Comment by jacquesm
1 month ago
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
> the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it
That's usually what happens indeed. There is a lot of great tech coming from [the rest of the world] and being bought by the US.
> the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details
I kinda disagree there. The lack of competition is the problem today. If, instead of AWS, there were 50 services all over the world and companies were distributed amongst them, then it would be much less of a problem. The problem right now is that the US can bully entire countries because those countries 100% rely on US services.
Instead of building a European replacement for AWS, I would like to see open standards allowing companies to easily switch, and different providers competing behing those standards. Or even better: companies could even mix the services: say "I want my backups replicated between this French company and this Croatian one".
That's obviously the idea, but unfortunately everybody just wants convenience instead of decentralization. Hence Mastodon's amazing adoption rate...
Is there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?
There is in France. They have a government investment arm that will invest relatively small amounts but with a string attached: a veto on any majority acquisition. This was used for instance to block the takeover of Dailymotion by Yahoo iirc.
It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
Of course there is. Google Mush Ryanair, for one.
And just 2 seconds of thinking is enough to answer that question. Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML yet if money alone was enough?
I asked to discuss, not because I didn’t know the answer. Please attempt to be more polite in the future.
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It’s not a matter of mechanism. It’s a matter of mindset. Until today the mindset wasn’t there. Maybe this will change.
I'm not convinced. If a company owner can get rich by selling their company to the devil himself, they will rationalise it so well that the employees will think it's helping humanity.
And the EU governments will be advertising it.. already happened in Greece… few companies with strong core tech were bought by Microsoft and the gov was “so happy” for the “success story”.
Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
> Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
Though that's one of the easy ones. Get your own domain and you're free to use whatever you want forever.
That's not as simple as it may seem. I've been running my own mailserver on an alternate domain for decades now and it is one thing to be receiving mail there but to send it is a nightmare. Google, Microsoft etc have made it all but impossible to get through their anti-spam measures to the point that they reject tons of perfectly good mail.
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In theory yes, in practice the messages from your random domain way too often end up in spam for Gmail and Outlook users, if they get delivered at all.
The task of governments is to stop this. Just like how Musk is prohibited from buying EasyJet.
Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML if Europe would let them? They would've done so a decade ago. The exact same reasoning now needs to be applied to the likes of OVHCloud.