable capabilities and they also have and will continue to have smaller budgets.
Do you really think if the NSA is not allowed to do something, that they'll be held accountable? In 2026? I doubt it very much so. The USA sits on a lot of data from EU, and that is a bad situation. We also need to stop selling important companies such as Nexperia (to CN) and Zivver (to USA).
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Open-source software was created by people who wanted to address their own needs, and we're lucky that we share the same needs. Commercial software companies and media companies were and are unhappy about that, because they lost control and profits.
Regulated, constrained versions of Internet are being built by governments and some large corporations, to meet their needs. While EU's constraints may look benign (even though they are not), the versions built in PRC, Russia, India, Türkyie are in various degrees openly anti-citizen. As long as citizens' needs (like privacy and unrestricted access) do not align with the ideas of the governments and corporations, we, citizens, are usually the losing side.
The fix is obvious: regulations should be liberty-preserving, and for that, governments that are better aligned with our, citizens', interests should be voted in.
And here we encounter a hard problem.
Open source must be a part of Europe's digital sovereignty (a crucial piece of a post-american internet). The continent otherwise doesn't have the resources to pull it off. Projects like https://eurostack.eu/ are a baby step in that direction.
Unfortunately that's just one piece of the puzzle. They also need a level of physical infrastructure that will take ages (or a miraculous breakthrough) to build. That too is a hard problem.
It isn't that hard. A democracy can be maximally liberal, including the internet, up to the Tolerance Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The people that govern Big Tech have said as much as that they don't believe in democracy, they show they don't believe in fair markets, and they are put to work to implement the threats of a crazy but powerful clique, attacking free and social democracies with an endless stream of sponsored garbage. If the EU had any leaders instead of weasels, they would have closed the sewers that brings lies, hate, conspiracy theories and division. If the EU does not act, it will go down, taken apart by the oligarchs.
Tolerance Paradox is not a "Tolerance Threshold" - it's a Paradox. You cannot be maximally liberal "up to Tolerance Paradox" - as soon as you are maximally liberal to any threshold, you are no longer liberal - hence the paradox.
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This Tolerance Paradox is something I’ve been discussing lately with family and friends, but was having a hard time articulating. Thanks for the link.
I see tons of parallels with today’s world, on both sides of the spectrum (left/right, woke/unwoke etc).
Like, I do agree that most speech should be free and that dark humour and unpopular ideas and whatnot should be allowed even if you or a portion of the population don’t like it.
However I also think you can’t just say whatever you want and hide behind that free speech protection, because that opens the door to really nasty stuff that the human species has lived through.
But where’s the line?
That comedian arrested in the UK for a tweet[0], for instance. Do I agree? No. Do I think it was an intolerant thing to say from my POV? Yes. Do I think it is in fact inciting violence and deserves arrest? No.
On the other hand, you have people preaching white supremacy and talking about inferior races. We know where that led us.
So where’s the line? Same thing applies for these “regulated” surveillances. CSAM sounds like a good reason, but the same tools can be used to limit or monitor other speeches and behaviors. (Not to get into the debate of effectiveness, since bypassing is doable if you really want to).
I don’t have an answer, and I don’t think there is a clear line to be drawn.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07p7v2nn8mo.amp
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With one hand they do so much to protect consumer rights for us citizens, but with the other hand they build a survailance state.
The US is doing that too, and has been pretty open about it for years.
The us is working to protect consumers too? Or just the surveillance bit?
Just the surveillance bit. I thought it was obvious given the rapid ongoing dismantling of consumer protections, on rereading I see it is not so clear.
Europe wants so very much worse in many cases.
It’s not "the EU" disappearing people in unmarked vans. It is not perfect, but it follows procedures and protocols to a fault.
The EU is also not a monolith, it’s different entities with not perfectly aligned interests, some of which representing member states, some of which citizens, again with significant divergence of opinion. The court of justice frequently finds against member states governments, for example.
TL;DR: "the EU" does not want things. Different participants want different things and what happens in the end is the result of a consensus building process.
What the US built is already dystopian, there's nothing to lose moving away from that. Things like chat control are not a good thing neither, but adding regulation can also be beneficial and lead to interoperable standards. That's where the US failed big time. E.g. things like having standardised chargers seems like a no brainer but it required regulators to step in for it to happen.
