1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
You could apply this to Slack vs Teams as well. Slack was already good, Microsoft just duplicated their work, came out with an inferior product and won. So, was it worth it?
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely.
Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"
US: "please do not support our advesaries" EU: "builds nordstream"
US: "stop killing innovation" EU: " more regulation"
Now:
US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
US: "our tech companies will not listen to you" EU: "omg big bad america, we should try to make out own"
I don't like it but at the same time, it works? Let EU rally against US who cares as long as they actually do something.
Simply put absolute best thing for US is a strong EU. China is an advesary that will take the entire US system to challenge if EU can handle the rest then it's a win.
What this meant between the lines for 60+ years is “please increase military spending on US overpriced weapons that we gonna sell you, weapons will be degraded versions of native counterparts and don’t think about making your own independent military industry. Oh by the way bring those weapons when we will do 20 years of failed occupation in Middle East, because we are the only country in NATO that triggered article 5 and bunch of Euros died for nothing. Because that’s the deal, we protect you, for the economic price of helping our imperial hegemony since 1940s stay at the top, but suddenly we decided this is a bad deal after all.”
The EU can't realign itself with China because that would destroy the last fragile bits of the EU economy that are left. They are already having issues with the excess supply lands on their shores even since the USA started tariffs with China. They can't deal with this long term.
The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff. Now what the president of the US achieved is that we want to spend more to develop our own local alternatives and improve them, not buy more from the US. Why would we buy from you if your president threatens to invade Greenland?
Also - military spending was increased not because Trump bullied us into it doing it. It was seen as necessary because of russian attack on Ukraine. Trump was not some genius diplomacy mastermind. He is a man child that is pissed of for not getting the Nobel peace price. How childish is that? This is not some person who can be taken seriously in any way.
Regulation is good, Micro-USB and USB-C for phones and computer chargers is better than the dozens of different chargers that was before. Only Apple was unhappy and didn't want it. We don't want big US tech companies to steal our personal data and do whatever they want wit it.
Also - now trump is pissed off at Canada for trying to get a trade deal with China, when it was he himself who first said Canada should become a part of the US, started with random bs tariffs on canadian goods, etc. What else can you expect from Canada, why should they not try to find a more reliable trade partner? How can it be rational, what Trump is doing?
This is an interesting take. You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
It ignores the fact that, on the rare occasion the Trump administration was not actively trying to undermine the EU, their "helpful advice" has always boiled down to "you should be more like us, and not being like us means you're failing."
My opinion, which I believe is common among Europeans, is that the opposite is true.
Have you ever stopped to think that maybe a large number of Europeans look at the lack of US regulation with disgust?
Am I missing something? [1] lists Guangzhou’s GDP as 435,746 M USD, while [2] lists Russia’s GDP as 2,173,836 M USD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
Sure, the US admin wants a strong US military, for example, ideally with 100% US weapons. Etc.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
EU countries give final approval to Russian gas ban - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-countries-give-fi... | https://archive.today/wOHeR - January 26th, 2026
> Under the agreement, the EU will halt Russian liquefied natural gas imports by end-2026 and pipeline gas by September 30, 2027.
> The law allows that deadline to shift to November 1, 2027, at the latest, if a country is struggling to fill its storage caverns with non-Russian gas ahead of winter.
> Russia supplied more than 40% of the EU's gas before 2022. That share dropped to around 13% in 2025, according to the latest available EU data.
> The European Commission plans to also propose legislation in the coming months to phase out Russian pipeline oil, and wean countries off Russian nuclear fuel.
Ember Energy: The final push for EU Russian gas phase-out - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-final-push-for-... - March 27th, 2025
Considering Russian's invasion started February 24, 2022, it's fairly impressive Europe has only needed ~5 years to disconnect entirely from Russian gas supplies. Better late than never. They've proven they have the capacity to achieve these objectives in a timely manner, when motivated.
You mean 2014.
But thank you for proving my point. 2014 - 2027 just a short 15 years (assuming it actually happens I have my doubts).
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards! Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
Basically all videoconferencing (except teams) is built on the back of French open source software.
I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.
From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its succeeding at it.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
It is so difficult we still to get a working visa into Western EU. The way this is done is by total bureaucratic nature of Ausländerbehörde.
