It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
this is not a new issue: airbus has been the victim of corporate espionage supposedly by boeing with aid by the nsa in a well documented case in november 2011, and they are not the only victim of US government agency supported corporate espionage: investigations into the selector lists that ran in the cabinet noir at DE-CIX have shown that a large part of them were targeting european corporations. and that predates the cloud act of 2018, which made american infrastructure significantly less trustworthy.
The French DGSE was also exposed targeting dozens of american tech aerospace companies in the 90s (and probably still are). That type of state-assisted industrial espionage is pretty common, even between "friendly" nations.
I think what's different now is the US announcing its intent to meddle into internal EU politics and supporting political opposition.
Honest q, 3rd party crashing in: does it make a difference? My assumption is not for parsing for understanding and grammatically, its fine, if significantly less common than the “for” construct.
> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
Doesn't Europe actually have a lot of Chinese equipment in their telecom infrastructure? Is this an effort just to try not to make that mistake again?
They're both very expensive and the carriers primarily care about cost and features. And huawei will take a dozen devs, give them a one way ticket and put them in a hotel room near a customer to grind our whatever feature needed to seal the deal.
I remember years ago talking to some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right".
We live in new times anyways - most of the carriers have outsourced a lot of the tech stuff to the vendors anyways.
Yes. I worked for a Cambodian telco, when there was a range of Alcatel, Nokia, etc switching equipment across 10 carriers. Huawei swept the lot within 2 years, and Alcatel staff told me they were losing everywhere - they couldn't match the price or technology. This was before the US decided to sanction Huawei.
I moved to UK in late 2013 and to be fair, from my observation the cellular coverage in the country has always been more than just a bit shitty.
Incidentally, the voice call quality in the UK is also really crappy. Operators compress/downsample the audio stream to the very edge of recognisability, because investing in sufficient infrastructure to support higher bandwidths is expensive.
Europe will just end up doing whatever is cheapest. It's the same story as always. They'll say some stuff publicly but they'll quietly come back to American tech once they see the price tag difference. They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
Would (gently) note that we’re commenting on an article re: American tech risk. :)
Not sure it’s really sunk in for my fellow Americans what’s going on, we’re not exactly used to consequences and it’s still considered, a best, impolite to treat a holistic evaluation of policies as something beyond debate.
But look at solar adoption across Europe since 2022. It’s going gang busters and now with sodium batteries coming online next year, cheap home energy storage is about to boom as well.
Europe doesn’t want to buy Russian gas, but there is also the very real political reality of what happens if your citizens freeze to death. I will be very surprised if any EU state is reliant on Russian gas by 2035.
When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar.
That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe.
Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country.
That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
I did a conservative calculation if you started around 2000 in Germany and went full nuclear like France did. Not using any fancy new nuclear or anything. Literally just mass production of standard nuclear plants. Plus all the updates of the grid, including domestic fuel enrichment and 'waste' storage. Plus all the investment necessary to great a fully modern grid to electrify the economy.
We are talking in the order of 500 billion Euro and this is very conservative assumption on nuclear construction cost. Much worse cost then what France actually achieved in their build-out. Also much of that is actually the grid, grids are really expensive it turns out. But building nuclear in central location next to places where there used to be coal plants, makes grid cost much cheaper because most of the grid is already there perfectly positioned to feed the population clusters. And that accounts for actually increasing overall production of energy, not decreasing as Germany is actually doing.
On the other-hand for the renewable path that Germany is going since 2000, just the grid alone is going to cost more then 500 billion euro, some estimation suggest that 2000-2045 total gird investment requirement is above significantly above that. Sadly today where everything is in this different private organization, this information is all over the place and 'semi'-private organization doing different parts of the infrastructure.
In total, between all the renewables, the grid and the storage, we are talking 1.5 trillion euro and that still includes gas peakers. If you want to go beyond and really go all in, it would be even more then that, as you suggest.
Turns out, if you plan includes trying to gather solar energy in Greece and Spain (or even Egypt), transporting it to Germany and then storing it into batteries there, well yeah, that's going to be expensive. And the solar panels you import from China aren't the expensive part.
France did the exact right think in the 70/80s build reliable long term energy generation, sadly since the 90s the newer generation of French politicians done literally anything they can to handle the situation as a badly and as incompetently as possible but that's a different story.
US says that Europe is their number one enemy. Using American tech is the most risky thing you can do since Trump declared that they are now a hostile enemy with intents of overthrowing European democracies.
Without getting hung up on the exact phrase “number 1”. It’s very literally one of the biggest things in official US national security strategy right now and some leaks of the non-public version talk about explicit plans to try and destroy the EU. So semantics aside, the overall point stands on solid ground.
That whole thing is just incoherent. There's lots about forming a trading alliance against China, and then loads about destroying the EU. You can't have both of those at the same time.
How was it a mistake? Europe got a lot of good telecom infrastructure for a low price. There's no evidence it was compromised.
It was actually the US that was pressuring Europe to get rid of Chinese telecom equipment, as part of the first Trump administration's broader strategy against China.
The US leadership and billionaires are literally trying to destroy my country by supporting far right parties here. I never want to have anything to do with the US again at least until they sort their own crap out.
Yeah I don't want to deal with a country that's trying to pretend to be our friend and then literally giving encouraging speeches to groups trying to destroy our continent.
Even if the democrats make it back to power, a lot of trust and goodwill has been lost. There can always be another trump.
I don’t think Democrats would really jump to our aide either. The rhetoric is different but I think the vast majority of Americans think that they can let Europe burn without it affecting them much.
> You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
It's not clear that europe even trusts europe anymore. Especially with french and german economic dominance looking shakier than ever, debt financing an unpopular war in the east piling up, mounting deficits, industry collapse, youth unemployment... european countries (or greenland for that matter) could do a whole lot worse than turning to china.
Agreed, though, that reliance on US is foolhardy. I can't make any sense of why we're trying to saw the feet off our own economy.
Yea, in 29 Germany, France and UK will have elections, and far-right parties with anti-EU and partially pro-Russian attitudes are leading the polls. If they win, there will be hardly any unified "Europe" left. Why would I then trust Germany ruled by AfD over MAGA-America?
At least with China there's some consistency. I can reliably trust them not to give a shit about me or my privacy, and to further their geopolitical interests. Meanwhile populists in the West aren't really even acting rationally from geopolitical perspective, they're more unpredictable.
Are you talking about the same China which has repeatedly performed industrial espionage, embedded surveillance into products, and supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
I'm sorry, did we already forget about the NSA literally running the biggest dragnet the world has ever known and the US CLOUD Act that allows them to spy into absolutely any US company anywhere in the world ?
>supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
As regrettable as it is, China's "support" of the invasion is mostly a matter of them both not giving a shit about the situation, and it helping them geopolitically with regards to Taiwan. They sold weapons. Just like France sold weapons to north african regimes when they were brutally repressing their protesters. The vast majority of Europe is doing the bare minimum for ukraine to keep the fight away without being actually involved.
Countries are not moral, and will do what benefits them. Some of them are more ruthless than others, but as it stands the vast majority of Europeans are considering the US as a greater threat to democracy and general life quality than China.
China is just not compatible with us ideologically. Freedom of speech, surveillance, state control. That stuff won't work here. It works in China because they've been under it for thousands of years.
It's incredible how quickly such obvious hostility as plans to incite what amounts to secession in a putatively friendly, allied sovereign entity has become normalized and ho-hum.
Was that when Obama capitulated to Putin and permitted him to annex Crimea? Perhaps that was the "more flexibility" that he secretly promised Putin he would have after his election. I wonder what he got in return for it.
In the real world, NATO is a highly exclusive club, which is very reluctant to accept new members and extend its mutual defence clause to them. Ukraine and Georgia sought to join NATO after Russia had already begun violating their sovereign territory, but NATO allies caved to Russian pressure and denied membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. Russia then used this opportunity to invade them without triggering the full arsenal of NATO.
Russia is not a cornered cat, but a nuclear-armed colonial empire that has expanded through war and conquest for centuries, growing from a small city-state into the largest country in the world, exterminating countless native ethnicities in the process:
Yes it is, and Russia is increasingly being recognized by scholars as such.
This is especially visible in the war against Ukraine, which is colonial in nature. Russia has invaded another country on imperialistic justifications ("reunification of Russian lands" etc), is using domestic minorities as cannon fodder to alter the ethnic composition of Russia in favor of Russians, is committing genocide against Ukrainians to destroy them as an ethnicity, and is resettling ethnic Russians into occupied territories to permanently alter Ukraine's ethnic composition.
The whole "NATO expansion" narrative is complete bullshit when the initiative to join NATO has come from Russia's neighbors, who want to gain the protection of its mutual defense clause in the hope that this would deter Russia from invading them.
Russia has been the aggressor in this part of the world for centuries, and the rest is a reaction to that. Russia is the sole reason why Northern and Eastern Europe have militaries at all; if it weren't for Russia, they could be disbanded overnight.
Europe should be building domestic digital capacity regardless (and not just servers) but saying it needs to treat the US like China is a bit melodramatic given the economic and physical threat to Europe is 10X greater in the east.
The US is not anti-Europe. The US has just begun to start evaluating its relationship with Europe rationally and wants it to grow up beyond the post-WW2 training wheels.
The overreaction to this kind of gives vibes of slamming the door and screaming “you don’t love me!” because dad won’t buy a new toy.
The difference is, Europeans used to trust their US partners, and built a lot of infrastructure on US services. This trust has been betrayed, so things now need to change.
It never existed to begin with with China, so no change is necessary.
There never was a relationship of mutual trust, it was always a relationship of Europe being under the wing of the US as a buffer against the USSR.
The US now wants to push Europe out of the nest, but most Europeans have only ever known life "living in their parents house".
Building an independent Europe is not compatible with the current European ethos of work/life/life/life balance, and will likely result in Europe either coming back to the US, falling into economic chaos, or moving into daddy Xi's house. They are a socialist country after all...
How much do you guys suffer about this work life balance, I can't wrap my head around the level of brainwash you guys have been through to use concepts as socialised wealth and wellness as a bad thing
these evil europeans wanting to have a break from work! how dare them!
Neither the European welfare state nor China's authoritarian leftism are socialist. They are, respectively, welfare-state capitalism and nationalist "socialism" (aka Naziism).
On the European side, socialism is a question of who owns businesses. If the majority of businesses are owned by the people who are working at those businesses, you have a socialist economy. Welfare states, regulatory regimes, and high tax rates do not change the ownership of businesses, they are about who provides the infrastructure around those businesses. If you have an economy where infrastructure is owned by a liberal nation-state, and businesses are owned by whoever gambled capital on the venture, then you get a capitalist economy. If your infrastructure is privately owned by individuals, then those owners become feudal lords and you get feudalism.
On the Chinese side, you might point out that there are laws that require CCP ownership of all businesses, eat the party line that says the CCP is the representative of the working class, and say, "hey that's a socialism". But this ownership and representation is purely nominal. The average Chinese worker has more or less zero political agency; speaking out gets you censored and harassed. How is that worker ownership? If, say, America started punishing individual shareholders who voted against Trump-aligned board members, we'd correctly recognize that the shareholders do not meaningfully own their businesses anymore.
