Comment by kmeisthax

As an extra anecdote: one of the things Cory Doctorow has been bringing up as a counterweight to US tech hegemony has been repealing anticircumvention laws that the US insisted upon as a condition of tariff-free market access that has now been rescinded. This is a good idea, but at the same time, the EC is never going to do it. We're already seeing with Stop Killing Games how even tangentially related consumer protection issues can and will be shot down with an insistence that IP is sacred and untouchable.

The reason for this is really simple: every pirate wants to be an admiral, and every client state wants to be an empire. We as tech consumers hear "sovereign cloud" and think "cutting out undue influence that US tech companies have in the EU". The EC hears "building our own tech monopolies to lock in other countries into our stack". Using SKG as an example again, the whole reason why SKG started was because of a French company, Ubisoft, killing one of their games. Why would the EC ever overrule their own industrial interests?

The EC was specifically and expressly built to be an antidemocratic bulwark against popular sovereignty. The entire concept of dividing people up by nation-states is already an antidemocratic exercise - e.g. France has 69,000,000 residents and Malta has 520,000, but both get one seat at the EC. And because the EC is made up of nation-state appointees and not elected representatives, they have all the incentive in the world to stab their own people in the back. The EC is the designated villain that the """liberal""" side of Europe's government uses to shut down democratic control (and, sometimes, even liberalism itself).

Some have pointed out that this is deliberate (and, supposedly, therefore good): that Malta would never have joined the EU if they didn't have veto powers over whatever France wanted to do. My counterargument is that veto powers are the last resort of the rich and powerful. You can either have strong protections[0] on national identity, or you can have democracy, but not both.

[0] To be clear, the way we deal with democracy being a tyranny of the majority is with liberalism: we explicitly declare certain things to be "human rights" and thus more or less off limits to the democratic process. This list is generally fixed (or at least, difficult to change) and thus less ripe for abuse than, say, having an entire wing of the government dedicated solely to overruling the people that is active all the time.