When he was CTO from Netflix, Gaurav Agarwal Could not get a visa to relocate to Germany. (No more with Netflix)
So even of one has > €80K salary and working in Apple or MS hq in Munich it is pain in the arse.
On the other hand this is encouraging people to apply and get passports. I for one would have never naturalised as German if the residence permit was quick and easy.
In summary, there are encouraging people to migrate.
Many of people I know (or friends of friends/brothers) are migrating from America to either Europe or shifting back to India.
I don't think that America can particularly do something about it. Trust's pretty fragile.
You’re (deliberately?) confusing the issue with e.g. illegal immigration or asylum seekers who often come from poor, war-torn areas with little education and possibly a very different mind-set.
I haven’t been accosted by roving gangs of well-educated IT Indians, I find the thought funny ;)
I have heard this deal be described as EU beneficiary from EU sources.
Ah yes, I feel like what you want for an EU is a connection with America which has been a very unreliable partner would even be an understatement in today's geopolitical environment.
It's saddening to see if you are from EU who actually believes so. I am more than happy to answer your queries in good faith but this just feels like pushing some of your own agenda or straight up racist.
We come with open arms even though the massacre of jallianwala bagh is still in our memories. There is just no question regarding the fact that EU primarily british forces had extracted immense wealth from India and India had to primarily rebuild it from scratch healing from the scars of its colonial past.
There's actually an internal pushback from some people i feel like who feel like EU is still imperialist & want to shut down this deal from India side given India hasn't lost much after the trump's tariffs compared to EU whose greenland was in some serious sovereign threats.
But I guess the point is that EU India deal is inevitable in this multi polar deal. India wants EU to be the financial hub where EU can then reinvest in India and India can create technological innovation.
I have tried to respond with as much calm as possible but I must admit that your message felt like a must admit,ragebait to me in start but I hope that this detailed message can help clear up on the details.
If you have any reasonable questions man, feel free to ask!
I wouldn't consider it a rant per se but rather that India's trying to move towards an multi polar deal and EU and India actually has a more net negative and Indians are wary of this deal even more so but on aggregate the deal would be extremely beneficial if seen from both sides with reason.
Also isn't UK trying to pester back into the EU again. It's super complicated to follow even as someone who follows geo-politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_re-accession_of_the_...
> I mean perhaps, yea I must've got sidetracked by India's colonial past but for the average Indian I would consider for that passage that they generally equate UK to be part of EU usually. (Perhaps from the pre-brexit era's or just in general)
When I started writing about jallianwala bagh I probably got distracted because I used to be part of drama club and we had this act when we were young and literally the amount of people dying and everything truly shocks one & genuinely disturbs one.
I recommend this documentary to know more about Jallianwala bagh massacre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9JZJx67cvo
I think my point which kind of got muddied up is that India wants to cozy up to EU and build things together but not to UK so much. India's extremely sensitive regarding UK given its past and in this deal,is cautious about EU and UK making ties again or any such discussions too.
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
What is the reason Linus lives in Oregon? By his own admission, 90% of his workday is reading and answering email. We have email in Europe, so that can’t be it.
Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
In addition to that, since we're on the car angle, Chinese EVs are basically just privacy nightmares. I mean, all cars are at this point, but that's why we definitely don't want Chinese ones coming across the Canadian border and ending up all over the place.
In the end there are in fact legitimate national security concerns that the tariffs address and Canada risks weakening those. So, that is the actual answer to why.
Kind of proved the point of America being an un-reliable partner which is what I inferred from Canadian PM's speech & his call for middle economies to connect with each other and strengthen together to have more leverage overall.
The previous Canada-US relationship is gone. Months ago I wrote on HN that purely by virtue of having to weather this storm, the nature of Canada-US relations will be irrevocably and fundamentally altered. Even if Trump and his cronies were jailed tomorrow, it's too late. The rest of the world understands that Trump is just a symptom of the disease affecting America and it's going to get worse, not better.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
What failed with Mistral?
Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?
Before or after the bubble pops?
What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
To be fair this example does look a lot like insanity.
Nothing is truly irreplaceable
I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.
Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
Realistically there is zero alternative to US tech/online dominance in sight in Europe and the credible competitors are more likely to be Chinese (tiktok, temu, shein, etc.) What is happening is EU politics.
