Comment by deaux
6 hours ago
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.
Nobody serious is advocating to avoid US tech altogether, at least unless Trump starts a hot war, but reducing dependency would be a very smart move.
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.
While it is a "massive endeavor", it is not impossible, it essentially amounts to writing portable code. A computer is a computer, and most of the tech stack in US cloud providers is based on open source projects.
Not depending on Chinese manufacturing is borderline impossible even if you are starting from scratch. Not only it will be way more expensive, with potentially longer delays and lesser capacities, but just finding some company that can and wants to do the job can be a nightmare. From what I have seen, many local manufacturers in the US and Europe are really there to fulfill government contracts that requires local production.
Most hardware kickstarter-like projects rely on Chinese manufacturing as if it was obvious. It is not "find a manufacturer", it is "go to China". Projects that instead rely on local (US/Europe) manufacturing in order to make a political statement have to to though a lot of trouble, and the result is often an overpriced product that may still have some parts made in China.
Anyone who thinks migrations at scale is just about “writing portable code” has never done a migration at scale.
A large corporation just migrating from everything hosted on VMs can take years.
And if you are responsible for an ETL implementation and working with AWS and have your files stored on S3 (every provider big and small has S3 compatible storage) and your data is hosted on Aurora Postgres, are you going to spend time creating a complicated ETL process or are you going to just schedule a cron job to run “select outfile into S3”?
And “most” of the services on AWS aren’t based on open source software and you still have to provision your resources using IAC and your architecture. No Terraform doesn’t give you “cloud agnosticism” any more than using Python when using AWS services.
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.
> the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before
I find this highly optimistic. It will take years, maybe decades for EU to replace US clouds and tech. And if they're going to do it with LLMs, then it will take billions of euros in devs and tokens (again, all going to US tech companies).
Meanwhile, USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Over the last decade USA and China have doubled-down on massive investments to out-compete each other while the EU seems like it's struggling to understand where to even begin.
Yes, I can see Claude Code making it easier to reproduce - Redshift (or Snowflake) - or anything else you need to be reliable and performant at scale.
Both products are nothing but reliable. Redshift can’t even go around partitioning limits, or S3 limits.
But what’s funny is that Claude Code is from US company so can’t be used in a boycott scenario
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