"Moving into Daddy Xi's house" would be stupid. The EU and China are not aligned on basically any core value; it'd basically be a surrender of one to the other. Actually, to be clear, the EU isn't even aligned on basically any core value with itself[0]. In fact, I would argue that's a way bigger headwind than European workers being used to a top-heavy welfare state. The EU has the resources to build a sovereign cloud, or run its own military, or source its own energy. But for each one there are challenges posed by the uniquely decentralized structure of Europe:
- Europe could build a sovereign cloud, but probably not one for each member state. So they're going to have to agree what country holds the data, and agree that that country can and will spy on all the others.
- Europe could fund its own military, tell NATO to pound sand, and re-colonize America for the trouble. But who runs that military? Given the history of EU politics, it would be France and Germany, and every other country in the EU has a history of being colonized by France or Germany. They are not trustworthy.
- Europe could fix its energy dependence, but Germany thinks nuclear power is Satan and wants to backstop renewables with the dirtiest-burning coal you can mine.
You'll notice a recurring theme here. The problem with Europe is not its fiscal deficit, the perceived laziness of its workers, or what have you. It's the lack of trust. The most trustworthy member state of the European Union was the United States of America, and so that's why everyone put their data on American servers, and let America dominate NATO, and so on. This is not Europe getting kicked out of the nest, it's the kids realizing their parent is a gaslighting asshole and that all their siblings, including themselves, are cut from the same cloth.
[0] Trump's current tariff actions and threats of territory annexation have galvanized the European public against America's government. However, prior to Trump coming back, Europe was full of far-right nutjobs that were just as cringe. Actually, a lot of them are still in power in Europe, and they're way more competent and cunning than Cheeto Mussolini.
It is US themselves that have decleared they are a hostile enemy to Europe now. China had made zero claims to annex parts of Europe. USA makes claims to annex parts of Denmark. China officially does not say their goal is to overthrow European democracies but US says their goal is to change the democratic govts of Europe.
They control Europe's digital infrastructure and are able to increase rent to usurous levels (tarrifs!) because Europe is dependent on their digital services. Without digital sovereignty, Europe has no sovereignty and will quickly become a modern colony from which wealth will be extracted.
The reason the US is able to raise rents (tariffs) has nothing to do with Europe buying US digital services.
The tariffs are on European exports. The problem is Europe has a weak domestic consumer market and is dependent on selling stuff to the US, not buying from them.
The EU has a services deficit compared to the US, the US has a goods deficit compared to Europe. Together, they are almost in balance, the difference is just 3% of total trade [1]. Put differently, the US and the EU need each other. This is why Trump is using footguns.
The problem is really that Europe has a few dozen weak consumer markets. If there really was a proper single market, I suspect the EU would be much more competitive in digital services.
Unfortunately despite their best efforts this isn't something Eurocrats can simply will into existence. The most important prerequisite is a common language, and there is zero political will to do the only sensible thing and establish English as the official common language of the EU.
> Nonsense. Unilaterial tarrifs are not how trade agreements work. This is pure extractive rent.
What do you mean by "unilateral tariffs"?
> The reason the US is not able to extract the same rents from China is that they have digital sovereignty and the US cannot just pull the cloud plug from them.
The US has higher tariffs against Chinese imports than European imports.
Greenland is not in europe. It may be a danish colony but that doesn't make it "european territory" any more than french guiana is. EU territory? Sure. But europe is a penninsula on the western flank of eurasia.
> Greenland is not in europe. It may be a danish colony but that doesn't make it "european territory" any more than french guiana is. EU territory? Sure. But europe is a penninsula on the western flank of eurasia.
You are right that Greenland is not in Europe (it sits on the Nort American tectonic plate).
It is also not an EU territory, however, it is linked to Europea through Denmark. European influence exists through governance, education, and trade.
Most Greenlanders identify primarily as Kalaallit (Inuit) and Greenlandic, not European.
How do Hawaiians feel about this? Just in case: what would you consider a valid qualification for Hawaiians, for their opinion on this matter to be material? And how many of them support an independent Hawaii?
I looked online but didn’t find any hard numbers, only vague movements. Scottish independence for example seems to have substantial , if minority , support. If the same cannot be said for Hawaii, then this comment feels… like a cop out.
As is the case when it comes to indigenous populations being displaced and slowly replaced over time: they don't get to have a choice. Hawaii was mostly Japanese in the early 1900s having already displaced previous arrivals, and today less than 15% of the population considers themselves native hawaiians. The remaining 85% are there _because_ Hawaii is not independent, why would they ever hold a vote for it ?
See similar cases in New Caledonia, the Falklands, and more.
US foreign policy is nearly as dimwitted as european foreign policy is. Of course puerto rico is a colony.
But also, actually, if China did annex puerto rico? Snap snap snap. Good for them. They really made it out the hood. May god look upon the rest of us so positively
> And Hawaii is not in America. Certainly neither is Guam etc.
Sure, no argument here.
> What kind of argument are you even trying to make?
Mostly that characterizing Greenland as European is just as insane as characterizing French Guiana that way. Or the falknlands, New Caledonia, Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Aruba, Curaçao, Anguilla, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, etc etc. These are colonies—not part of europe, and should have been made whole decades ago with the resolution of WWII, and their continued presence as "rightfully" part of European nations destabilizes our globe.
Europe is welcome to extend its economic privileges to all nations of earth, and I for one will continue to argue for kicking us out of Hawaii and Guam while ensuring we don't further engage in predatory trade agreements.
Of course, I don't expect any of this predation to cease anytime soon.
Greenland has been inching towards independence since the seventies, because that's the common ambition of greenlandic peoples and it's slow because there are rather deep ties between Denmark and Greenland. These ties are to some extent very negative for the greenlanders, they're generally discriminated against and have been viciously mistreated at times, but a quick clean cut would also be quite painful for them.
In the seventies Greenland joined the EU predecessor EEC with Denmark, quickly realised that europeans were emptying their fishing waters and in the early eighties left the union. It's the only entity to have done so. Then the independence process trudged on, they self-manage in many areas now, even more since a 2008 referendum where some 75% or so voted in favour of independence. Since 2009 there is a law that says that Greenland can become independent whenever they want, as long as it's approved by greenlander referendum and the danish parliament.
To the extent they're a colony international law also clearly gives them the right to unilaterally declare independence. A majority of greenlanders are likely still in favour, but a majority also would prefer to postpone it if it would result in worse living conditions, since that's what polls usually conclude.
Ignoring half a century of rather delicate politics and independence ambitions the US shat all over it and said that they wanted to buy it, and then several years later said that they might just annex instead. This is quite belligerent and nasty behaviour, which in my opinion should have caused european countries to start dumping US bonds and stop answering calls from the White House.
Well nobody is forcing Denmark to be a dick about decolonization, nor a dick to all the people it never colonized. That's a choice.
> This is quite belligerent and nasty behaviour
So was colonizing, well, anywhere. Europe still hasn't been appropriately punished for this. And yes, the US deserves to be punished severely for its own brutal conquests.
Denmark isn't "being a dick about decolonization", it's just that they happen to be very kindly subsidising half of Greenland's budget, which causes even many enthusiastic about the idea of an independent Greenland cause to think that leaving might be a mistake.
Conversely, the leader of the present day United States threatens to colonising Greenland by force to show off how powerful he is. Ergo Europeans, particularly Greenlanders, have little reason to trust the US
> Denmark isn't "being a dick about decolonization", it's just that they happen to be very kindly subsidising half of Greenland's budget, which causes even many enthusiastic about the idea of an independent Greenland cause to think that leaving might be a mistake.
Brother, spread this pro-colonization propaganda elsewhere.
> Conversely, the leader of the present day United States threatens to colonising Greenland by force to show off how powerful he is. Ergo Europeans, particularly Greenlanders, have little reason to trust the US
You know nothing about this, so stop spreading your made up lies. A roadmap for Greenlandic independence is in place. The Greenlandic parliament is controlling the speed of this process.
That's what the possessive descriptor "European" means, yes. Which is why it's weird you're so against it. I'm not really sure what you're arguing at this point.
"European" is a geographic adjective. It does not apply to domination of other places. No amount of willpower will make the places that europe chooses to rape "european".
Currently Denmark participates in financing Greenland, pulling the rug on it would likely not be pleasant for the greenlanders and if they did I'd count that as rather dickish unless the greenlanders had a near consensus on the issue and asked the danish parliament to do it.
Well, some justice have been sought and won, but a lot remains. To me it seems like an attempt at distraction to clump together the treatment of the Mau Mau and the nuking of Algeria with Denmark's relation with Greenland.
Besides economic relations, independence for Greenland would also mean that they would need to seek justice to a larger extent through international courts and in at least some cases it's likely easier for greenlanders to find justice in danish courts.
And yet denmark hasn't burned. How do you remediate this contradiction?
> To me it seems like an attempt at distraction to clump together the treatment of the Mau Mau and the nuking of Algeria with Denmark's relation with Greenland.
Believe me, britain deserves far worse than just being burned down. But denmark still must face justice
You make it sound that the brits were the bad guys, when it was an elite top % pulling the strings and the rest were mostly trying to make ends meet.
But yes agree, the elite extracting wealth from the colonies back in the days, and still are extracting wealth from your average Joe, deserves far worse.
Colonies can only address this at the granularity of the nationalism with which they were presented. If every-day brits don't want to be blamed, they need to make their own rebellion to show they aren't party to the evil done in their name.
I think this is true of my own country (the US), and it's hopeless. I think most americans are ok with the evil done in their name. I wish I had better advice or insight.
But pretending like two imperial powers arguing over greenland is some great injustice just spits in the face of humanity. Have some fucking dignity. Greenland deserves better than to be treated like a piece of property
> It was supposed to be something akin to United States of Europe
No, it never was.
> but instead in devolved into a bureaucracy
No it hasn't:
"There are two striking aspects of this rejection of EU bureaucracy. First, in comparison with other, comparable entities, such as the US federal bureaucracy, the EU’s administrative apparatus has a marginal size. Specifically, the EU, which is responsible for more than 440 million citizens, employs only around 60,000 people, while the US federal bureaucracy has more than two million employees that govern a territory with about 330 million inhabitants. Accordingly, the EU bureaucracy is comparatively small and far from being the “bureaucratic monster” which it is frequently portrayed as."
I'm thankful for that. That is why our food is way better and way healthier than the shit the US makes it's citizens eat.
> is incredibly socialist and the EC thinks it is above everyone else.
LOL. No it's not "socialist" and the European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. If you really think the Commission behaves as if they are above everything else (they do not!), I pull an American president.
> That is why our food is way better and way healthier than the shit the US makes it's citizens eat.
The US optimized for convenience, affordability, and variety.
You can eat very healthily in the US, but it requires more intentional choices.
In many (not all) EU countries, the default option is closer to healthy.
> You can eat very healthily in the US, but it requires more intentional choices.
It requires money too. If you are poor your choices are naturally limited and in the end you are dependent on government regulations to eat at least somewhat healthy.
