Comment by 201-12958
7 hours ago
The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
If you want to do your part as a consumer, boycott all American products:
7 hours ago
The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
If you want to do your part as a consumer, boycott all American products:
https://di.day/
When my country and China had border clashes, there was a nation-wide grassroot level movement to boycott Chinese goods and services where possible. It worked to an extent but it fizzled out in few weeks/months. Some of the reasons were the impracticality of total boycott so you start from a position of compromise, difficulty to sustain a movement born out of anger and some inter-govt agreements to avoid escalations etc.
Do you have plans to overcome those sort of challenges and sustain this initiative ?
You speak about India?
Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.
The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.
> only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake
If only! We just outsourced all our agriculture to Latin America (MERCOSUR free trade agreement).
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>> Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity. You can't reach that goal without collaboration and trade. If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers, the US, China and Russia, in order of importance, who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.
Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.
I mean if the world has gone mad, don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.
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Boycotting US tech is magnitudes easier than boycotting Chinese-made products. They're in whole different universes. Especially on a country level, let alone a EU level.
Is removing the dependence on US tech easy for the EU? No, it's tough and takes a lot of work and time. It's still a piece of cake compared to the dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They're incomparable.
Does that include not using AWS or anyone that is a host interface to AWS? Does that include social media like hacker news or instagram? I have no stakes here (I'm an American who doesn't run a tech business) but it seems like it would be unfathomly difficult if not impossible to avoid US tech altogether.
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The most critical and impactful modern day tech is smartphone and that is US tech.
As long as mobile os and adjacent services like the store etc are controlled there is no true path to digital independence especially in a highly digitalized region like the EU.
One example is if EU allows the Android developer verification to pass this year in its current or even in more relaxed form, that just means EU is still open for some hard lessons in the future.
Tell that to all the companies that built their entire tech stacks on US cloud providers...
Massive endeavor for a lot of setups.
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By the way, the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before to reduce that dependence, as the cost of reproducing many of the mature technologies is going to cost less than it would have before. Ironically, doing that may require using US tools (like Claude Code), at least for now, but it could be a very interesting evolution/opportunity for Europe.
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The government has to mandate it on some level with purchasing power.
If the government switched away from Microsft and refused to accept MS document formats for any legal reason - then things might shift.
Most businesses just don't care, they want they easy button.
A law firm does not want to screw around, they just click 'buy' on Word, Outlook, Teams.
There's a deep psychology to it.
I remember a developer telling me that Oracle 'was the only real database'.
It's not so much propaganda, just the propagandistic power of incumbency. People who only know one thing are hard pressed to believe there could be something else.
This is more than 50% brand, narrative etc.
We techies tend to underestimate the power of perception, even when it's of our own creation etc. i.e. people fighting over Linux and it's various distros.
It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.
to be honest I don't expect a effective long term consumer boycott
but any companies which have their brand closely tied to the US image (e.g. Coca Cola) will most likely have bug issues
and if people have a choice between a product from a company they now is EU or better local and one where they don't know about it the choice will be influenced by it
and maybe we can finally take tear down some of the absurd misinformation companies and corruption originating from MS and similar. (E.g. systematic malicious misinformation often supplemented with non fair competition/subsidization and outright bribery (no joke, MS has (through middle mans) wide spread bribed public, research and school organizations in Germany, like actual bribes, not just things which should count as bribes but do not(1)))
(1): I knew some people which had been involved in it. But any case where legal actions where taken ended without relevant outcome because all the blame always feel to the sales middle man AFIK and supposedly MS didn't know. Also the bribes mostly ended up as additional founding for the research institute and only in small parts in personal pockets from what I have heard. At the same time politics have caused so massive issues due to incompetently made laws and regulations for many public organizations that accepting this bribes and using them as additional founds often looked as a necessary evil... :sob: (yes I know there are not emotes on HN)
Can't wait to fund even more corrupt EU bureaucrats with my taxes.
>The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
I for one seriously doubt they assume such a thing. They are most likely given something in return that they think somehow makes such a trade worth it. Whether it's access to some fancy US intel/survelliance tech, "discounts" on US defense purchases or what have you, until you get transparency or clarity on the very specific items included in all these deals it's hard to determine the scale of their stupidity. It's either that or personal bribes, blackmail, and kickbacks to key EU politicians depending on the EU country in question.
If there was a "false assumption" above all others it was most likely the assumption that the post-WWII US foreign policy towards Europe would continue to the end of their lifetimes.
Since "Cola" is listed in the "popular alternatives" box, I think it's important to mention that most European Coca-Cola bottlers operate as franchises, i.e. they license the Coca-Cola brand and get the syrup for the drinks they bottle from the Atlanta-based HQ, but other than that they are locally-owned companies. So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
That just means they have all the infrastructure they need to bottle syrup from another source and start selling that instead - no capex needed, just maybe need to get together with other franchisees and figure out how to spend some opex on marketing and getting it onto store shelves. Coca-cola has a moat, but it's hardly protective of franchisees here.
There must be thousands of soda manufacturers in Europe. I can buy dozens of sodas where I live. But they are not Coca Cola.
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Someone just used gas chromatography to develop a seemingly passable knock off of the unpatented Coca Cola formula and posted it online. https://youtu.be/TDkH3EbWTYc
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It's arguably unhealthy that one company has such global dominance over any market, even a trivial one like soft drinks.
> So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.
exactly idk. about other EU Countries but at least in Germany outside of small country side stores you tend to have a very wide variety of "alternative" soft drinks. Some trying to emulate some big brand (e.g. Coca Cola) but also many keeping the concept (Cola) and putting their own twist on it. Most importantly most of them seem to be EU based (and often Germany based and sometimes local to your region).
The main drawback of them is that due to them operating on a (way) smaller scale and need to have a factor to differentiate themself, so most of them are more expensive. (but there are cheap no-brand clones, too).
A much bigger problem is that Nestle and co. try to either buy up any new innovative successful German food/drink companies. Sure after being bought up they tend to continue operate like before so technically they aren't dependent on the US, but they have been bought up anyway.
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If you totally remove Coke from the market, sure, but no one wants to drink a knockoff Coke, they want the actual thing.
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Good thing that locally we produce other sugary drinks that we can buy instead!
China making a firewall so that it would grow its own tech industry instead of relying on the US was, in retrospect, a really smart move.
It was also very smart of them to send their citizens to US universities and companies and exfiltrate research and IP to grow their own tech industry...