Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch.
Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.
This is even worse. For instance, in a medical university, we
recently were told we need a smartphone and install an app
from Google store (!!!), in order to read emails sent out
by officials at the medical university. I protested to that
but they had a deal already with the private company and
their signature meant they had to keep on being addicted to
that private company, so now I am locked out of receiving
emails since for redirect you also need to have that app
installed once. I don't have a smartphone though and I
find it outrageous that people are forced to install it
AND forced to use Google Store, for publicly funded (!!!)
universities here in central Europe. Some lobbyists are
currently getting very rich. I call it theft of taxpayer's
money though.
I don't know where you are, and I'm not an expert, but a job requiring specific technology typically means it is your employer's responsibility to provide that technology. So if they signed a contract that mandates you have a smartphone, you can use your own if you like, but I think they are legally required to provide you with one if you choose not to buy one. In fact in most cases, I think they should prefer that (since the security of your personal device is very much none of their business).
I think this is kind of a ticking time bomb with a lot of companies depending on personal devices for 2FA.
Which is exactly the point of the whole "sovereignty" debate: on one hand there's a lot of slop about "national interest" and "privacy" and "features" and such, and on the other hand management decides for whoever offers something (anything) cheaper and with a golf tournament on top. And then everybody moans and complains about the situation.
European companies just ignore privacy and make their lawyers write increasingly contorted cya statements. I’ve worked in several and the idea we shouldn’t be using American hyperscalers (remember, the CLOUD act means hosting in Europe is useless) gets laughs.
As tech worked who has worked in US FAANGs (still in europe)... the difference is immense.
EU companies simply can't compete and will never be able to compete until they change the mindset. And the change must be pervasive, across all aspects (including IC compensation).
Oh boy, that server story is painful to read. That ain't universal across providers. I work at european data center and was a tech and the worst SLA is like next business day and even then if our hardware is at fault, you won't be waiting for the next day for us to start taking action on it. And if you have a feeling you're left in dark, you can even pick up the phone at middle of the night to call our support and either get some status or light some fire that will prioritize the process in the pipeline (well, to actually DO something other than cold reboot at night time you may need to purchase SLA that will require involvement of higher support level at nighttime/holiday)
There are some things that I'd like to be improved in technical support side, but we are way better in "human reachability", responsiveness and "blame game" point of view than US hyperscalers.
if the EU furniture maker has the correct mindset and the EU tech company does not then it seems to me the conclusions fall apart
>European tech imported the product ambition. It forgot to import the customer obsession that’s supposed to come with it.
The French furniture maker didn't import the customer obsession. I agree that U.S tech in these particular subsets are better at the EU doing it, and that needs to be fixed but you can't really talk about how great U.S tech is when you can also point at thousands of horrifying lack of support stories from them also.
U.S Tech has a good mindset for replacing hardware when it fails, they have a good workflow for that. The idea that they have good support however should be tempered by regular reading of some sort of online tech news aggregator.
Yeah the problem with EU is that once "compliance" becomes the only reason, lethargy kicks in. Their players stop competing because they have no incentive to, the compliance will keep them afloat.
I would assume the same here. If they are forced to move to EU just because of compliance, the alternatives would remain poor quality.
Doing business with the US is just impossible these days. If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners.
I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out
- Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.
- Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.
- Majority see these but just move on
- 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat
- Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.
- Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks
The concern is not so much that the US will lose friends moreso that other business partners will become more prominent. The US has a lot of social capital to burn. I’m not certain that somebody hasn’t calculated how much they can get away with…
Meanwhile Trump threatened China with 100+% tariffs. The EU just suspended an exemption for small personal packages that was due to expire in 2028 anyway.
I mean, if you saw the Canadian PMs speech at davos, you'd know "the west" is already distancing itself from the US. This is not a hypothetical, it has begun.
It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night, it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect, but it is happening, and has been happening for over a year.
A speech is the definition of a hypothetical. I can show you a million Trump speeches that "show" the opposite. Something tells me you wont take those as gospel for some reason.
>It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night
Oh really? I thought we're ABOUT to find out what it's like to have no allies or business partners? Weird!
>it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect
Ah, the magic "it's happening but I can't prove it, so trust me bro". Meanwhile, I can point you to tangible metrics showing the world is moving away from the EU to China, meaning the EU will have zero trade with anyone else in short order (trust me it's really happening).
False equivalency. Trump constantly says whatever he wants in plain contradiction to verifiable facts:
The strait is open!
We win the war!
I’m not in the Epstein files!
Those may be the facts now, but not forever. It's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect. That doesn't mean what he's saying is not about to come true.
the other ~~subsidiary of AIPAC~~ party will be in power again in less than 3 years and everything will go back to business as usual. a divorce from the US is the last thing the EU really wants.
The EU keeps trying to manifest the missing european data infrastructure via data regulation instead of outright bans and limits on american companies, the way China did it.