What's interesting is JFK Jr. (our Secratary of Health and Human Services) has a stance that Americans eat too many ultra-processed foods. He wants people to eat more whole foods and fewer additives. He questions conventional warnings about saturated fat and supports dietary changes than include more full-fat dairy and meats. He prefers education over bans or mandates.
And that is not working for the poor of which the US seems to have plenty for a developed country.
The poor have no choice, even if they are educated, and the food industry is fine with selling them garbage. It's legal to do so after all. AFAIK food is generally even cheaper in Europe than in the USA. Even with those regulations.
Regulation is about setting minimum standards for acceptance, not specifying exactly how.
This means that if I walk into a random croissant shop and buy a croissant, I don't subsequently have 2 days of food poisoning.
Arguably, healthier being the default is also good. The less I personally need to think about this, the more I can think about other more useful things.
> There are two striking aspects of this rejection of EU bureaucracy. First, in comparison with other, comparable entities, such as the US federal bureaucracy, the EU’s administrative apparatus has a marginal size. Specifically, the EU, which is responsible for more than 440 million citizens, employs only around 60,000 people, while the US federal bureaucracy has more than two million employees that govern a territory with about 330 million inhabitants.
that's because the EU co-opted existing member state agencies instead of creating its own
e.g. the german federal department of agriculture effectively is controlled by the EU (almost all of its duties are an EU competence), but 100% of its costs are attributed to germany
this makes the EU look much more efficient than it is
The EU in its current form is mostly about markets. It routinely pushes for the sacrifice of government monopolies to the altar of the free market (see for a recent example the french train network). Most of its regulations are to ensure a level field for a balanced market.
Hell it pushes for free markets even when it makes very little sense (the eu electricity market and its weird idiosyncrasies are an artifact of that)
It basically bans member governments from printing money and imposes very strict limits of 3% GDP on government deficits. For reference the US deficit was 5.9% gdp this year, Almost twice as much. this greatly limits government control over the economy.
> imposes very strict limits of 3% GDP on government deficits.
You might want to check that information. This very strict limit is only enforced on selective EU countries like Greece for example.
France has had routinely yearly deficits above 3% in the last 10 years and has never been worried one bit about it.
For the record the French deficit was around 5.4% this year and it is set to increase again next year as the parliament is completely blocked and a budget compromise cannot be reached.
Even the so called debt ceiling defined in the pact of stability is mostly ignored. Italy and France are both well above the 100% debt to GDP ratio when the treaty says that every country within the EU should be at or below 60%.
> It basically bans member governments from printing money
It only bans the ones that have adopted the Euro. The countries that have declined to adopt the euro are free to do as they please more or less.
The euro countries though may not be able to print money, but they just get the ECB to do it for them via quantitative easing which has been used since 2008 and only recently stopped when the interests rates started climbing after the pandemic.
> Even Zelenskyy acknowledged that the US provides more aid than the EU. And this is despite the fact that Europe has twice the population and doesn't have a vast ocean between it and Russia.
Why does the population matter at all? The US GDP is $30T and the EU GDP is $21T.
> Isn't it exactly the opposite, and it was the EU that attempted to overthrow democracy in the US (and failed)?
What are you talking about? According to US intelligence agencies, bipartisan Senate reports, and federal prosecutions, Russia, China, and Iran have been singled out at running disinformation campaigns. The EU has never been accused by the US of trying to topple democracy in the US.
They are not "giving" money. They are exchanging them for resources. Russia gets the money but loses resources which it could've sold to other countries instead.
Ah, you're totally right. Europe is getting the better end of the deal Russia is practically getting scammed, exchanging goods for profits they can redistribute to fund their war.
The EU is not Europe. I never see any pro-EU sentiment anywhere besides on HN and Reddit. Talk to Europeans and they hate the EU and see it as an oppressive foreign power. Except for the Germans.
> Talk to Europeans and they hate the EU and see it as an oppressive foreign power.
Your framing is off, I'm afraid.
Across Europe, most people see the EU as more good than bad, especially compared to the alternative of countries acting alone. At the same time, support is often cautious rather than enthusiastic.
I've never seen any pro-EU attitude in the European countries I've lived in. Except for among the political and media class. But those aren't representatives of the general population.
But I haven't lived in central Europe, like Germany, Belgium, etc. Where the attitudes seem to be quite pro-EU.
The original statement still stands. Europe is not the EU. The EU is not Europe.
Voter turn out is extremely low in certain central and eastern Europe for EU elections. I think it was down to under 20% in some places a few years ago.
I had hoped that the UK would vote to remain and Europe would move away from a centralist, authoritarian model, but it's got worse especially since 2020. The EU is its own worst enemy.
No, I haven't. Both the UK and EU are doing many of the same things. You can argue that the EU is bureaucratic without supporting bureaucracy within the UK. These are not contradictory positions.
You claimed that the UK leaving was bad as they were more liberal, and then noted that they were also doing lots of anti privacy stuff. Seems a little contradictory to me.
It insists on things like "corruption is bad", "human rights are for everyone including gays" so naturally certain conservative groups find that authoritarian.
Human rights are for everyone, not just people you agree with. If you bring in censorship, surveillance and smother protest for people you disagree with, you will find it getting used against you yourself at some point. Europe has imported this false binary from the USA, and it is not benefitting it either.
The EU has its fair share of corruption, but it is is better at hiding it than developing countries. Its current president Ursula Von Der Leyen is a fraud who appears to have cheated at university, and only got to where she did due to wealth and aristocratic family connections.
also things such as chat control and surveilling the entire populace, but I'm sure you must be right that the problem people have with it is that they say "corruption is bad"
Chat control is a Swedish proposal that has consistently lost in the Parliament. We should of course keep fighting it but at least as a Swede I know things would have been much worse without the EU.
It was pushed by Sweden but also by many other countries including France (which loves to give lessons of democracy to the world by the way and is very much at the forefront of human rights or so they say) and Hungary amongst others.
> has consistently lost in the Parliament.
It has consistently lost so far. Secondly the reason it has lost is because people like me took the time to actually reach out to any MEP who would take my call to tell them to oppose this law. If we had waited for the EU to react and put a stop to this madness, we would still be waiting.
This law should never have been proposed in the first place anyway. The fact that it was proposed and debated is a shameful action in itself.
> I know things would have been much worse without the EU.
How can you know for sure? You can't. Since it originated from the EU commission, it stands to reason that without the EU commission it would not have happened.
You believe that the EU is good because that is your belief. The European countries existed for 100s of years before the EU. There is no reason to think that they can't go back to this state in the future.
One definition of authoritarian is "enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom".
It would seem to me that the recent spate of sanctioning individuals - e.g. for 'disseminating misinformation' without a legal definition of what that actually is would be an example of authoritarianism. A direct attack on freedom of speech and thought.
Which Europeans have you "talked" to? Discord and twitter don't count. People moan about the EU like they moan about their own national government.
Opinion polls on actually leaving the EU show a minority in favour. Most Europeans saw Brexit play out and realise sticking the finger up at your neighbours is not a winning strategy.
Brexit was ironically mostly an anti immigration vote. It has thoroughly demolished the involved parties that the one thing promised has not come to pass.
I guess real life doesn't count either? Good that we can rely on HN and Reddit, where the pro-EU sentiment is strong. I just haven't seen that in real life, which is why I suggest maybe it might be particular to Germans and probably Belgians and Dutch.
Unfortunately you live in the wrong time and age. You'd like to report to your local commissar when somebody expresses opinions and ideas against the cherished government - "he's a right wing propagandist who seeks to destroy us!". But it's not the 20th century anymore, and all you can do is scream into the cyber void.
Accusing anybody who doesn't love the government of "spreading propaganda" is not a sign of knowledge. It's a sign of an obsolete 20th century mindset and perspective on life.
Next perhaps you're going to accuse me of "Staatsfeindlichkeit", which the German leadership was screaming in their denouncements, before the people tore down their walls.
"Verunglimpfung des Staates" - "Insulting the State", this awful, awful crime, is something I'm going to continue doing however I fancy. Millions of people were killed for that right, so it's not something I'm ever giving up.
Not loving the government is OK. Heck, hating the government might also be OK.
Insisting that we European citizens hate the EU when it is not true, and then doubling down with accusations of censorship when the whole thread points out your mistake, is downright stupid. But hey, if that makes you happy as some kind of freedom fighter, go for it.
When you start talking about "right wing propaganda that will destroy us", then I only hear echoes of the government worship of the 20th century. As I said, the EU is not Europe, nor the other way around. And that's mainly what's upsetting hackers. They live in a fantasy that the EU is in some way like the USA. I know that quite a lot of Germans, Dutch and Belgians consider themselves "EU citizens". And maybe Spaniards as well. Nobody in Northern Europe considers themself an "EU citizen" or gives any value to the EU. They consider themselves people of their own nations only, and the EU as a foreign influence.
I have met plenty of people from Finland, Sweden and Denmark who were all pretty happy with the EU. I guess it helps that we all work in big international projects, so we get to talk to lots of different nationalities on a daily basis.
The EU has better healthcare and welfare overall, but fewer individual rights in other areas. Less gun crime (although this depends on region). Poverty levels vary a lot across the EU.
Americans take homeschooling for granted, for better or worse, but it is banned in some European countries like Germany.
Also the USA allows groups such as the Amish their liberty, which would be extremely unlikely in much of the EU where state interference would either force them out or destroy them.
The US has umpteen issues but is much better for freedom of expression frankly, although it is being steered away from that.
The EU is not more "free". There are a lot of things you can't say or will get shut down for. Most of the EU does not have the same freedom of expression or religion that the USA guarantees in its founding documents. The collective cannot have freedom if the individual does not. That includes the right to disagree.
The EU and USA are going down the same road. Social media is a part of this censorship of open discussion and is usually American based, but works hand in hand with the European governments. Both European and American governments seem happy to deceive citizens into a surveillance state.
It is unacceptable to ban homeschooling. Some children need to be homeschooled, because of disabilities, or even high intelligence. Given the fact that Germany has suffered from both far right and far left dictatorships within living memory, anything that does not promote blind obedience to the state should be encouraged.
Many parts of Europe retain a feudal mentality, which includes constant deference to authority.
> There are a lot of things you can't say or will get shut down for.
Such as? I honestly can't think of anything.
> It is unacceptable to ban homeschooling. Some children need to be homeschooled, because of disabilities, or even high intelligence.
European education laws prioritize the child's right to education and social development over parental autonomy as an absolute. Mandatory schooling laws have been adopted to ensure minimum educational standards and to safeguard against neglect and abuse, which is especially important when it comes to disabilities. Someone with proper training and decades of experience will educate a disabled child far more effectively than a parent whose only guaranteed qualification may be knowing how to have sex.
I've seen what a complete crapshoot state education is first hand. My god daughter came out of school recently and can barely read and write. I had to suffer through it myself...
I find it amusing that homeschooling is so vilified and stereotyped. All the homeschooled children I know are BETTER educated not worse. Contrary to the stereotype. Schools have massive bullying issues and are often bad environments for neurodiverse people. Schools are very Lord of the Flies.