What things do you mean exactly? I'm not following all of that too closely
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> There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies. Which obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but it's how you can view the EU.
I would rather say for quite a lot of people in Germany it's that they neither trust the Federal Government nor the EU government nor the US-American tech companies.
> I would rather say for quite a lot of people in Germany it's that they neither trust the Federal Government nor the EU government nor the US-American tech companies.
I think that is a healthy attitude.
I am British and do not trust my government or big tech (regardless of where it is based). IMO governments are easily lobbied to utimately tend to take the side of big business.
>There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies.
This is a Danish blindspot, Europeans do not trust their governments in large (France is fractured, Southern Europe has endemic corruption, Germany is increasingly authoritarian in order to keep heterodox parties out) and this is in part the source behind the flare up of "far-right" movements in the continent. The infamous EU chat law doesnt help either, and all the abuses of Germany in their misuse of hate speech to punish speech is not a positive development. We do not have real alternatives to most American tech services, and administrations are unwilling to move to Linux based alternatives.
The EU is also not interested in strengthening the domestic software market by engaging in selective protectionism like the Chinese, because of the extensive lobbying by foreign and domestic actors which are the incumbents and see no interest in a competitive and dynamic environment which would destroy them.
> The EU is also not interested in strengthening the domestic software market by engaging in selective protectionism like the Chinese, because of the extensive lobbying by foreign and domestic actors which are the incumbents and see no interest in a competitive and dynamic environment which would destroy them.
They don't need to though, just require all government software to be released under a free software license, with limited exceptions for national security. The US does very well in software, so the EU should commoditise their complement and focus on free software services. This is both cheaper than the current services, and produces lots of employment for EU based tech people (probably at less money though, unfortunately).
This is basically what China is doing with their open weights models.
> Germany is increasingly authoritarian in order to keep heterodox parties out
... and those parties would be even more authoritarian if they got in. Which they might in part because of the reaction. It's possible to get fucked from both ends...
> Germany is increasingly authoritarian in order to keep heterodox parties out
Please explain?
The Greens are doing well, and certainly are hetrodox.
Do you mean "keep fascists out"?
Or do you mean something else?
I would not classify Greens as heterodox, because the whole climate policy (and the degrowth movement overall) is forefront in Germany. The move to close nuclear plants and instead replace it with renewables (which are blocked at the local level by boomer Green elected NIMBYs) is not sound, if your objective is to achieve enrgy transition and 0 fossil fuels.
As for the fascists, when one looks deeper into the AfD (not that I like them, more the opposite) they are just the old right + immigration issues. Labelling them as fascist is a dangerous thing because it devalues the value of the word and opens the way for true facsicm to come.
> With one hand they do so much to protect consumer rights for us citizens, but with the other hand they build a survailance state.
You say this with no irony as an american..
If you think internet surveillance is an EU first, you will be delighted to read about PRISM
I think nobody in the EU believes that America is the country of freedom and privacy and anonymity. (Boolean and)
I guess what the OP meant is that in EU you might have the police knocking at your door for some reasons you don't have in the USA, not because they don't have data about you, but because in the USA you have some very strong constitutional rights that are really hard to bypass.
Twitter, Tiktok, etc could never be created in the current EU.
> because in the USA you have some very strong constitutional rights that are really hard to bypass.
It exists, but it is being selectively ignored by those in charge. Don't assume it will automatically defend you, especially not pre-emptively:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jail...
https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-fire-challenges-unconst...
Since they can operate in EU, I don't see why they can't be made in EU. There are well known disadvantages that prevents emergence of SV style startups, but I'd argue even that is a good thing.
> in EU you might have the police knocking at your door for some reasons you don't have in the USA
Is there any significant difference where the law gives you fewer rights in the EU in this regard? Speaking of knocking, it's very unlikely that in the EU some SWAT team will knock down your door because someone anonymously told them you're dangerous, kill you, and suffer no consequences.
> but because in the USA you have some very strong constitutional rights that are really hard to bypass
Other than the right to have guns, which keeps everyone happy and gives the SWAT team a legitimate reason to go in guns blazing, kill you, and get away with it, I'm having a hard time finding a right that isn't routinely subject to some exception. Guaranteed when the ultimate authority on the constitution is staffed by corrupt yes-men.