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has a GDP of:
Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont
put together.
That's the equivalent of 18 states.
Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.
Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.
By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?
What do you mean?
I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
The regulations were insane.
I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
- signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)
As a European that has to filter all his water, and with family in Europa that has to cook water every day, that is a statistic to be proud of! I don’t know the numbers over here but I bet it is a lot more than 3%.
In Amsterdam it’s around 13% of households that have lead pipes.
And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.
There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.
If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
It was good enough for the US.
For electronic products, it should be enough to get the CE mark on your product, and it can be sold in any country. That is the point of the EU, that any company can sell it's products or services in the whole union, there are regulations, but they are union wide, not specific for each country.
Unless you were making something very special, that each country wants to and is allowed to regulate separately.
Taxes can be different, the VAT % is different in each country. But so is it also in each county or town in the US, and your people claim that this is the reason why you can't include taxes on prices in grocery shops, which is difficult to believe here for our people. So dealing with different tax rates shouldn't be big news for you? I mean... there are lots of online shops that know about different tax rates, it's not difficult. Or you could let someone else handle it for you.
The US does not have that.
A lot of things good enough for the US are not considered suitable or safe here.
Correctly so, I might add.
If your government is not concerned with public safety, why should the EU adopt the same stance?
What does that say for the EU?
Hope you don't accidentally fall off a historical ledge that can't get a handrail.
Without being more specific, the only thing I can presume is that you were unwilling to follow regulations here.
I furnished and equipped my home a couple of years ago, and I had plenty of options for dishwashers, from multiple brands. Many different models at varied price points.
This tells me that serious companies have little problems to follow regulations to compete here.
This all really sounds like a "you" problem.
India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU or US
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
Have you used Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
So it's not just a failing of Teams.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
Export tarrifs aren't really a thing, particularly for software. Making US cloud more expensive would only make transitioning away from them faster.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
In a multipolar world you don't critically need that if you can order your hardware from party I when party C or U shuts you out.
Remember that China is running their own Android island with Huawei and Xiaomi. Yes, a lot of Chinese people flash the Play Store, but it isn't strictly necessary. Not hard to imagine the EU and India creating their own islands too.
Kind of wicked we have to think this way though. I much prefer a world with the maximum healthy amount of open trade and travel.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
If AOSP is suddenly the only acceptable smart-os on phones for 600 million people, I think it would work out yes.
There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.
Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.
But I think we can agree that an ally by definition is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.
It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.
Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all the US wanted. Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days.
I think you’ll find the EU doesn’t have much appetite for this sort of thing. They’ll take the risk at face-value, and put mitigations in place going forward (including if necessary, divestment from US tech firms)
You did not need any more strengthening of any military treaties with Denmark, the US could already open as any military bases on Greenland, there was nothing stopping you from doing that, sending more of your army there to deter China or Russia, or whatever else. Here, https://people.com/donald-trump-wants-ownership-greenland-ps... He is saying he needs to own it to personally feel good. How does this make sense diplomatically?
Any excuses you make will not make him look better or make him look like he can be trusted. If you want to achieve something in international politics have to be made carefully, not by threatening to annex Canada or parts of your allied countries.
Your president is just destroying the good image and goodwill towards the US with his 'negotiation style'. His style is childish bullying and temper tantrums, he can not be taken seriously as a reliable partner when he can say one thing today, and tomorrow say something totally different, even if you think you have reached an agreement with him on something.
The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.
Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.
Trust has been eroded.
There is a difference between a nation (USA) and its president having the theoretical power to shut down whole parts of your infrastructure which everyone agrees “that would never happen” versus it having happened multiple times already. Then the setting up of separate boards, basically retreating from NATO/NAVO, the military threat against Greenland. It doesn’t inspire confidence. He has been breaking with “things that you just don’t do” for a while now.
Good luck meeting China without friends. Clearly brilliant statesmanship. Europe is able to read, the room, the situation, and the National Security Strategy, which makes it pretty clear that meddling with European democracy is a important foreign policy.
Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.
There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.
We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.
Not to mention that threatening to go to war with an ally as a negotiating tactic is crazy regardless of how inconsistent you are about it.
Tariffs + coercion via-vis EU tech regulation + Greenland are rapidly making the transatlantic tech status quo untenable.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.
