Comment by flumpcakes
12 days ago
What I think most US people don't realise, is this would overnight start the slow but complete collapse of the US and it's economy.
Europe can make alternatives to US tech, and with it's track record it will probably be more open with more legitimate options and less predatory monopolies.
Once that is established with a home grown market of 450m people it will start competing with US in all the other markets.
Let's not forgot how many EU people work for US tech.
I suspect the wheels are in motion for many such transitions away from US dependency, in software and other fields.
Whenever trust is massively breached, and I believe much of the EU feels strongly that the US has breached trust, the natural action is to regroup and then gradually begin figuring out how to not be vulnerable to the same risk again.
If the US continues escalating the Greenland situation I expect that process will speed up massively.
Europe can make alternatives to US tech
Then why are there approximately no European tech companies? You remember that FT graph....
We did have alternatives to US tech, they just lost competition (fair or not) to US companies, and because tech is a winner takes it all industry, they ceased to exist. Should US companies leave EU though, we absolutely are in a position to have our own tech again.
They are either crushed my American monopolies and enforcing US laws abroad, or European companies are bought-out wholesale by American companies. Europe was too scared to enforce their own protectionist schemes because it always upset the US. Europe could be a superpower, if it wanted to.
The article discusses many of the (unfair) tactics which have lead to US tech dominance.
The easy part of a smartphone to create for EU is the part that is done in the US.
The difficult part is the hardware. That is also why the iPhone is produced in Asia. Replacing TSMC is much more difficult than the software.
> iPhone is produced in Asia. Replacing TSMC
iPhone chips are largely produced in Arizona, and TSMC's 2nm fabs are scheduled to come online by 2028. 30% of TSMC's global production is schedule to be produced in America.
USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the USA mainland for a long time now.
Contrast with the EU which has done nothing to become self-reliant, and really just has no ideas. It is unfortunate.
Which iPhone chips? The A19 in the latest iPhones use TSMC N3P which AFAIK Arizona is not equipped to produce.
It appears that TSMC are not deploying the latest nodes to US for multiple years after they've entered volume production in Taiwan.
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Creating good smartphone software is not easy. Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close. The rest are so far behind in the race they think they are leading.
Because there was arguably no need for a third option. The current duopoly only exists because it was seen as risk-free, and propping up an alternative was seen as uneconomical.
> Creating good smartphone software is not easy.
Yes, but it's not rocket science either (and even if it were, the EU has both rocket scientists and a space port).
Maybe it's been too long for people to even imagine it, but European companies were fully capable of developing a smartphone OS and running an app certification platform (there were no app stores yet, as the industry was very fragmented) less than two decades ago.
I would argue MS did with windows phone, and Palm and Nokia did too. BlackBerry as well, but less flexibly.
They weren’t commercially successful because of network effects, which I think matter less when your back is against the wall to migrate away from the duopoly.
Android is open source (decreasingly, but still). A reasonable starting point would be forking it and adding replacements for the proprietary Google Play services, app store etc.
Gobally Android also has a much larger market share than Apple. (Yes the US is the opposite, it is an outlier.)
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> Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close.
Debatable
Android is a solid basis for a homegrown solution. We just never had the need to build one just yet. What Google and Apple built was convenient. But it's not as irreplaceable as some might think.
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Apple was behind Google for the longest time, lacking very basic features they didn't get until years later. Don't let the blue bubbles cult fool you.
Technically, sure, but as long as the US dollar is the 'world reserve currency' any attempt to do so that would threaten to be a success can be easily 'bought out' by the US just by creating a few more bits on a ledger.
USD is about 2/3 of foreign exchange reserves. Which definitely is the lion's share. However, the more the US prattles about, the lower that ratio will become, the less soft power the US has.
It’s rapidly declining as the world reserve. Thats part of the over 10% decline in the value of the dollar last year (it still amazes me that those prattling on about the rise in the S&P last year dont realize that of the 16% increase, over 10% was eaten up by the USD falling, so the real increase was closer to 6% which is remarkably average if not below average, when considering higher than normal inflation).
The other part that Americans aren’t seeing coming is a reduction in the reduced willingness of the rest of rhe world to finance American debt. The last few rounds have seen a much higher percentage of corporate debt purchases as opposed to sovereign purchases. Which is fine for now, but if a slowdown hits, corporate purchases of U.S. debt will reduce in a way sovereign purchases never did (in fact those tend to increase).
That would severely impact the ability of the Fed to goose a slowing economy by lowering interest rates.
It's only one of many; I think (armchair gut feeling etc, not an economist) that the euro was one of the best economic decisions in recent history. Unless Europe falls apart - which currently many outside forces are trying to achieve - the euro will remain one of the safest currencies to use.
Except that the US Dollar is declining as a "world reserve currency" [1].
[1]: https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/currencies...