“In the EU” only because some countries might have individual laws, unless you have more information about the EU specifically causing that?
The country with the worst “bad opinion, police comes knocking” is the recently seceded UK.
And I guess Germany has something against nazism?
Netlog was a pretty successful attempt outside the US though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlog
Tiktok was also not created in the current US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok
Sure they could. You'd just have to answer subpoenas when the police are trying to identify a user, same as in the USA.
You might get a few more of them. Recently a bunch of French people received jail time for repeatedly posting how the president was a pedophile and his wife was a man. Because, you know, harassment is illegal in many European countries. But the only obligation by the service provider, if asked, would be to delete the posts and give the user's IP address.
The EU Digital Services Act is actually a much wider liability shield than the USA's Section 230. I suggest reading it. ISPs ("mere conduits") have basically absolutely immunity, and caches merely have to ensure they make an effort to delete the cached object when the original object disappears (i.e. they have a reasonable expiry time) to be immune. Social media, since it's a content publisher, has more obligations, of course, but they are also not that onerous and things like automated scanning are only required if your site is big enough to afford them.
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USA does not have strong constitutional rights. It has constitutional rights with zero teeth, little to no judicial backing and about thousands convoluted loopholes that ensure they dont apply to you.
And when, rarely, they do apply, you get no restitution or relief.
Long before that we had ECHELON.
[PDF] https://historicalarchives.europarl.europa.eu/files/live/sit...
As a bit of trivia ECHELON was discussed in Grand Theft Auto III in 2001. 'Conspiracy Theorist Caller' phones in to Chatterbox FM to discuss and makes a call to free Kevin Mitnick:
> Come on, do you honestly believe the NSA's echelon system isn't already reading your e-mails, and recording your phone conversations? It's all designed to frighten us so we don't complain about our rights being taken away in the name of fighting whatever boogeyman they come up with today.
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Or XKeyscore.
Or Carnivore, or Room 641A, or even Project SHAMROCK in the telegram era.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/76bemv/tie...
You took a joke about the NA LoL teams being so bad compared to the other regions that it was considered a "free win", and turned it into a critique of Europe. Good job...
> Now we all have contingency plans for just that, and a lot of organisations are already actually doing it.
Who has actually done it?
What are you going to use instead? You could move servers off MS cloud platforms (although very little has actually happened and there seems to be very few places with a firm commitment to do it) but I am very sceptical that anyone is going to move client devices to anything other than MS, Apple and Google controlled OSes.
For computers we have linux, ok, but how are iOS and Android being replaced?
Mobile phones are baffling to me. I heard a story recently that the Venezuelan government is stopping people on the street and inspecting mobile phones for dissident content. In such an environment, why are people relying on phones for anything? Why trust it at all? This stupid device _could_ get you taken to prison for merely having the wrong ideas, but you've still _just got to_ use it! I'm starting to think that if mobile phones gave parents' children rapid, aggressive brain cancer, all anyone would be talking about is "regulation" and "minimizing usage."
And I know someone's going to say "not using a phone might look _more_ suspicious!" I suppose but the needle does need to turn at some point, right? This risk was pretty easily foreseeable. If you got arrested for what was found on your phone during an arrest would you ever look at the device the same way again? In 5 years, would you be using it for meaningful or private communication whatsoever?
Venezuela you say? The US would be checking my entire social media history, not only what is on the phone, if I ever plan to enter the US.
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Yeah I do think if your trust in state institutions is gone for whatever reason (such as living in a dictatorship), it'd be absolute madness to carry around an electronic snitch with you. I'm not sure what I would rely on in those circumstances, but it certainly wouldn't be smartphones. Personally I'd want to rely on in-person communication as much as possible.
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Phones are just an easy target. Dumb phones still have address books, these are social networks too that can be exploited. In fact, that's how Chechnya prosecutes and kills unwanted people, like gays or regime opponents - by unraveling phone contacts.