Home schooling is of course only as good as the people teaching but the same is true of schools. Most state curricula prioritise the state and adoration of the state... funnily enough
Not all European countries have banned home schooling. Not even all members of the EU.
As for neglect and abuse of children, the public schools is where you will most readily find it. Including bullying until children commit suicide. And school shootings. Which is a lesser risk at home. No matter which continent.
No one said all EU countries have banned homeschooling. That is just one issue.
Schools are a haven for bullying, both by students and teachers. I did have some good teachers but some of them were also the most cruel and abusive people I've ever met.
He is not an EU citizen and, as a foreigner, acts as a mouthpiece for a hostile dictatorship. The US has sanctioned similar people too, most notably Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2559
I've read somewhere that Americans understand freedom as "freedom TO", shiny Europeans understand freedom as "freedom FROM". This is extremely visible in this thread and probably a cause of many misunderstandings.
There's philosophical terms for this: America emphasizes negative liberty ("freedom from interference by other people. Negative liberty is primarily concerned with freedom from external restraint") , while Europe emphasizes positive liberty ("the possession of the power and resources to act in the context of the structural limitations of the broader society which impacts a person's ability to act")
I don't give very much for statistics and opinion polls. People tend to give the answer they think they're "supposed to give" in those. I base my assessment on my experience from talking to people in real life.
> Maybe you should get out of your right-wing bubble.
Your comment is nasty, but I don't think you're this nasty in real life. Probably you're just blowing off some steam online.
Likewise, I've never met a person who has said they are for the EU or even strongly pro-EU. So it must be a question of which of the EU member countries you are in or other kind of bubbles.
> Get out of yours.
I suggested in my original post that Germans seem to be pro-EU. And probably neighbouring countries too. Here in this thread also appeared a fanatically pro-EU Spaniard. In Nordic countries, I've never met a person who would admit they were pro-EU. Of course they must exist, since presumably half the people voted yes to join, a few decades ago.
In the end it seems to be no more complicated than people who benefit financially from EU redistribution of money are pro-EU and the people who have to pay the bill for it are against the EU.
As I said, I don't give much for opinion polls. And comparing two sides as you do now, doesn't mean that people are fond of either side.
You can prove anything with statistics. The last opinion poll I saw for my country of birth was both the EU and the national government at a less than 50% approval rate.
Ok so you trust your gut and lived experiences more that population statistics. That's a totally valid approach but it's very easy to misread the popular opinion as your friends are not a random sample.
I have an idea of what I'm talking about. I say that the EU is not Europe. Nor is Europe the EU. People in these conversations need to understand the difference, because it is significant. Norway, Great Britain, Iceland and Switzerland aren't in the EU.
Yes, but those are only trade and border agreements, and don't give the EU influence on internal political matters. Compare similar trade agreements between other nations, such as between the United States and their neighbours.
> Yes, but those are only trade and border agreements
Honestly goods and service regulations are probably the biggest infringement of sovereignty as it signs all of your companies up to arbitrary standards. That may be a good idea, but to pretend that it's somehow less important than other pooling of sovereignty seems strange to me.
> The US literally wrote a national security strategy describing that it wants to dismantle the EU.
The official 2025 NSS document does not explicitly state a US goal to dismantle the European Union.
The strategy is highly critical of the EU's direction and Europe's trajectory in ways that critics could say could indirectly undermine EU cohesion, but there's no formal language saying the US wants to dismantle the EU.
Critics interpret the tone and strategic shift as potentially indirectly weakening EU cohesion if taken as encouragement to nationalist or Eurosceptic political forces.
Every year the percentage of European GDP driven by government spending rises by roughly 1%. We just hit over 50% on average in the Eurozone.
So they have over 50% control, and this will only rise as the population further ages, eating all productive activity in the economy.
It doesn't matter who 'owns' the means of production if the government is post-facto seizing a controlling stake in all economic activity via taxation and deficit spending (phantom taxation via inflation). Europe is quite literally eating its private sector like saturn devouring his son.
This article is about FAFO for MAGA loyalists in the USA. Well, MAGA has FA'd with US-European relations. Now they get to FO where it takes us (i.e. over the waterfall, isolating the USA from everything good in the world.)
I mean, we still borderline run the world, so there's that. In this very OP it's major news that Europe is trying to move off of US technology, because we're just so dominant.
> trump pissing away a century of hard-won soft power handed the century to China
Right, it's all Trump's fault, not the fault of the boomers that sold our country's manufacturing base out to China in the 60's onward which gave them their start, and that we've never recovered from.
But no, I'm sure it's the orange man who still hasn't done 1/3rd of the things we voted him in to do, that is the problem. Average deportation rates are still below Obama's terms, "Mr. President, there's too much winning!!". What a joke, I wish he did half the things you all claim he does, we'd be much better off.
Americans really need to consider stuff outside their little bubble sometimes and think about how their country is just a gear in a much larger system.
Of course American power is being pissed away by the guy hurting the transatlantic alliance American power was built on in the first place.
Your internal generational squabbles don't concern us. How you present yourself externally does, and that's worse than it's been in a long time.
> Your internal generational squabbles don't concern us.
Of course it doesn't, like how European's view of Americans doesn't matter to the vast majority of us. Every country has some sort of 'bubble', or a set of concerns and shared history only relevant to the in-group. I couldn't give a rats ass about the generational history of Europe either, for instance.
> How you present yourself externally does, and that's worse than it's been in a long time.
Well, of course, I'm sure the potential of not recieving massive military aid anymore, and no longer having the ability to run the country dry, would be very noticeable. If that was the cost of maintaining Europe as an ally, then being viewed in a more negative light is simply a necessary expense.
> Well, of course, I'm sure the potential of not recieving massive military aid anymore, and no longer having the ability to run the country dry, would be very noticeable. If that was the cost of maintaining Europe as an ally, then being viewed in a more negative light is simply a necessary expense.
See, this is exactly what I mean with my above post.
The US is a rich and powerful country, but it's actively sabotaging the foundation of said wealth and power.
The "massive military aid" was free power projection for you guys, giving your military access to another third of the globe. It was also a massive subsidy program for US industry, with us buying your stuff.
US wealth is built on access to our market, yet you were convinced you were the ones doing us a favour.
Truth is, the US has been the wealthiest and most powerful country, not by accident or by divine providence, but by our grace.
Nero is burning Rome and the plebeians are cheering him on.
It can be both. The document is massive, very contradictory and incoherent, and most of the people hysterical over it haven't even read it. Look I'm no fan of the trump administration but people should have concrete concerns, not waving around "project 2025" like some symbol of the country's imminent collapse. Unfortunately, our country is nowhere near collapse and this administration is not going to be the thing to bring it down. Though they're trying their hardest, i will admit.
Talk of how it might be interpreted is rather beside the point when the administration appears to be implementing a particular interpretation and SCOTUS appears to be fine with that, whether or not it is a selective one. Those are the concrete concerns of which you speak.
It is helpful to have the document publicly available, but only if enough people heed its implicit warning.
I would argue the concrete concerns we should have is the fact that we seem to be committing economic suicide, which will have decades of economic and sociopolitical fallout. If you think people have an appetite for fascism today, wait until you see what decades of deflating economies will do.
If the #2 or #1 most popular political party in Germany are "literal Neonazis", I think Germany and likely Europe as a whole has a much bigger problem than whatever America is doing.
Well, foreign intervention and propaganda in democracies is nothing new. It is well documented all the way back to the time of ancient Greece.
So your contention is that in Germany and perhaps other countries (France?) some of the most popular political parties are popular only because their partisans are uneducated dupes or worse, in thrall to foreign powers. Perhaps you would be better off ideologically not supporting democracy - it sounds like it is not for you. Of course democracy has its problems - and people voting for dumb ideas is one of them!
You can either accept that it's your duty to convince your citizens you are right to win their votes, or you can insist that everyone else is wrong and democracy means they should shut up and vote only the "right" way in accordance with establishment approved opinions and go about what Europe has been doing, which is to continue to pursue unpopular policies and blame Russiia/nazis/America/the Internet/free speech for their problems.
European center and left parties could suck all the oxygen out of the room and starve the far-right overnight if they simply introduced and enforced major immigration restrictions - but it's precisely this which is not a Establishment Approved Idea and deemed Unthinkable Hate. Democracy, as long as your opinions are allowed.
> So your contention is that in Germany and perhaps other countries (France?) some of the most popular political parties are popular only because their partisans are uneducated dupes or worse, in thrall to foreign powers. Perhaps you would be better off ideologically not supporting democracy - it sounds like it is not for you. Of course democracy has its problems - and people voting for dumb ideas is one of them!
I don't! I think authoritarian leftism is the way to go as most people are too stupid for their own good tbh.
> European center and left parties could suck all the oxygen out of the room and starve the far-right overnight if they simply introduced and enforced major immigration restrictions
Economic suicide. Why would anyone argue for this? Europe might as well just nuke itself.
Granted, if I were a conservative European, I would also be pro nuking myself.
Heavens to Betsy, someone online just disagreed with the Correct Political Views! Better ban their account and send an officer to their door to arrest them now, before they can further poison our beautiful free democracies with their right-wing propaganda.
The Trump administration really does have a point about anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe. You'd be very surprised because you're used to European censorship regimes reaching beyond the continent and limiting free speech online.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter who or what you're replying to. You've taken a flamewar 15 comments deep. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid here.
The American public schooling system in action yet again here. 3rd grade reading comprehension in no way stops them from loudly proclaiming some of the dumbest shit possible.
> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software.
My belief is that there is no problem with the Chinese equipment, just scare-mongering from the US because it has no manufacturer of 5G equipment. And Europe jumped on the bandwagon just because.
For decades trusting the US was no problem at all. The relationship was mutually beneficial. Cooperation and trust among nations is possible and Juche (completely self-reliance) is not a worthwhile goal at all. So, sure, cooperation is great and should always be a goal – it also secures peace (people who are economically intertwined are less likely to go to war with each other).
The issue is the US burning up that earned mutual trust. And at some point you have to sadly abandon ship. Cooperation is great, trade is great, but not under all circumstances and all the time.
The issue has less to do with intelligence silliness, and more to do with the fact that the overall geopolitical objectives of the US can not be trusted, and that rift has grown to a point where self-reliance on critical infrastructure may be in Europe’s best interest.
US started to eavesdrop on Turkey and Greece first. Germany pulled out of the project by citing this is going too far for them. Some citations from news:
The Germans were taken aback by the Americans’ willingness to spy on all but their closest allies, with targets including NATO members Spain, Greece, Turkey and Italy [0].
Operation Rubicon [1] has a map of spied countries, incl. NATO allies and "friends".
I failed to find that great long-read article. If I can find, I will attach it here, too.
See, this is a clear example why hypercynicism (everything has always been maximally evil all the time already) is not at all helpful. You lose your ability to differentiate in your cynical zeal to cast everyone as maximally (undifferentiably) evil all the time.
>> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
> Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software.
The logic is don't use infrastructure of people you don't trust. If Europeans don't trust Chinese, then don't use Chinese infra; if the Europeans don't trust the US (anymore), then don't use US infra. The Europeans could trust the Canadians, and use Canadian infra for example.