No, we shouldn't act like (stupid) children. We should enact a transition based on what we can do and when. I know that nuanced and complex solutions to complex problems don't fire up voters anywhere, but that's the only way to not shoot our own feet.
Alternately, it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe. The Dutch American Friendship Treaty accidentally enables this and has become quite popular, but is only for one country.
And then what's gonna happen to the (already fucked)Dutch housing market?
> it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe
Only if it's bidirectional. If Americans can gentrify me out of the EU housing market with their higher purchasing power, then I should also have access to their labor market for those six figure wages to compensate. Tit for tat, as freedom of movement works in the EU. Otherwise it's just monetary colonialism. Imagine if Swedes were allowed to move to Spain but spaniards would not allowed to go work in Sweden.
They should, but the entire EU economy runs on US clouds. It's hard enough to get new hardware as it is (US hardware btw), so how should the EU, especially today, move to sovereign clouds within the next few years?
I'd argue every single EU business with more than five employees would be impacted by such a decision. Just pulling the plug would be economic suicide.
Seems to me they’re waiting it out. Everything could change in a presidential election and the European economy wins either way. It is an economic bloc after all.
What you describe would be what’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face”
The problem with "everything could change in a presidential election" is that offers no stability. No one wants to plan around "maybe the United States goes rabid again in four years".
The current arrangement has been torpedoed a long time ago already, with the Patriot Act (2001) (though it took many years to understand the extent of it).
> Everything could change in a presidential election
A lot can change, but not everything. Trump won twice and republican elites are fully behind him. Even if he looses, the same ideologies will continue. It happened twice, it is not a fluke but a permanent property of American politics.
Moreover, constitutional changes supreme court created are structural change. They will be super hard to undone - first they would need to change supreme court composition. The influence of money in American politics will just grow, the structural advantages of conservatives have in voting system will just grow and next conservative president will have even more space for maneuvering. (Non conservative one will likely be stopped by supreme court on some excuse.)
So, basically, outside of change actual constitution which is impossible, it will stay the same at best in the long term.
Privacy laws are actually one of the very useful things that came out. It is difficult to do the same in the US because of the business lobby. It is crazy that US citizens data can be purchased in the “black” market and the used by the agencies. Leaving tech companies to self regulate is just not viable and it is proven time and time again they cannot do it.
Outright bans would destroy European companies that rely on American companies. First they need to build their own infrastructure (which China has done).
Legislation for a ban will take years anyway, and will have sunrise/sundown provisions. This will provide ample time to build the infrastructure. But infra won't happen without mandating the transition, since market incentives will always pull against it.
The only answer isn't to sink to the lowest common denominator.
Ban or tax things from the "globalised" world that are just worker/societal/environmental protection arbitrage so they're competing for the EU market on a level playing field, then we'll see who can compete.
The EU is plenty big enough to be self-sufficient if it has to and shouldn't be afraid of risking this if abusive and exploitative companies from other places don't way to pay their way.
The EU isn’t a country, which is exactly why things are lacking vision and feel confusing. The EU is actually too decentralized and fragmented for its own good, contrary to what people whine about.
We need more federalism, and an actual single market
Tbf it could reduce hiring friction and make it easier to take a chance on a riskier hire. Also makes it easier for workers to change jobs, notice periods here can be outright insane (3 months in some cases) and even as an employee I hated them.
It's more simple than that; lack of investment due to various factors among which some are due to regulations, but also because the lower ROI you get in the USA due to corporate culture, higher cost in general (wages, energy, resources, manufacturing, etc.), slower economic growth and so on.
Check Swiss worker protections compared to France or Germany and then check their economy and tech companies there. Biggest Google office outside the US is in Switzerland.
It's not better worker output, it's faster movement and pivoting to rapid changing market conditions as a company, if you can get rid of slackers that abuse unions and worker protections to coast and do nothing.
As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.
IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.
A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning.
The way this is going is definitely worrying, but what you're saying is disingenous at best.
Furthermore, even if this passes somehow, that doesn't change the fact that the US remains an unreliable partner. Now we have two governments scouring through your data instead of one.
The EU isn’t a single entity, it’s a whole ecosystem of actors pushing their own agenda. The parliament, which represents the people, has been very clearly opposed to chat control
This seems like a very good principle to adhere to in general. Anything that is funded by the public needs to serve the public interest, in my opinion.
Putting public money into e.g. proprietary software and proprietary services that are then operated and gated by a few selected companies, for profit, with their only goal being the rent seeking via long term government contracts, is in my opinion far from being in the public's best interest.
I do not trust either but you have to at least agree that having some sort of mutually recognised data privacy framework is a good idea because the courts can enforce it then. Saying everything must be from EU is also slightly silly and we should instead have something similar like certification (cyber act ?) to ensure enough competition exists to avoid service degradation. IMO cryptography could be the answer to many privacy related issues for the cross border transfers.