The EU is slowly weakening Google's grasp on Android, for example by evening the playing field for app stores. You can get google-free Android devices from both Chinese manufacturers and the Netherlands (Fairphone). They aren't terribly attractive right now, but that could quickly change if the demand exists
At that point Google would probably turn even more hostile to the open source nature of Android, leading to some sort of fork
Google is tightening their grip on Android. They are going to effectively kill of alternative app stores by requiring them to use Google's developer verification (there have been discussions on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569371 ). Many countries are introducing things such as age verification and ID apps that require Google Android. A lot of bank apps will only work with Google Android. This is why Fairphone offers a Google Android option, an I would guess that is what most people use.
There are lots of other problems. As discussed recently the HSBC app will not work if you have installed any software at all from another app store.
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"Google-free" FOSS Android-builds (Graphene, /e/, iodé) are available today and usable for most tasks. Just make sure your government IDs and banking apps don't depend on proprietary Google-only features.
Amusingly often banking are apps purpousefully configured to refuse working on the more secure Android builds ("SafetyNet").
If the EU made a decent certification option so that the Google Store wasn't necessary for a lot of our apps, then Graphene and similar would be good replacements. As it is I couldn't use a single app on my android phone (I basically only have public sector apps + banking) without the Google Store thing. Since these all either require the Google Store themselves or the national digital ID which does
> For computers we have linux
US has it. There are some non-US contributors, but, the Linux Foundation is in US, Linus is in US, kernel.org is in US.
My daily driver is a GNU/Linux phone, Librem 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
>There is a saying about how US citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies.
Almost always easier to pick a new company than a new government.
> Almost always easier to pick a new company than a new government.
As long as the company you left doesn't buy the company you just picked.
As long as you have decent antitrust regulation with teeth and you ignore all natural monopolies.
That's what democracy is supposed to fix
> ... 10 years ago people would've laughed if you talked about leaving Microsoft and iOS in enterprise. Now we all have contingency plans for just that, ...
If, at long last, Trump doing insane things can help get rid of that piece of undescribable turd that Windows is in the EU, please just please Trump: go take the Groenland.
As an EU citizen I'm gladly giving Groenland up (even if it's not in the EU but belongs to Denmark which is, itself, in the EU) if in exchange I don't ever have to see a computer running Windows ever again in Europe.
> As an EU citizen I'm gladly giving Groenland up (even if it's not in the EU but belongs to Denmark which is, itself, in the EU)
Nitpicky, but I guess ultimately it kind of/might matter: Greenland belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark (Danish Realm), not Denmark. Denmark (often called Denmark Proper) is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, which also Faroe Islands belong to. Denmark is in Europe + EU, Kingdom of Denmark isn't in EU, but main part of it is indeed in Europe.
I think if Greenland was actually part of Denmark, it too would be part of EU, as I don't think you can selectively "unmark" specific territories in a country to not be in EU if the country itself is in EU. But since Greeland isn't actually a part of Denmark, it isn't part of the EU.
> I think if Greenland was actually part of Denmark, it too would be part of EU, as I don't think you can selectively "unmark" specific territories in a country to not be in EU if the country itself is in EU.
Yes, you can. Plenty of overseas territories span the complete gamut between autonomous regions outside the EU and overseas EU regions. Each one is a special case and has specific reasons why there are inside or outside the EU.
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> Denmark is in Europe + EU, Kingdom of Denmark isn't in EU, but main part of it is indeed in Europe.
Main part by population. By area, not so.
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If Greenland is taken over by US, Windows will be your least of the problem. But tunnel vision is oh-so-common in Europe, both between politics and populace
iOS was always irrelevant in Europe. No regulation was needed, ever. It was useless.
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That is, of course, a deeply misleading characterization. You might as well start ranting about the EUSSR in your next comment. The US regime is deeply undemocratic, cleptocratic and corrupt, but delegating democratically elected power isn't undemocratic in itself.
The european parliament is elected by citizens, and the council is formed of the heads of state of each member country (which would have been elected in the way each country decides).
Which part with direct power isn't elected?
>>Unlike national governments, EU ruling regime is not elected by EU citizens.
It literally is. What a deeply misinformed and frankly misleading take.
You won’t ever be able to use anything but Microsoft and other American products. I feel sorry for you. Mr Trump and Lindsey are laughing directly at your face, it seems.
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