> Europeans don't trust Chinese, then don't use Chinese infra; if the Europeans don't trust the US (anymore), then don't use US infra.
I'm seeing the EU being singled out as unreasonable for avoiding the risk represented by buying their whole infrastructure from companies with deep and blatant ties to CCP's armed forces.
Somehow these critics are omitting the fact that most of the world, specially asian countries, have also banned them.
Yes, there is a lot of affinity towards Canada in Europa, I feel. Last Bastion of Democracy on the North-American continent, and not part of the whacky Trump-Atlantian Hemisphere.
China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian. They're also preparing for military activities to expand their territory.
It's not that each country needs to develop their own, but it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.
Like Saudi Arabia and formerly the Saddam regime (when he sold oil in USD)?
While compatible world view is used as an argument against diplomatic and economic relations, in reality it’s just a bonus, not a requirement. What’s important is plain old cost benefit and national interests. The US is still a better ally for EU than China, but it’s gotten drastically worse fast. And while China has territorial ambitions, they are nowhere near EU. The US is the good old status quo ”devil you know”, but it’s abundantly evident now that nobody really knew them, including many of their own political elites domestically.
On diplomacy timescales, ignoring China because of human rights concerns is exceptionally short-sighted, both for EU if US continues current path, and for global stability in case conflicts escalate between China and US. There is no choice that guarantees EU will have a strong ”human rights” ally in 10 years.
> China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian
Let's also say that democracy is very important internally. But as a EU citizen (or even better as a middle east citizen) whether they're democratic or authoritarian makes very little difference to me- I don't get a say in what they do. And in the case of the ME, it wasn't China or its allies that reduced several countries to rubble, it was the democratic US.
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view
There are no such things as "incompatible world view" but certainly closer or more distant ones. And I think the fundamental values of the US are pretty far away from those of the EU.
I'm not sure I understand what it means to be "compatible". We are talking about different countries with different regimes of course: in what sense two countries are or aren't compatible?
Huawei became very competitive to Apple. Outsold Apple in it's home market. Huawei got banned.
DJI has a near monopoly on drones. No US company could compete and players like GoPro shut down their consumer drone projects. DJI got/is about to get banned.
Tiktok was dangerous to Meta. TikTok got almost banned/forced-sold.
Chinese EVs are better than almost any US offering. Chinese EVs got banned (by 100%+ tarrifs on them).
Sale of AI and Chips to China got banned. No ChatGPT or Claude offered to us here in Hong Kong.
This is all the US Tech sector can do now. Short term this will go very well but long term this leads to the US falling behind and behind because American companies have artificially created barriers where they aren't forced to comepete anymore, meanwhile the world moves on and has a competitive environment. Innovation will move faster Ex-USA
I fly a DJI Mini 5 Pro, use a Huawei Freeclip 2 earphone, a Huawei GT6 watch, a Xiaomi Silicon Carbon powerbank, an Oppo Find N5 foldable. Most are better/unique compared to what you can even get in America. And that's only the beginning. That's only 2025.
> Huawei became very competitive to Apple. Huawei got banned.
How would you explain Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.?
> DJI got banned.
Untrue.
Supply is constrained and future of new product availability is uncertain because of FY2025 National Defesnse Authorization ACt, which requires a security audit by late Dec 2025. If that doesn't happen, DJI could automatically be added to the FCC's restricted list, which could block new products from being certified and sold in the US.
Your argument is that US tech companies do not have the ability to compete, but this example doesn't support your claim; in fact it does the opposite.
But even so, your information is out of date. Nvidia is now allowed to sell its advanced H200 AI chips to China. The whiplash is dumb, but the move is aimed at maintaining US AI leadership, support American jobs, while addressing concerns about China's military AI development.
As a former Huawei phone owner, and a present Honor phone owner, Samsung LG and Sony does not hold a candle to the quality on offer from Honor and Huawei.
And this is coming from someone who has owned multiple Samsungs over the years.
I agree generally that protectionism is bad, but the examples you present are just the US (finally!) doing to China what China has done to the world for decades. They rely on relatively unencumbered trade in Western markets, while locking their own markets up from outside competition.
And yet you can buy a Tesla in China or an iPhone or any luxury bag or or or. Plenty of brands. It's not quite as black and white as people think.
What you're talking about is social networks/messengers/news which are limited not so much for competitive reasons but national security reasons. They like to control what people see which is something a Google, Meta or X cannot guarantee.
Not sure how that statement squares against the fact that a lot of major US stores (Amazon, Target, Costco, Walmart, B&H Photo, Microcenter, etc.) have DJI products available for purchase, as well as that there is literally a physical retail DJI store[0] within a ~20min subway ride away from my apartment in the US.
According to the "Huawei cyber security evaluation centre" (HCSEC) oversight boards annual report to the national security adviser of the United Kingdom (note: HCSEC was a joint lab between NSCS, GCHQ and Huawei with a lot of access to internal documentation and firmware source code and so on to check if they are telling the truth when they promised there is no backdoor for the chinese ministry of national security in the 5G equipment) their quality and basic security processes are so bad, that it is believable that all the vulnerabilities are unintentional. However they did improve in the years prior to being kicked out, so you are not wrong that it was somewhat of a bandwagon move following the us sanctions.
> just scare-mongering from the US because it has no manufacturer of 5G equipment.
Even if that were accurate, which it isn’t, what exactly do you think the US stands to gain by Europe buying 5g from someone other than China (like the European providers Ericsson and nokia)?
Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech, reinforcing the US's position as a global powerhouse. (Meanwhile US tech is built on the shoulders of their allies.) Now we see these same allies are starting to look inward and invest in technology they own completely because the US is acting decisively not like an ally. Something unthinkable since WW2.
I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.
I agree, this is a good thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. Airbus obviously has a large amount of military work, and its data needs to stay in Europe.
What we also need is a faster acceleration of military spending so this can happen with more companies.
> thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market.
They are not. It can hurt Airbus very much if a provider says they can provide a certain level of hardware/software for 10 years and in three years the RAM or storage goes through the roof and the provider is not big enough to absorb all the losses.
People don’t choose the hyperscalers because they are based in the US, they choose them because they are too big to fail and have pretty much unlimited resources and have multiplr streams of revenue.
Airbus is ~30% government owned by France/Germany/Spain and others. It is funded both as a private business and as a European "champion" to compete with Boeing.
It is also likely to get the majority of the European civil, commercial, and military orders now.
There is no reason why Europe can't build a hyperscalar cloud service. The skills and the software and hardware are all transferrable technology.
European defence budgets are being ramped up, spending some billions on data centres and comms is a no-brainer as part of that.
European governments contracting to a European cloud provider would be more than enough to fund the provisioning.
I would expect a contract review for millions in hosting to review how the company will mitigate those costs. Normally you would expect them to contract away the risk themselves. In fact the current rise in RAM costs is due to exactly this, big hosters contracting for long term RAM certainty.
> There's a futures market for RAM prices if you want to hedge that risk. No different than corn.
Yeah, and that's a fine vehicle for insuring against this risk for a finance company or for an individual.
I am prepared to be wrong on the following take (as it is based on nothing more than just "it came to me in a dream"), but my hunch is that neither Airbus nor the EU state governments are currently even attempting to hedge the RAM price risk by accumulating a RAM futures stash on the market.
> Almost all computer equipment companies are from US.
Made in a few Asian countries. I think it's kind of funny reading the contents of your post and how it ignores Asia, that's actually behind most of it. How much of a Dell PC is US-American?
Was it laziness and stupidity, or was it protection money. I thought the deal since WW2 was a US security guarantee, in return for letting the US have our money. A protection racket. Or perhaps it was more like Europe paying tribute to its colonial master.
Anyhow it is clear the protection is not to be relied upon, so it is time to stop paying. It is dangerous making deals with gangsters. It is perhaps more dangerous to change the deal. But when the protection is not there, it is time to build strength.
Well done to France for maintaining its independent nuclear deterrent through this era. Britain made a mistake letting that go
Wait so the US is supposed to provide security at no cost forever? Are you talking about NATO or something else? The only thing I see a problem is all countries paying the same rate to be in NATO.
This trope with CERN/EU created the WWW is just chauvinism. That contribution to the internet is just infinitesimal small. Just stop repeating it as it was the cornerstone of today’s world.
Is just one little stone in a gigantic castle made in the united states. I’m European, and I think is just silly to look who “invented” each thing, trying to feel patriotic about that. Every invention is based on other inventions, research, ideas and necessities around the world. Trying to put flags on it, is just stupid.
>> Is the castle made in the US? Why cut it off at precisely that point?
Because I was talking about this “internet was invented in CERN”, which is just not a little bit true
About the rest: So what?! Thanks Thanks Europe and Europeans!! We just killed 6 Mio. Judes and burned people in the middle ages… but wait. We invented the Web!!! And we can forget everything that came from Asia and middle East also. All is our merit!!! Again, my point is it is stupid to say some country invented X.
What kind of cheap chauvinism is that? Please give me a break. Many things where invented everywhere in the world, and I could not care less, because that will not make me better or worse because of being part of a country which borders were defined not 100 years ago.
The starting point of this thread in HN is about starting to develop some kind of digital independence, because frankly, the EU may have GDPR, but in everything else is much worse and stuck like 5 decades ago.
Your words are displaying the mindset that is the main driving force behind the currently ongoing decline of the American empire. Incredible hubris paired with ignorance and a lack of self reflection. Great qualities if you want to go further down that line.
Well, the currently best OS widely deployed is Chinese only. HarmonyOS, a microkernel OS replacing Android on Chinese phones. About 10x faster development than in the US. And secure, unlike Linux.
Fuchsia never made it widescale. They started a couple of years before the Chinese and then got stuck
> Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech
This is a disingenuous straw man. The allies are derided for literally freeloading on US military protection while underinvesting in their own defense.
My country spends less on defence as a percentage of GDP than the US. But it spends much of that with US companies. This is not Freeloading. It was a deal. Cancel TSR-2, and buy American and we will lend you some money. Cancel your nuclear program and buy US submarine launched missiles and we will help you look after yourself. Now let Visa and Mastercard skim off all your transactions and we will keep you secure to keep the money flowing. Sweetheart tax deals for US companies to operate, and we will keep you safe to keep the money flowing. It is not Freeloading, it is colonialism
Agreed those things exist, in most contracts one or both parties feel they are not getting a 'fair' deal and will renegotiate terms, this is very common.
The current U.S. President has insisted that Europeans are freeloading. Given that he’s been the primary proponent of this idea, and given that he’s been cutting off aid and has made cutting off this “freeloading” the central plank of his defense strategy, the U.S. defense budget must have gone down significantly right?
Obviously faulty logic. This isn't a zero-sum game. In fact, the whole point is to increase our combined combat power.
For too long European NATO countries have kept token militaries lacking any substantial combat power. They have centered their national defense strategies around holding off Russia for just long enough for Uncle Sam to swoop in, fight the Russians, and save the day. But the US does not have the combat power to fight both Russia and China. So our total combat power must increase. Should the US bear this increased burden alone? Or should the rest of NATO finally get serious about funding and fielding effective militaries?