Also these decisions related where the data is stored and which service is used are under control of each commercial org buying them. The risks are assessed at the end of the day and in case of any issues the providers change. Why would a publicly funded org store citizen data in the US is a question regardless of privacy laws though.
> Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.
For the skimmer/TL;DR'er, note that this article is by an advocacy group presenting their analysis of a situation, and then advocating and taking action on it: "Next Steps: Commission must repeal EU-US deal. noyb ..."
It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.
For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.
These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.
The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.
However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.
I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.
You could both be right: Shrems III could be in the works, and TLA could be presenting their legal analysis as an established fact.
In other words, (a) no, the "US Supreme Court" didn't "Just Bl[ow] Up EU-US Data Transfers" – there's nothing in the decision even remotely addressing the transfers (nor the EU!) – but (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.)
So the US Supreme Court is doing here more and better for
EU citizens (!!!) than the EU commission and EU courts are.
Because the EU officials constantly keep on lying to EU
citizens how our data is safe in the USA, which it clearly
is not, even aside from Trump's brown shirts, the ICE snipers
that have already killed US citizens in shootings. The world
is a very strange place, but one good thing is that Trump's
criminal gangster organisation has not undermined the whole
US court system yet. And he is now too old and too demented
to do so, so they will rally behind hugely uncharismatic
losers such as eyeliner-boy "can't stop it with my make-up"
Vance or "I change my opinion all the time" Mr. Rubio.
The US supreme court is correcting the lies the American government made when they assured the EU and its citizens that they can be trusted with their data. It's not just the EU lying, both sides are awful at this.
I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise. It makes sense, because banning EU companies from using AWS/GCP/etc. would bankrupt the EU into a recession, but the way they're going about these things is very annoying.
That said, if the USA would actually keep its promises and adopt legislation that solves the reasons why the EU cannot give out a decent competency decision, the problem would go away entirely.
The Biden administration set up a precarious body within the government to resolve the issue rather than go through the normal lawmaking process, probably because it wouldn't go through.
> I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise
We are too afraid of change and having to take responsibilities. Delegating to the US worked for decades, and it’s very hard to accept that we’ve done a mistake and need to take some risks ourselves. I feel it’s the same issue we have at European countries level.
But also, the EU is still a patchwork of entities that do not have a common vision of what the future should be. Hopefully losing our largest ally will push towards a closer, more federalist union. There is still so much work to do to unify the single market. I’m watching closely what is going on with the 28th regime[0] for that purpose
> the EU is still a patchwork of entities that do not have a common vision of what the future should be
For many, that's a feature, not a bug. The EU follows a democratic system consisting of many different countries with different types of government and different ideologies. It's not a unified federal government, as much as some people would like it to be.
The whole 28th regime concept seems extremely flawed to me. I understand the desire from a business perspective, but as a citizen I do not want a company to opt out of national legal protections and obligations by operating under some fantasy government. Unless this concept will be subject to the strongest, best-enforced regulations and tax rates equivalent to the highest tax rates within the Union, I do not want this project to happen, and I predict I'm far from the only one.
Nah. They are simply giving more power to Trump, power that he did not used to have and should not have. That is it. Supreme court is are advancing their own ideological goals and rewriting parts of constitution they don't like.
It has a tendency of doing so, but in this case the body that was supposed to patch over the requirements for EU data transfer was flawed in its design.
The reason this house of cards was necessary in the first place is that the American government does not want to grant foreign citizens the rights necessary to ensure the privacy guarantees the EU requires.
American courts deciding that institutional independence is bad now is awful for American citizens, but it's not supposed to be very relevant to the EU like this.
> Meanwhile, the EU decides that its most important issue is adjudicating whether a Supreme Court ruling will prevent its citizens from using Instagram.
The EU hasn't decided or prioritized anything here yet. NOYB has decided that this issue is important, but they're a non-profit organization that is completely unrelated to any government. NOYB will eventually take this issue to the EU courts, but the courts are independent of the other branches of government, and are required to adjudicate any valid complaint, so regardless of what their ruling is, you can't really attribute that to "the EU" either.
Obviously a caricature, but you must engage with the substance of the underlying issue.
If you have watched the EU's approach to U.S. tech cos (DMA, DPA) you can see a trend of increased regulation; to where it's not worth sometimes to release apps on the App Store initially to the EU due to GDPR and DMA restrictions.
Appreciate it if you take the technical bite out of the comment and engage in good faith here.
The regulators have repeatedly shown their willingness to look at the pure letter of the law and levy multibillion dollar fines.
Maybe the tech cos deserve it. But what's at hand here is where the investment of time and energy is going in the bloc.
My other comments address why this feels like an issue.
And the hilarious, (IMO) bad faith downvoting suggests the comment actually stings. We must ask why.
> If you have watched the EU's approach to U.S. tech cos (DMA, DPA) you can see a trend of increased regulation
Sure, no dispute here—I agree that in general, the EU has recently being making it more difficult for large American tech companies to do business in Europe.