Now everybody realises you can trust no one.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
I assume, then, that culture would be doomed to fail.
If providers like OVH play their cards right, they can use this sudden influx of cash to both scale up, and improve their offerings. There's a lot of money on the table right now.
AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
The problem is when US decides to ban sales of compute hardware to EU (like they do to China). Then it will be clear who's really in power.
If China closed the door overnight to the US, it would also be clear who's really in power.
The US simply does not have the capacity to replicate the manufacturing domestically.
Even if it were possible, "100% Made in the US" would end up costing at least 20–30% more.
And the US does not have a plan B. Sure there might be India .... one day....years away.
I keep wondering though. Is insane amount of compute really that crucial? Aren't most real computing needs served well with not so cutting edge tech? I am 5-10 years behind on most of my machines. Servers we have at work are very modest (and outdated) yet the software these servers power are still valuable. Maybe EU could run on some domestic RISC-V cheapo chips.
The worst thing in the long-term for American hardware makers is for the US to block other countries to purchase from them and having that money invested in alternatives.
Not true.
But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?
Transparent pricing.
EU company: Yes, you really can accurately calculate to the nearest cent how much your compute instance will cost you and exactly what you are getting for that money. No surprises.
US company:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network "up to" ? And then of course the big "I DUNNO" in relation to "how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"
EU company: Of course we don't charge you for LIST etc. on S3. We only charge you for off-network GETs and the associated data transfer, on-network is free.
US company: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?
You know what else I like about the EU companies ?
At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.
Yes that's right US companies. It IS possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an "oops I just spent a million dollars overnight" moment.
Which they are.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
They already did it for the Ministry of Education with [La Forge](https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/). Used to be forgejo, now a GitLab instance.
This can go as far as we want )
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.
Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
Small steps, but steps.
The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...
https://livekit.io/ https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
https://jitsi.org/ https://www.opendesk.eu/en
As an aside I am surprised it has taken this long but seems inevitable now given the last 18 months.
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
I wonder if the emoji will grow into its own set:
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/src/fronten...
The reason why Google Docs somewhat managed to break this was 1. free, 2. multiplayer/easy to share.
One law about requiring the state documents to be submitted in open formats, editable in libre software... and the lock instantly breaks.
That's exactly what we need though, so I see that as a plus.
I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.
Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.
There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#:~:text=LaSuite%20étant%2...
I wonder what would happen if EU countries started encouraging ad blocking via their ISP DNS servers?
"What do they call it?"
"Le Zoom"
Ah yes, the mythical AngryOpenSourceNerd, heard about his Kick channel.
If an organisation ran it's own instance, it would only need to scale for that organisation ( including any external attends over a bridge ).
That does of course assume companies have the expertise/appetite to run things themselves.
Which itself links to:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
I see a lot of talk about "sovereignty" and "European software". What I don’t see is action.
Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
Of course. I just hope these people know that for example healthcare in Europe is by no means free.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...
As a bonus, all that spend doesn't make us better in outcomes.
https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low#life-expec...
There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell.
We Asked 300 People About Health Care Costs. The Numbers Are Shocking. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-... | https://archive.today/MnYz9 - January 22nd, 2026
If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.
But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.
What you get back is great worker protection, child care, free education and generally a feeling of safety for yourself and family. We also have a democracy that offers more than two choices!
Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.
Other than that I agree I'd love to move there.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
You're "not really worrying" ... whilst you are in a job.
There fixed that for you.
As I am sure you are acutely aware US is the home of lay-offs and is generally easy to fire people.
If you loose your job in the US it becomes panic stations because you loose that precious employer-paid healthcare overnight.
Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.
Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".
High risk, high reward and all that. Although, the previous 20 years of high compensation are obviously no indication of the next 20.
Europe is a _very_ different place.
Not everything here is so bad.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
Afterwards you have to pay some of the highest taxes in the world....
https://www.tech-careers.nl/job-seeker-visa-for-tech-roles-i...
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
Earlier repo submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
Edit: I'm not saying they don't.
But I can't figure out how to replace GSuite.
And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it for other more serious work projects.
Hetzner has basic load-balancing and security around the VPS and that's it, OVH has a bit more but it all looks quite green.
So a huge waste of taxpayers money...
This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
This is the press release:
https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/souverainete-numerique-letat...