European states have been freeloading, and US defense budgets are not going to decrease just because Europe finally starts to take some responsibility for its own defense.
Pray tell, how much of, say, the latest Afghanistan war did the US pay and how much do their allies need to bear? The rebuilding of a whole country, the reinstatement of the Taliban regime, the destabilization of the region, and the still ongoing stream of refugees? The political aftermath of which is still felt in Europe.
Europe could have simply denied entry to the refugees and avoided their entire refugee problem. It's especially silly to blame the US when most EU states strongly supported the downfall of Qaddafi and Assad.
That's the thing though. Most European states (inside and outside the EU) consider the US their strategic ally, and they will support whatever it takes to make that strategy work. Policy at international level is made for strategic reasons, and you have to look at what countries do, not at what they say.
The strongest state, economically and military, can get away with a lot others wouldn't, since everyone else will want to be on their good side. The new US administration has clearly shifted in terms of what they say, but not yet much in terms of what they do. Maybe Ukraine will be the exception here.
The EU is so much more civilized by bribing Turkiye [0], Libya [1], Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia [2], and other nations to shoot and/or indefinitely detain them for you guys instead.
Yet we as Americans are the savages.
European civil society needs to drop this charade of moralizing and being "rules based". The reality is EU policymakers are equally as mercurial and open to making deals with devils. The issue is a subset of you guys have a weird form of "white saviourship" and sense of exceptionalism.
Finally, a plurality of us Americans either never had or no longer have blood ties with Europe. As an Asian American who used to work om the Hill, I myself and my peers increasingly ignore or overlook Europe despite having went to college with a number of your up-and-coming decisionmakers. In 2025, the majority of us Americans are Latino, Black, Mixed, Asian, or multi-generational White American.
Any positive historical ties we had with Europe (in reality, a fluke from 1939-2011) was because of 1.5 gen Central and Eastern European immigrants turned NatSec Advisers like Kissinger (German), Albright (Czech), and Brzezinski (Polish). From a soft power perspective, when we don't look inward we increasingly look to Latin America or Asia. And economically as well - our total trade with all of Europe is barely $975B compared to $1.5T with all of the Americas and around $2-2.5T with Asia.
> The allies are derided for literally freeloading on US military protection while underinvesting in their own defense.
1. No one forced the US to spend a bajillion dollars on defense.
2. The US did so out of their own free will, and out of self-interest: their power hegemony allowed for peaceful trade routes that benefited the US economy and US corporations.
3. Their own defense against what? What threats, until fairly recently, did the Europeans face that they needed to spend money protecting against?
Guess which country had never any interest in a strong (politically and militarily) Europe, to maintain the world hegemony?
A Europe with an independent defense is dangerous competition for the US. Maybe it means that some international trade will be done in Euro. Maybe it means foreign policies in Europe's interests.
It seems every single comment in the thread is understanding "cloud" here to mean AWS vs Hetzner. But it's clear from the first paragraph of the article that what they actually mean is MS 365 Dynamics vs SAP. They primarily want a managed ERP + CRM solution, not servers.
Even that isn't generic and broad enough. I've noticed so many people mean SaaS when they say cloud. That isn't even a hardware or server or infrastructure meaning. It's referring to a whole cohesive IT product that you subscribe to.
Actually I'd say "cloud" says more about the business model than it says about the actual product.
Indeed. And SAP has no cooperation with any European cloud providers, afaik. It's the big three plus alibaba. SAP wants to move away from on-prem, but I guess it has a solution for critical applications. Maybe that can be shoehorned onto OVH or something.
Not entirely true. You can do SAP RISE on Telekom (not Open Telekom Cloud, forgot the name of the thing) and as far as I know STACKIT is currently in beta. Apparently the AWS Sovereign Cloud will be possible as well. Its just way more expensive because Microsoft and AWS use their monetary power to give SAP better offers (just guesswork obviously, its not like SAP would tell you).
SAP runs its own cloud/IaaS in addition to running its workloads on the hyperscalers. It's been doing that for years internally, and that SAP cloud is now being extended to be open for direct consumption by other companies:
Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere.
People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete.
This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product.
We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.
Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself
IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos …
Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in
I hesitate to call Hetzner "cloud". Hetzner is an EC2+S3 competitor, not an AWS one. IMO the minimum for being a real cloud is you need hosted Postgres, hosted Kafka, hosted Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage. Without the first three Hetzner is just not in the same product category. Nobody sensible buys AWS for the comically overpriced EC2.
Another missed component is a real autoscaling load balancer. This often gets missed and taken for granted. Possibly due to if you haven't seen a good one (AWS) you might not realise what you're missing. Most aspiring "cloud" companies have fixed capacity single tennant load balancers which is not cloud in any definition.
It's far cheaper to do it yourself, but the entire point is that you outsource the management of the service. Lots of people don't want to deal with database failovers, or - god forbid - deal with Kubernetes control plane issues.
On the opposite, it is more expensive, and any large enough company should probably at least consider renting metal rather than services. For a small org, though, it lets you avoid a lot of infrastructure/ops work.
If your threat model is AWS deciding you break their AUP, the issue is with you doing AUP breaking stuff. This ain’t your personal Google Play account.
Half a billion people shouldn't be reliant on whether a guy with clown makeup is having a dementia moment.
Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country. Actually in house not big tech EU "sovereign" cloud wink wink nudge
It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship.
Airbus has the ability to move their data to another location, but it is very problemetic that all people with a social account can't. Sure, you can delete your Facebook account but it will take years for you profile to be gone because we all know your data is sold to other parties.
My only option is to keep in mind that everything I put online will one day be read by some evil entity. Even my IP address that Hacker News might store (I don't know, but servers log stuff).
> It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship.
I know, watching the fall of the UK and European countries has been really depressing to see. It's unfortunate, but it seems the US will have to carry the torch alone going into the mid-to-late 21st century.
Seems extremely dangerous to be doing those kinds of things with software from someone politically hostile. Perhaps the EU should be weaning itself off that too?
> And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
By doing police legwork and by prevention work (i.e. offer help to pedophiles, don't go and wreck MENA countries for funsies, but invest in helping the civilian populations).
this might be rather unrelated to the article, but I hate seeing companies being bought up by the US in europe and it especially makes me upset to see that the american president has the audacity to claim that european countries are just leeching off the US when in reality the whole world feeding the US is what allows it to do things that would cause any other country to go bankrupt.
I do not understand what this is supposed to be about.
What is this "Euro Cloud" and what does it have to do with "ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management (aircraft designs)"?
For example I am not aware that Microsoft, Amazon or Google offer any PLM services. The companies offering those would be Siemens, Dassault and so on. Is the issue that those PLM providers are themselves running on Microsoft, Amazon or Google Services? But then the issue is with Airbus needing to force their suppliers into changing where there services are delivered from, but AFAIK these PLM providers offer on prem services, so it seems like a relatively trivial issue.
What exactly is the "Euro Cloud" supposed to mean here, what is the actual issue with Airbus switching their PLM to on prem? TO be honest I find it hard to imagine that this isn't already the case. So what is going on here?
This sounds funny now. But Hetzner has been moving into a cloud direction consistently. They recently rolled out VPCs, load balancers and all that. They are slowly building the blocks to provide what we generally call a cloud.
Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
Absolutely not. There's a gazillion cloud providers out there with hosted postgres+kafka+redis and the other big open source softwares. Hetzner is just not one of them.
Hetzner, OVH and Upcloud. All of them have object storage, managed Redis,Postgres and K8S.
Most of the time the missing things are homegrown SaaS offerings of big 3 and identity services. You will not find equivalent IAM or BigQuery in indie clouds.
Welcome to the real world. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but this is what’s happened. That’s why everyone is doing AWS. To pretend this is a non-issue and can easily be fixed by investing a bit in development does not reflect reality.
Because they don’t offer every service AWS offers? They offer plenty of hosted databases, queues and what not that it shouldn’t be too hard to move things over. Especially not if you are on Kubernetes. Not if you are all in on lambdas of course but that is a problem in and of itself.
I had created this comment on your other comment on one of my other comments that there are no cloud providers and so I am wishing to talk about both of these at the same comment perhaps
I do not know about the others but OVH (even with all of its flaws) is definitely a cloud provider
I got so damn overwhelmed looking at all the services offered by OVH once and I found some niche services which would most likely be underrated by many but if one wants at scale cheap cold storage, I recommend OVH's cold storage because they cost only 2$ per month/TB storage long term but have only 12$/TB ingress/egress compared to the egregious 100$/TB (or so I have heard) AWS's outage and where you have to play this little dance of shutting down AWS itself or something to not pay it but I genuinely think that OVH has a lot of features
I am not kidding but when I say overwhelmed, I truly meant it so much that I had to take a walk outside to put things into mind, I was looking for partnership opportunities for OVH tho that time but in my mind I have rejected them because they are too big to partner at a small scale In my opinion
OVH has the 2nd most meaningful high content or similar metric (I forgot the website which shared it) after AWS, it had more high traffic websites overall even more so than gcp
Personally I do not like this complexity. Just give me compute and storage and let me handle the rest but I don't really like OVH thaat much (my opinions change overtime too) but please look more into it if you genuinely want european cloud provider, I am interested to know about it, What are the metrics which qualify for the "long shot", I am genuinely curious and wishing to discuss honestly.
But to give you another example (from the article): Try migrating Google Workspace to an EU solution. Actually impossible. I tried it myself, and gave up. The closest you’ll get is Proton, which isn’t EU to begin with and doesn’t even have half of the features Google Workspace offers.
Well proton isn't Eu but its switzerland and I think that proton is going to move some of their servers to germany after switzerland had this questionable decision which feared privacy services (including proton)
Proton recently got proton sheets/proton docs
Personally one of the largest issues I have with proton is the lack of extensibility. Like google has app scripts and similar api's but proton's lack of api's have frustrated me so much that I have built an api over scraping/using a puppeteer instance over it but its still in very finnicky state
Well, I am not sure about the newer BTP-based stuff, but the main ABAP-based core of an SAP S/4HANA system certainly does not need those capabilities, as it is still basically the same running in on premise systems. The priority of a couple of BTP apps might be quite low, if they are not starting from scratch.
Scaleway and OVH offer all the basics and more (kubernetes, networking, hosted dbs, queues, storage, GPUs etc). It’s google workspace/microsoft 365 that has no equivalent.
1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place)
2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?"
If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century.
do you really suppose replicating the technical requirements of a security-sensitive company of this size in-house would be so easy? I've been doing infrastructure for 25 years and wouldn't want anywhere near this project. but what you will no doubt find is a pool of overconfident volunteers creating exactly the kind of risk outsourcing the problem allowed them to avoid in the first place
The way I understand it is today is when I board on an Airbus I enter an hybrid of a mechanical and digital machine.
I understand there is a lot of complex and sensitive software embedded/hosted on that plane that hopefully are not gonna kill me.
So computers are actually core to their business. They probably almost invented things like PLM too.
Nothing Airbus does is easy, this is why there are only about 2 companies like that in the world. This is why I do not see why their hosting have to be outsourced...