But I don't think that that applies at all in this specific case. The EU has already been sued twice over US–EU data-sharing agreements, and both times, they fought it all the way to their supreme court, and after they lost, they quickly made new agreements that were essentially equivalent to the old ones. So the EU repeatedly gone to a lot of effort to allow US–EU data-sharing, which suggests that their priorities are the exact opposite of forbidding this.
> And the hilarious, (IMO) bad faith downvoting suggests the comment actually stings. We must ask why.
I can't speak for the others, but I personally downvoted your top-level comment because the sentence that I quoted was factually incorrect. I don't agree with your other points, but they seem like valid opinions, so I wouldn't have downvoted for those alone.
(And FWIW, I'm Canadian, so I have no vested interests in either side here)
You really look at my original comment and think - "yeah that deserves a BIIIIG round of downvotes?" And then I come back and engaged and then you think I'm digging myself in a hole?
I'm having a substantive debate on a difficult issue with different perspectives.
Woof.
And to be clear, I did engage with his point, if only indirectly.
Saying "noyb" isn't the EU is like saying a major influencer like Tucker Carlson isn't the U.S. government. Technically correct, but underrating the influence and alignment it has inside the bloc.
"Yes, noyb (None Of Your Business) is highly popular and influential in the EU. Founded in 2017 in Vienna by prominent privacy advocate Max Schrems, the non-profit organization functions as a leading strategic litigation center that enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."
It really pains me that even after all this effort, you get downvoted 'for cause.' the discussion unfortunately continues to get worse here.
> If the EU takes the DPA 'independence' seriously, they will end up marginalized in the tech space.
If NVIDIA can't sell GPUs to China, will that marginalise chinese technology? Or will it help supercharge a local industry? It might do both - hobbling chinese AI in the short term, but helping chinese competitors emerge in the medium to long term. US tariffs are the same. They might "marginalise" the US economy. But maybe they'll revitalise the US manufacturing industry too? We'll see!
The EU has a tremendous number of smart software engineers. They're more than capable of recreating the US technology stack locally. Especially with the benefit of hindsight, and with access to opensource software. In the long run, I wouldn't be surprised if Europe ended up richer by building their own tech stack "in house" instead of outsourcing to US hyperscalers.
People weaponizing the downvote here without good faith discussion is disappointing but expected on HN recently. It's OK, you can take my HN points.
> The EU has a tremendous number of smart software engineers.
Yes.
> They're more than capable of recreating the US tech stack locally.
No.
Where are the dozens of European tech winners? Seriously. They have the best education system in the world, strong social safety nets, cheap healthcare, and great lifestyles. Why have they not created innovative technologies that turn into worldbeating companies?
It's worth seriously asking this question. Many serious tech companies ultimately move to the U.S. because of capital availability but this should be addressable no? EU has big banks and pools of capital?
The ball has been there to take for 30-40 years. Europe has not consistently manufactured winners in the tech space.
> Opensource
Let's see. We hope. But this doesn't seem to have been a good strategy in Web 1 or Web 2 besides a couple of notable exceptions. But notable exceptions don't power an economy.
> Europe ends up richer
I don't see how. This is the problem. They cannot build. They don't have the raw materials. The land. The labor supply. The power. This is getting closer to the root cause.
Have spent many years in Europe. Rooting for them.
> Where are the dozens of European tech winners? Seriously. They have the best education system in the world, strong social safety nets, cheap healthcare, and great lifestyles. Why have they not created innovative technologies that turn into worldbeating companies?
This is a great question. I'm Australian, and I ask myself the same question constantly here in Aus. The engineers I graduated with in Sydney are easily as good as the engineers I worked with in the Bay Area. But where are all the startups?
Having worked in Aus and SF, I think the two big elements are culture and finance. We don't have a culture in Aus of risktaking and entrepreneurship. People just seem less interested here in changing the world by starting a tech company. If you do start a business, you're kind of on your own. There isn't a community of people who've done it before who can guide you. And there isn't the same sort of venture capital here. Lenders only want to make sure bets. There's money for low risk, low yield lending. But there are barely any funds for high risk, high yield. The successful tech startups I know in australia bootstrapped themselves (Fastmail, Atlassian).
As far as I can tell, Europe has the same problems. Europe has capital, but I don't think that capital it looking to make angel investments.
But maybe cutting ties with the US tech scene would help change that? So long as Google Docs works well, nobody is clamouring to make or fund a competitor. But take google docs away, and suddenly there's a clear need and a chance to make a lot of money. That could spur innovation.
> Where are the dozens of European tech winners? Seriously. They have the best education system in the world, strong social safety nets, cheap healthcare, and great lifestyles. Why have they not created innovative technologies that turn into worldbeating companies?
Maybe that is because there are US companies competing in the same space that are not held to the same regulations because of treaties like this one. It's hard to build a competitor to AWS, not just technically (although it very much is), but also business-wise - who would choose the unproven startup if you can go with the accepted best practise? By forcing US companies to equal footing, you give European startups more of chance. (Which is a Chinese playbook, too.)
