Comment by mrdevlar
5 days ago
This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu.
It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech.
We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, so we're phasing you out. It'll take decades to repair the lost trust in US digital services among the governments of Europe.
If it's the same woman I'm thinking of Office365 is underselling it a bit - she's fully sanctioned by the US. She can't use debit/credit cards, any Apple/Google device or service, Amazon/eBay, etc. She's completely digitally crippled by sanctions. And she's one of several people.
As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.
Yes, I'm aware of the rest of it, I just didn't feel it particularly relevant to the discussion.
Yes, I'm with you. I'm grateful that most of the news I hear about this is relatively positive. I'm actually kind of in awe of how fast it's all moving. For all the talk about slow Europeans, that single ICC action seems to have launched a ton of initiatives.
I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).
> take a decade
More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.
> More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay
And now you know where that $4.7B fine will be spent. Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?
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I definitely started out typing out the plural, but thought I should temper my words a bit for some reason.
They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.
Some are more exposed than others.
I don't doubt there are some, but GP made it sound like every European company and institution is working feverishly on it, which just cannot be true.
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