This administration has done more to undermine US power than probably any in history. This isn't a new statement either (eg [1]). Personally, I think that's not such a bad thing because we are the bad guys. I know people get all in their feelings when you say stuff like that but the number of democratically elected governments we've overthrown, just to get their resources, is indefensible.
This week it broke that China is pretty far along in duplicating EUV litthography. The US restricts ASML, a Dutch company, from exporting their best machines to China and Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese companies from exporting their chips to China. The second one was a massive mistake. Why? Because it created a marekt for China to produce chips because they had no other choice.
Geopolitically I think this is very similar to the USSR copying the atomic bomb in just 4 years after WW2 where US leaders either thought it was impossible or would take 20+ years.
The US has become unpredictable and unreliable. Ukraine is a big part of this because Europe is waking up to them having to be responsible for their own defense and that ultimately will undermine US power projection through NATO.
Since very early in this administration, probably back when the tariff nonsense began, I believed that Europe would be forced to distance themselves from US tech giants and at some point the EU would require cloud storage to be within EU borders and eventually require European companies to own and run that cloud rather than US companies.
China has their own version of virtually every tech company. I can see the EU moving in this direction for key functions and cloud is likely the first of those.
What's really precarious is the entire US economy is now essentially a bet on US companies owning a global AI future and I honestly don't think it's going to happen, mainly because China won't let it happen. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow for this and only the beginning.
What you really need to remember about the current administration is we're not even 1 year into a 4 year term with everything that's happened and the entire foreign policy is kleptocratic not strategic in nature.
I wonder if this includes Skywise, the Palantir-built data lake and design stack that they use for many many internal operations (design, airline support, manufacturing). Not sure what difference it really makes where the data is hosted if the folks doing the hosting call home to Colorado…
From what I've seen of Skywise, it is just a glorified SharePoint. Different systems upload CSV files that get turned into database tables. Then you can define views across these tables that other systems can consume by having them dumped to CSV and dropped on an SFTP.
Performance is not great, so you need middleware and batching anyway. As far as I am concerned, it wouldn't be a great loss if Skywise disappeared and just the SFTP with CSV:s remained.
And not just Airbus. Very quietly there is a lot of stuff being moved out of the US and away from MS, AWS, Google etc. Trump has absolutely no idea what he's doing and comes across as the proverbial bull in a China shop.
History books a hundred years hence will have some choice things to say about how we all stood by and let this happen.
On a very small personal/hobby level: backblaze (which i like as a company) lost my business, moved stuff over to a European company. I'm not a multi million dollar business but I've started to do what i can.
Would have loved to visit the US and see all the things it has to offer, but absolutely not planning to in this climate. I think the US is currently at billions lost in just Canadian tourism?
In case any SME-sized companies here are wanting to do something similar but are looking askance at the risk/investment/hiring required, then we'd [0] love to talk to you.
We specialise in doing this but on a smaller scale. Eg. 10-100 person companies that have 0-to-a-few DevOps engineers. Included is DevOps time each month to use as you wish, we're on call for SLAs, around 50% reduced cost vs AWS/Google/Azure, etc.
Somewhat differently to most, we deploy onto bare metal. In addition to dropping costs we typically see at least a 2x speed-up overall. Once client just reported a 80% reduction in processing time.
CTOs like us because we're always on-hand via Slack (plus we're the ones getting woken up in the night), and CFOs like us because billing becomes consistent.
It always puzzled me that big corps don’t have their own infrastructure. Surely there’s a point where hiring a team to manage it properly becomes economical at a certain point, and they take a lot of security risks out of a third party’s hands.
Ultimately this plays into China's hand. They have been promoting "sovereign internet" for many years now (to justify their tight control and the GFW). See the Wuzhen "World" Internet Conferences.
> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
I must be terribly fussy but this genuinely tripped me up while reading. What does this phrasing even mean? Is it an 80% chance of success? This seems like someone has heard the phrase "80/20 rule" and applied it somewhere it makes no sense.
> The aerospace manufacturer...now wants to move key on-premises applications...to the cloud.
most of the discourse here is missing the point. it is not to migrate a cloud resource away from (assumed) US-based services, but rather moving to the cloud for core services.
now "sovereign" is the hot word in these parts, and of course it would be a priority. but if it ends up running American HW/SW, is it really being independent? regardless, the article also mentions Google workspace, which is not in the scope of migration.
regardless of which part of the fence one is in, things are easier said than done especially when IT services is a cost to the company rather than revenue stream.
Given it was revealed that CIA specifically targeted 200million deals and above, it was political naivety amounting ti gross negligence on behalf of Airbus executives that it took them 10 years. Same for many other large organisations and countries, unbelieveable.
Why did it have to be Trump to make them take action?
Quite frankly, I'm astonished that large players like Airbus are/were still relying on US infrastructure providers at all, given public knowledge of ECHELON in the 90s and the BND-NSA espionage in the 00s.
One of the reason is a lot of those "EU Sovereign Clouds" were malicious cash grabs.
It happened several times in the last decade:
- First politicians raise the alarm about "digital sovereignty"
- Then some create new EU sovereign clouds that are pitched/forced on corporations
- They usually do not work, get consolidated and then the scam is revealed
The biggest reveal was when we discovered and warned one of our client the Orange "Sovereign Cloud" (French telco partially owned by the government !) and built to host European most sensitive worloads was just handed over and run by Huawei [0] [1].
They were not the only one who did something like that.
I don't want to put actors like Hertzner in the same bag as they seem to be honest and really compete to offer a cheaper alternative to hyperscalers.
There isnt any irony here. Huawei equipment was investigated by British and German intelligence agencies and was found to have no backdoors. That's why some countries are heavily buying it.
They're doing what they were voted in to do though? Most of what they're doing has high baseline approval ratings, just not in the specific implementation.
I do, works perfectly if you know what you're doing. If you have no clue, jump to AWS and enjoy the lockin, if you do, jump to a EU provider, and enjoy not being locked in, and a vastly lower cost.
lol my team has worked with every major cloud provider for a decade, but sure it's all our fault because incompetence.
good luck man.
edit: I never even implied that AWS lock-in something positive. I'm getting paid to move companies from cloud to on-prem because that's true sovereignty.
You can have the data safely on-prem, connected to computers that are connected to the internet, or safely in the cloud, connected to computers that are connected to the internet. The threats are not that different.
You'd be fooling yourself if you think any moderately complex company still hasn't moved to the cloud or isn't thinking about it (with rare exceptions)
Yeah, not really sure how a globally distributed manufacturing operation with a complex supply chain and customers all over the world that need access to data for their operations is supposed to function effectively without it.
(and I say that as someone that used to sell commercial aviation data that came on CDs...)
I'm not sure what the 'critical' stuff is either or what the details of Airbus' network hosting and knowledge compartmentalization strategy is, but you're not going to run a globally distributed manufacturing business with complex supply and maintenance requirements without having technical specs, CAD files, diagnostic criteria customer records etc sitting on computers connected to the internet.
It would be reasonably "secure" if it is encrypted on a physically private network using in-house _modified_ _mainstream_ encryption algorithm, then after an over-the-air transfer then you can store it on a third party could under the control of foreign interests. Oh, don't forget the file names have to be encrypted too.
Why would a company without cryptographic expertise modifying an existing algorithm without any particular goal in mind just to be different, produce something more secure than the winning solution in an open cryptographic competition?
> directory names
And file structure too, preferably. Incremental sync could be done with XTS mode.
You need only cryptographic common sense: it seems you have no idea how much it is easy to modify a mainstream cryptographic software to add basic and robust cryptographic modifications...
I've been assessing systems that use cryptography for about 20 years as part of my work in information security, and I've never seen a customization that increased the security of a cryptographic algorithm over following the best practices.
Usually, non-specialists fiddling with cryptographic algorithms makes them much less secure. Developers who aren't cryptographic mathematicians should generally use a well-respected algorithm, follow current best practices, and treat that component as a magic box that's not to be tampered with.
Doing such "customizations" (which are actually crypto 101) will break all attacks designed specifically for a crypto algo in mind. Even better if you lie on the crypto algorithm.
Ofc, that must be encrypted on systems which "cannot connect" (and you can go overkill with EM protection with a very good faraday cage).
If you are making such a technical pain for attackers, they will switch to social engineering anyway.
Algorithms like AES-GCM are standards because - when used according to best practices - there are no known practical attacks against them.
If someone has an attack that would defeat the cryptographic protection in a particular piece of software, the software is likely doing one or more of the following:
* Not using a modern, well-tested algorithm (e.g. using DES, a hokey custom XOR stream cipher, AES-ECB, etc.).
* Not following general cryptographic best practices (e.g. hardcoded or predictable key/IV/nonce, insecure storage of keys).
* Not following best practices for the specific algorithm (e.g. using AES-GCM, but reusing a key/nonce combination; using AES-CBC without applying an integrity-protection mechanism).
* The software is doing something that doesn't make sense, cryptographically (e.g. using symmetric encryption to encrypt sensitive data, but the data and the keys are necessarily accessible to the same set of users/service accounts, so there's no net change in security).
If such an attack fails because a developer has made changes to the cryptographic algorithm, a motivated attacker is likely just going to look at the code in Ghidra, x64dbg, etc. and figure out how to account for the changes. It's not a strong security control. I've been decrypting content stored using that kind of software for something like 20 years.
The correct approach is to verify that the use of a particular type of cryptography makes sense in the first place, then use a well-tested modern algorithm and follow the current best practices. i.e. using code from years-old forum posts will likely result in an insecure product.
A necessary step to reduce risk to infrastructure given that the US government has become erratic and has decided it is now anti-Europe.
The US means to undermine the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...
The US means to annex European territory: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo
It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
this is not a new issue: airbus has been the victim of corporate espionage supposedly by boeing with aid by the nsa in a well documented case in november 2011, and they are not the only victim of US government agency supported corporate espionage: investigations into the selector lists that ran in the cabinet noir at DE-CIX have shown that a large part of them were targeting european corporations. and that predates the cloud act of 2018, which made american infrastructure significantly less trustworthy.
The French DGSE was also exposed targeting dozens of american tech aerospace companies in the 90s (and probably still are). That type of state-assisted industrial espionage is pretty common, even between "friendly" nations. I think what's different now is the US announcing its intent to meddle into internal EU politics and supporting political opposition.
Even before that, remember the echelon incident in the 90s where the US used military espionage to Boeing an edge in commercial posts.
> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure.
Hopefully now "Europe" will think before fire selling all of its hardware manufacturing companies to foreign firms.
Yeah, for those foreign firms to manufacture goods from US companies in order to fill Walmarts and number go up.
Manufacture goods from US companies? Do you mean "for"?
Honest q, 3rd party crashing in: does it make a difference? My assumption is not for parsing for understanding and grammatically, its fine, if significantly less common than the “for” construct.
I'm just trying to understand what point they are trying to make
> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
Doesn't Europe actually have a lot of Chinese equipment in their telecom infrastructure? Is this an effort just to try not to make that mistake again?
No, not a lot as the EU has two very competitive providers in Ericsson and Nokia
They're both very expensive and the carriers primarily care about cost and features. And huawei will take a dozen devs, give them a one way ticket and put them in a hotel room near a customer to grind our whatever feature needed to seal the deal.