EU companies are creative. Their economy does not create large monopolies functioning on debt. It has nothing to do with innovation. It is economic structure.
SV works on dumping prices they accuse Chinese of - sell under price until you destroy the competition anyway. Regulating its negative impacts elsewhere is entirely fair.
His reading of the letter of the law is probably right. Enforcement is a big question, but they'll hold their judgment given how mad they are generically at U.S. Tech cos.
Mate if you're going to cherry pick about "markets and alignment"
-> More people have died in the EU from heat waves due to lack of air conditioning than gun violence in the US. Ratio is worse if you remove suicide gun death.
Societal choices do have consequences!
The EU doesn't have to kill jobs. The companies are doing that on their own because they cannot compete. Take a look at what is happening in Germany.
The whole point is the EU should be more competitive. It would be great if they could create jobs instead of giving them to Instagram.
That's what everyone wants. No one wants to live in the 9/9/6 grind hellscape.
But you cannot regulate the world there. EU has tried. It has not worked.
> -> More people have died in the EU from heat waves due to lack of air conditioning than gun violence in the US. Ratio is worse if you remove suicide gun death.
That is mostly on how heat deaths are counted in eu vs usa. In usa heat must be mentioned as a cause of death on the certificate but as those who die in heat waves mostly have underlying issues heat is rearly put as cause of death. In the eu you don't need heath mentioned on the death certificate to count it as a heath death, they count excess deaths.
> More people have died in the EU from heat waves due to lack of air conditioning than gun violence in the US.
People in Eu died due to global warming which EU actually tried to deal with. Meanwhile, USA is major contributor to the warming and intentionally torpedoed last chance to make it better. Yes, the temperature is raising faster in Europe then elsewhere. That was not caused by the lack of air conditioning.
Heat waves are new. I don't know why are some Americans trying to create moral panic around air conditioning, it is not like it was illegal in Europe. Air conditioning wont stop global warming. EU do need to plant more trees in cities to create shades and start building houses that will keep cool better. And it is doing so. And again, EU genuinely tried to slow the global warming.
EU should be more integrated, sovereign, autonomous, making thrive cooperation through all its counties and talented people and with non-hostile extra-European actors.
But competition is just a trap of short term view. Competition is for losers. Competition is war in disguise that will drop the mask as soon as it feels it is now offering more short term return to the predation mindset eager to destroy everything it can devour. Competition want everyone to be serf. Competition eats Moloch for breakfast thinking how to optimize the pipeline of Moloch production and how to eat them all faster.
Europe must free itself from the competition myths, and the sooner the better.
Heat is more lethal the older you get. Guess who has the higher life expectancy and more old people who can die of heat.
On top of that come non-unjusted work ethics especially in countries like Germany where non working hours on the hottest hours is still seen as lazy (like the southern Europeans are often seen)
> Take a look at what is happening in Germany.
It’s called resting on one's laurels.
They still try to save ICE cars and fight renewable energy sources. It’s a shame given that Germany once was leading in solar energy.
They can compete but they think they could turn back the wheel of time and could stay on previous technology.
> But you cannot regulate the world there. EU has tried. It has not worked.
You don’t need the regulate the world. Capitalism follows every regulation if the market is big enough and the EU still is big enough. They just aren’t consistent enough in enforcing it because of lobbying of shortsighted companies.
Current AI companies with trillion USD valuations, models which costed them billions USD to train and now have total addressable market few hundred approved entities are very close to being a fad.
I think this is kind of a ticking time bomb with a lot of companies depending on personal devices for 2FA.
As tech worked who has worked in US FAANGs (still in europe)... the difference is immense.
EU companies simply can't compete and will never be able to compete until they change the mindset. And the change must be pervasive, across all aspects (including IC compensation).
There are some things that I'd like to be improved in technical support side, but we are way better in "human reachability", responsiveness and "blame game" point of view than US hyperscalers.
>European tech imported the product ambition. It forgot to import the customer obsession that’s supposed to come with it.
The French furniture maker didn't import the customer obsession. I agree that U.S tech in these particular subsets are better at the EU doing it, and that needs to be fixed but you can't really talk about how great U.S tech is when you can also point at thousands of horrifying lack of support stories from them also.
U.S Tech has a good mindset for replacing hardware when it fails, they have a good workflow for that. The idea that they have good support however should be tempered by regular reading of some sort of online tech news aggregator.
Behind all the legal wabble-dabble I think it would be funny if they pull the plug and realize the lights go out
I would assume the same here. If they are forced to move to EU just because of compliance, the alternatives would remain poor quality.
The treaties and deals he has managed to torpedo by forcing courts to uphold privacy laws is insane (and impressive).
I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out
piranha: carnivorous fish
Nice callout.
Neither here nor there, but many (most?) fish are carnivorous.
- Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.
- Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.
- Majority see these but just move on
- 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat
- Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.
- Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks
- Its f*king broken system
Meanwhile Trump threatened China with 100+% tariffs. The EU just suspended an exemption for small personal packages that was due to expire in 2028 anyway.
Why should the EU be the pariah?
It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night, it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect, but it is happening, and has been happening for over a year.
>It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night
Oh really? I thought we're ABOUT to find out what it's like to have no allies or business partners? Weird!
>it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect
Ah, the magic "it's happening but I can't prove it, so trust me bro". Meanwhile, I can point you to tangible metrics showing the world is moving away from the EU to China, meaning the EU will have zero trade with anyone else in short order (trust me it's really happening).
How do you supposed this will happen? Through destruction of evidence or the invention of a Time Machine to warn his younger self?
>> 2088
Noticing
https://europa.eu
It won't do any of this because it has no balls and no vision.
We're doomed and it's our fault.
> it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe
Only if it's bidirectional. If Americans can gentrify me out of the EU housing market with their higher purchasing power, then I should also have access to their labor market for those six figure wages to compensate. Tit for tat, as freedom of movement works in the EU. Otherwise it's just monetary colonialism. Imagine if Swedes were allowed to move to Spain but spaniards would not allowed to go work in Sweden.
I'd argue every single EU business with more than five employees would be impacted by such a decision. Just pulling the plug would be economic suicide.
Seems to me they’re waiting it out. Everything could change in a presidential election and the European economy wins either way. It is an economic bloc after all.
What you describe would be what’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face”
The current arrangement has been torpedoed a long time ago already, with the Patriot Act (2001) (though it took many years to understand the extent of it).
A lot can change, but not everything. Trump won twice and republican elites are fully behind him. Even if he looses, the same ideologies will continue. It happened twice, it is not a fluke but a permanent property of American politics.
Moreover, constitutional changes supreme court created are structural change. They will be super hard to undone - first they would need to change supreme court composition. The influence of money in American politics will just grow, the structural advantages of conservatives have in voting system will just grow and next conservative president will have even more space for maneuvering. (Non conservative one will likely be stopped by supreme court on some excuse.)
So, basically, outside of change actual constitution which is impossible, it will stay the same at best in the long term.
If it means "wait and change nothing long term, hope it will be better" I dont.
The time to start this process is now.
Ban or tax things from the "globalised" world that are just worker/societal/environmental protection arbitrage so they're competing for the EU market on a level playing field, then we'll see who can compete.
The EU is plenty big enough to be self-sufficient if it has to and shouldn't be afraid of risking this if abusive and exploitative companies from other places don't way to pay their way.
/s
It's not better worker output, it's faster movement and pivoting to rapid changing market conditions as a company, if you can get rid of slackers that abuse unions and worker protections to coast and do nothing.
If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.
IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.
EU is working on mandating scans of all your private encrypted messages right now. EU data protection is marketing for the gullible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719
The way this is going is definitely worrying, but what you're saying is disingenous at best.
Furthermore, even if this passes somehow, that doesn't change the fact that the US remains an unreliable partner. Now we have two governments scouring through your data instead of one.
This seems like a very good principle to adhere to in general. Anything that is funded by the public needs to serve the public interest, in my opinion.
Putting public money into e.g. proprietary software and proprietary services that are then operated and gated by a few selected companies, for profit, with their only goal being the rent seeking via long term government contracts, is in my opinion far from being in the public's best interest.
Also these decisions related where the data is stored and which service is used are under control of each commercial org buying them. The risks are assessed at the end of the day and in case of any issues the providers change. Why would a publicly funded org store citizen data in the US is a question regardless of privacy laws though.
It's well overdue to take seriously and put all our efforts behind the many (various but little known) local-first initiatives.
See for instance: https://elfaconsortium.eu/ It's a race against time.
This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.
It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.
These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.
The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.
However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.
I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.
In other words, (a) no, the "US Supreme Court" didn't "Just Bl[ow] Up EU-US Data Transfers" – there's nothing in the decision even remotely addressing the transfers (nor the EU!) – but (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.)
A big loser team.
I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise. It makes sense, because banning EU companies from using AWS/GCP/etc. would bankrupt the EU into a recession, but the way they're going about these things is very annoying.
That said, if the USA would actually keep its promises and adopt legislation that solves the reasons why the EU cannot give out a decent competency decision, the problem would go away entirely.
The Biden administration set up a precarious body within the government to resolve the issue rather than go through the normal lawmaking process, probably because it wouldn't go through.
We are too afraid of change and having to take responsibilities. Delegating to the US worked for decades, and it’s very hard to accept that we’ve done a mistake and need to take some risks ourselves. I feel it’s the same issue we have at European countries level.
But also, the EU is still a patchwork of entities that do not have a common vision of what the future should be. Hopefully losing our largest ally will push towards a closer, more federalist union. There is still so much work to do to unify the single market. I’m watching closely what is going on with the 28th regime[0] for that purpose
0: https://the28thregime.eu/
For many, that's a feature, not a bug. The EU follows a democratic system consisting of many different countries with different types of government and different ideologies. It's not a unified federal government, as much as some people would like it to be.
The whole 28th regime concept seems extremely flawed to me. I understand the desire from a business perspective, but as a citizen I do not want a company to opt out of national legal protections and obligations by operating under some fantasy government. Unless this concept will be subject to the strongest, best-enforced regulations and tax rates equivalent to the highest tax rates within the Union, I do not want this project to happen, and I predict I'm far from the only one.
Nah. They are simply giving more power to Trump, power that he did not used to have and should not have. That is it. Supreme court is are advancing their own ideological goals and rewriting parts of constitution they don't like.
The reason this house of cards was necessary in the first place is that the American government does not want to grant foreign citizens the rights necessary to ensure the privacy guarantees the EU requires.
American courts deciding that institutional independence is bad now is awful for American citizens, but it's not supposed to be very relevant to the EU like this.
The EU hasn't decided or prioritized anything here yet. NOYB has decided that this issue is important, but they're a non-profit organization that is completely unrelated to any government. NOYB will eventually take this issue to the EU courts, but the courts are independent of the other branches of government, and are required to adjudicate any valid complaint, so regardless of what their ruling is, you can't really attribute that to "the EU" either.
If you have watched the EU's approach to U.S. tech cos (DMA, DPA) you can see a trend of increased regulation; to where it's not worth sometimes to release apps on the App Store initially to the EU due to GDPR and DMA restrictions.
Appreciate it if you take the technical bite out of the comment and engage in good faith here.
The regulators have repeatedly shown their willingness to look at the pure letter of the law and levy multibillion dollar fines.
Maybe the tech cos deserve it. But what's at hand here is where the investment of time and energy is going in the bloc.
My other comments address why this feels like an issue.
And the hilarious, (IMO) bad faith downvoting suggests the comment actually stings. We must ask why.
Sure, no dispute here—I agree that in general, the EU has recently being making it more difficult for large American tech companies to do business in Europe.
But I don't think that that applies at all in this specific case. The EU has already been sued twice over US–EU data-sharing agreements, and both times, they fought it all the way to their supreme court, and after they lost, they quickly made new agreements that were essentially equivalent to the old ones. So the EU repeatedly gone to a lot of effort to allow US–EU data-sharing, which suggests that their priorities are the exact opposite of forbidding this.
> And the hilarious, (IMO) bad faith downvoting suggests the comment actually stings. We must ask why.
I can't speak for the others, but I personally downvoted your top-level comment because the sentence that I quoted was factually incorrect. I don't agree with your other points, but they seem like valid opinions, so I wouldn't have downvoted for those alone.
(And FWIW, I'm Canadian, so I have no vested interests in either side here)
Got the effect shrug
Don't dig yourself further into that hole by slinging "bad faith" around willy nilly.
I'm having a substantive debate on a difficult issue with different perspectives.
Woof.
And to be clear, I did engage with his point, if only indirectly.
Saying "noyb" isn't the EU is like saying a major influencer like Tucker Carlson isn't the U.S. government. Technically correct, but underrating the influence and alignment it has inside the bloc.
"Yes, noyb (None Of Your Business) is highly popular and influential in the EU. Founded in 2017 in Vienna by prominent privacy advocate Max Schrems, the non-profit organization functions as a leading strategic litigation center that enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."
It really pains me that even after all this effort, you get downvoted 'for cause.' the discussion unfortunately continues to get worse here.
DMA has nothing to do with small apps.
If NVIDIA can't sell GPUs to China, will that marginalise chinese technology? Or will it help supercharge a local industry? It might do both - hobbling chinese AI in the short term, but helping chinese competitors emerge in the medium to long term. US tariffs are the same. They might "marginalise" the US economy. But maybe they'll revitalise the US manufacturing industry too? We'll see!
The EU has a tremendous number of smart software engineers. They're more than capable of recreating the US technology stack locally. Especially with the benefit of hindsight, and with access to opensource software. In the long run, I wouldn't be surprised if Europe ended up richer by building their own tech stack "in house" instead of outsourcing to US hyperscalers.
People weaponizing the downvote here without good faith discussion is disappointing but expected on HN recently. It's OK, you can take my HN points.
> The EU has a tremendous number of smart software engineers. Yes.
> They're more than capable of recreating the US tech stack locally.
No.
Where are the dozens of European tech winners? Seriously. They have the best education system in the world, strong social safety nets, cheap healthcare, and great lifestyles. Why have they not created innovative technologies that turn into worldbeating companies?
It's worth seriously asking this question. Many serious tech companies ultimately move to the U.S. because of capital availability but this should be addressable no? EU has big banks and pools of capital?
The ball has been there to take for 30-40 years. Europe has not consistently manufactured winners in the tech space.
> Opensource Let's see. We hope. But this doesn't seem to have been a good strategy in Web 1 or Web 2 besides a couple of notable exceptions. But notable exceptions don't power an economy.
> Europe ends up richer I don't see how. This is the problem. They cannot build. They don't have the raw materials. The land. The labor supply. The power. This is getting closer to the root cause.
Have spent many years in Europe. Rooting for them.
Just not sure they will figure it out.
This is a great question. I'm Australian, and I ask myself the same question constantly here in Aus. The engineers I graduated with in Sydney are easily as good as the engineers I worked with in the Bay Area. But where are all the startups?
Having worked in Aus and SF, I think the two big elements are culture and finance. We don't have a culture in Aus of risktaking and entrepreneurship. People just seem less interested here in changing the world by starting a tech company. If you do start a business, you're kind of on your own. There isn't a community of people who've done it before who can guide you. And there isn't the same sort of venture capital here. Lenders only want to make sure bets. There's money for low risk, low yield lending. But there are barely any funds for high risk, high yield. The successful tech startups I know in australia bootstrapped themselves (Fastmail, Atlassian).
As far as I can tell, Europe has the same problems. Europe has capital, but I don't think that capital it looking to make angel investments.
But maybe cutting ties with the US tech scene would help change that? So long as Google Docs works well, nobody is clamouring to make or fund a competitor. But take google docs away, and suddenly there's a clear need and a chance to make a lot of money. That could spur innovation.
Agree with your assessments on culture and finance though.
Thanks for the comment.
Maybe that is because there are US companies competing in the same space that are not held to the same regulations because of treaties like this one. It's hard to build a competitor to AWS, not just technically (although it very much is), but also business-wise - who would choose the unproven startup if you can go with the accepted best practise? By forcing US companies to equal footing, you give European startups more of chance. (Which is a Chinese playbook, too.)
SV works on dumping prices they accuse Chinese of - sell under price until you destroy the competition anyway. Regulating its negative impacts elsewhere is entirely fair.
Source: worked with EU regulators on privacy.
DPA is exactly the USP where EU companies can beat US companies. So your point is the EU should kill European jobs in favor of Instagram.
BTW the best available and align markets are the reason for this
https://abcnews.com/US/wisconsin-man-dies-after-inhaler-cost...
-> More people have died in the EU from heat waves due to lack of air conditioning than gun violence in the US. Ratio is worse if you remove suicide gun death.
Societal choices do have consequences!
The EU doesn't have to kill jobs. The companies are doing that on their own because they cannot compete. Take a look at what is happening in Germany.
The whole point is the EU should be more competitive. It would be great if they could create jobs instead of giving them to Instagram.
That's what everyone wants. No one wants to live in the 9/9/6 grind hellscape.
But you cannot regulate the world there. EU has tried. It has not worked.
This is only a clear-eyed assessment.
That is mostly on how heat deaths are counted in eu vs usa. In usa heat must be mentioned as a cause of death on the certificate but as those who die in heat waves mostly have underlying issues heat is rearly put as cause of death. In the eu you don't need heath mentioned on the death certificate to count it as a heath death, they count excess deaths.
People in Eu died due to global warming which EU actually tried to deal with. Meanwhile, USA is major contributor to the warming and intentionally torpedoed last chance to make it better. Yes, the temperature is raising faster in Europe then elsewhere. That was not caused by the lack of air conditioning.
Heat waves are new. I don't know why are some Americans trying to create moral panic around air conditioning, it is not like it was illegal in Europe. Air conditioning wont stop global warming. EU do need to plant more trees in cities to create shades and start building houses that will keep cool better. And it is doing so. And again, EU genuinely tried to slow the global warming.
But competition is just a trap of short term view. Competition is for losers. Competition is war in disguise that will drop the mask as soon as it feels it is now offering more short term return to the predation mindset eager to destroy everything it can devour. Competition want everyone to be serf. Competition eats Moloch for breakfast thinking how to optimize the pipeline of Moloch production and how to eat them all faster.
Europe must free itself from the competition myths, and the sooner the better.
Heat is more lethal the older you get. Guess who has the higher life expectancy and more old people who can die of heat.
On top of that come non-unjusted work ethics especially in countries like Germany where non working hours on the hottest hours is still seen as lazy (like the southern Europeans are often seen)
> Take a look at what is happening in Germany.
It’s called resting on one's laurels.
They still try to save ICE cars and fight renewable energy sources. It’s a shame given that Germany once was leading in solar energy.
They can compete but they think they could turn back the wheel of time and could stay on previous technology.
> But you cannot regulate the world there. EU has tried. It has not worked.
You don’t need the regulate the world. Capitalism follows every regulation if the market is big enough and the EU still is big enough. They just aren’t consistent enough in enforcing it because of lobbying of shortsighted companies.
If it’s a yes, it needs datacenters and get a lot more energy.
If no, it needs to transfer data to US for training/inferencing on it.
It can outsource its data centers abroad too like it did with its manufacturing industry.