I remember years ago talking to some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right".
We live in new times anyways - most of the carriers have outsourced a lot of the tech stuff to the vendors anyways.
> some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right".
Then he has no principle and cannot be trusted.
Yes. I worked for a Cambodian telco, when there was a range of Alcatel, Nokia, etc switching equipment across 10 carriers. Huawei swept the lot within 2 years, and Alcatel staff told me they were losing everywhere - they couldn't match the price or technology. This was before the US decided to sanction Huawei.
The entire problem is they aren't nearly as "very competitive" as would be politically convenient.
The UK certainly ripped out a lot of Huawei equipment. Which is why our cellular coverage is a bit shitty these days
As an American, I would much prefer spotty cellar coverage to a Salt Typhoon attack. You lot got off easy!
I moved to UK in late 2013 and to be fair, from my observation the cellular coverage in the country has always been more than just a bit shitty.
Incidentally, the voice call quality in the UK is also really crappy. Operators compress/downsample the audio stream to the very edge of recognisability, because investing in sufficient infrastructure to support higher bandwidths is expensive.
Europe will just end up doing whatever is cheapest. It's the same story as always. They'll say some stuff publicly but they'll quietly come back to American tech once they see the price tag difference. They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
> They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
Being risk-averse unfortunately now means "avoid the USA".
With good cause
With US tech now in profit-squeezing mode rather than user-acquisition mode, the cost sensitivity might favor switching for things like SaaS.
Would (gently) note that we’re commenting on an article re: American tech risk. :)
Not sure it’s really sunk in for my fellow Americans what’s going on, we’re not exactly used to consequences and it’s still considered, a best, impolite to treat a holistic evaluation of policies as something beyond debate.
My Scaleway cloud stuff is way cheaper than AWS. Much simpler billing too.
Yep - just look at their oil/energy situation: they still buy it by the boatload from you know who, but just through 3rd parties.
But look at solar adoption across Europe since 2022. It’s going gang busters and now with sodium batteries coming online next year, cheap home energy storage is about to boom as well.
Europe doesn’t want to buy Russian gas, but there is also the very real political reality of what happens if your citizens freeze to death. I will be very surprised if any EU state is reliant on Russian gas by 2035.
When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
Yeah they are just insane whishfull thinkers.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar. That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe. Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country. That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
I did a conservative calculation if you started around 2000 in Germany and went full nuclear like France did. Not using any fancy new nuclear or anything. Literally just mass production of standard nuclear plants. Plus all the updates of the grid, including domestic fuel enrichment and 'waste' storage. Plus all the investment necessary to great a fully modern grid to electrify the economy.
We are talking in the order of 500 billion Euro and this is very conservative assumption on nuclear construction cost. Much worse cost then what France actually achieved in their build-out. Also much of that is actually the grid, grids are really expensive it turns out. But building nuclear in central location next to places where there used to be coal plants, makes grid cost much cheaper because most of the grid is already there perfectly positioned to feed the population clusters. And that accounts for actually increasing overall production of energy, not decreasing as Germany is actually doing.
On the other-hand for the renewable path that Germany is going since 2000, just the grid alone is going to cost more then 500 billion euro, some estimation suggest that 2000-2045 total gird investment requirement is above significantly above that. Sadly today where everything is in this different private organization, this information is all over the place and 'semi'-private organization doing different parts of the infrastructure.
In total, between all the renewables, the grid and the storage, we are talking 1.5 trillion euro and that still includes gas peakers. If you want to go beyond and really go all in, it would be even more then that, as you suggest.
Turns out, if you plan includes trying to gather solar energy in Greece and Spain (or even Egypt), transporting it to Germany and then storing it into batteries there, well yeah, that's going to be expensive. And the solar panels you import from China aren't the expensive part.
France did the exact right think in the 70/80s build reliable long term energy generation, sadly since the 90s the newer generation of French politicians done literally anything they can to handle the situation as a badly and as incompetently as possible but that's a different story.
That's positive news, but I'm talking about oil - which is still needed for modern industrial economies (plastics, diesel, etc).
The US would too if they had no choice. Which we don't, you can't just turn a whole economy around to become oil free.
Steps are being made but it takes time
US says that Europe is their number one enemy. Using American tech is the most risky thing you can do since Trump declared that they are now a hostile enemy with intents of overthrowing European democracies.
> US says that Europe is their number one enemy.
Pardon my French, but where do you get that nonsense from?
Without getting hung up on the exact phrase “number 1”. It’s very literally one of the biggest things in official US national security strategy right now and some leaks of the non-public version talk about explicit plans to try and destroy the EU. So semantics aside, the overall point stands on solid ground.
That whole thing is just incoherent. There's lots about forming a trading alliance against China, and then loads about destroying the EU. You can't have both of those at the same time.
Yet it is an official US policy document. The fact that it's incoherent makes it even more unpredictable and dangerous.
Those fools think of Russia as ally against both.
The latest US national security strategy, one would assume.
[dead]
How was it a mistake? Europe got a lot of good telecom infrastructure for a low price. There's no evidence it was compromised.
It was actually the US that was pressuring Europe to get rid of Chinese telecom equipment, as part of the first Trump administration's broader strategy against China.
The US leadership and billionaires are literally trying to destroy my country by supporting far right parties here. I never want to have anything to do with the US again at least until they sort their own crap out.
Yeah I don't want to deal with a country that's trying to pretend to be our friend and then literally giving encouraging speeches to groups trying to destroy our continent.
Even if the democrats make it back to power, a lot of trust and goodwill has been lost. There can always be another trump.
I don’t think Democrats would really jump to our aide either. The rhetoric is different but I think the vast majority of Americans think that they can let Europe burn without it affecting them much.
> You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
It's not clear that europe even trusts europe anymore. Especially with french and german economic dominance looking shakier than ever, debt financing an unpopular war in the east piling up, mounting deficits, industry collapse, youth unemployment... european countries (or greenland for that matter) could do a whole lot worse than turning to china.
Agreed, though, that reliance on US is foolhardy. I can't make any sense of why we're trying to saw the feet off our own economy.
Yea, in 29 Germany, France and UK will have elections, and far-right parties with anti-EU and partially pro-Russian attitudes are leading the polls. If they win, there will be hardly any unified "Europe" left. Why would I then trust Germany ruled by AfD over MAGA-America?
At least with China there's some consistency. I can reliably trust them not to give a shit about me or my privacy, and to further their geopolitical interests. Meanwhile populists in the West aren't really even acting rationally from geopolitical perspective, they're more unpredictable.
Are you talking about the same China which has repeatedly performed industrial espionage, embedded surveillance into products, and supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
>which has repeatedly performed industrial espionage
Ah yes. Europe and the US are famously not known for performing industrial espionage. They're bestest friends.
https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m... https://web.archive.org/web/20151016000311/http://www.nytime... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petr... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/brazil-canada-espionage-which...
> embedded surveillance into products
I'm sorry, did we already forget about the NSA literally running the biggest dragnet the world has ever known and the US CLOUD Act that allows them to spy into absolutely any US company anywhere in the world ?
>supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
As regrettable as it is, China's "support" of the invasion is mostly a matter of them both not giving a shit about the situation, and it helping them geopolitically with regards to Taiwan. They sold weapons. Just like France sold weapons to north african regimes when they were brutally repressing their protesters. The vast majority of Europe is doing the bare minimum for ukraine to keep the fight away without being actually involved.
Countries are not moral, and will do what benefits them. Some of them are more ruthless than others, but as it stands the vast majority of Europeans are considering the US as a greater threat to democracy and general life quality than China.
It's called "competence"
China is just not compatible with us ideologically. Freedom of speech, surveillance, state control. That stuff won't work here. It works in China because they've been under it for thousands of years.
It's incredible how quickly such obvious hostility as plans to incite what amounts to secession in a putatively friendly, allied sovereign entity has become normalized and ho-hum.
[flagged]
This is not Russia Today.
Here’s the source from the guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/06/us-ukraine-rus...
>"an architect of the Ukraine crisis".
Architect of the Ukraine crisis is Russian armed forces crossing the border and occupying the land, everything else is irrelevant.
> Architect of the Ukraine crisis is Russian armed forces crossing the border and occupying the land, everything else is irrelevant.
Russia's hostility towards Ukraine starts well before the 2022 invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war
We are discussing 2014. Russian armed forces were present there from the get-go, and hybrid approaches were there long before 2014 too.
Was that when Obama capitulated to Putin and permitted him to annex Crimea? Perhaps that was the "more flexibility" that he secretly promised Putin he would have after his election. I wonder what he got in return for it.
I don't disagree? Merkel and Obama both.
[flagged]
Fuck the eu in that context, EU showed weakness, it got us war.
[flagged]
... says the Russian war propaganda.
In the real world, NATO is a highly exclusive club, which is very reluctant to accept new members and extend its mutual defence clause to them. Ukraine and Georgia sought to join NATO after Russia had already begun violating their sovereign territory, but NATO allies caved to Russian pressure and denied membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. Russia then used this opportunity to invade them without triggering the full arsenal of NATO.
Russia is not a cornered cat, but a nuclear-armed colonial empire that has expanded through war and conquest for centuries, growing from a small city-state into the largest country in the world, exterminating countless native ethnicities in the process:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia
The colonialist argument you are debating is not adequate, you can say the same for the whole Western bloc. You can even say the same for NATO [1].
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/INTERAC...
Yes it is, and Russia is increasingly being recognized by scholars as such.
This is especially visible in the war against Ukraine, which is colonial in nature. Russia has invaded another country on imperialistic justifications ("reunification of Russian lands" etc), is using domestic minorities as cannon fodder to alter the ethnic composition of Russia in favor of Russians, is committing genocide against Ukrainians to destroy them as an ethnicity, and is resettling ethnic Russians into occupied territories to permanently alter Ukraine's ethnic composition.
The whole "NATO expansion" narrative is complete bullshit when the initiative to join NATO has come from Russia's neighbors, who want to gain the protection of its mutual defense clause in the hope that this would deter Russia from invading them.
Russia has been the aggressor in this part of the world for centuries, and the rest is a reaction to that. Russia is the sole reason why Northern and Eastern Europe have militaries at all; if it weren't for Russia, they could be disbanded overnight.
Europe should be building domestic digital capacity regardless (and not just servers) but saying it needs to treat the US like China is a bit melodramatic given the economic and physical threat to Europe is 10X greater in the east.
The US is not anti-Europe. The US has just begun to start evaluating its relationship with Europe rationally and wants it to grow up beyond the post-WW2 training wheels.
The overreaction to this kind of gives vibes of slamming the door and screaming “you don’t love me!” because dad won’t buy a new toy.
The difference is, Europeans used to trust their US partners, and built a lot of infrastructure on US services. This trust has been betrayed, so things now need to change.
It never existed to begin with with China, so no change is necessary.
That's not "melodramatic".
There never was a relationship of mutual trust, it was always a relationship of Europe being under the wing of the US as a buffer against the USSR.
The US now wants to push Europe out of the nest, but most Europeans have only ever known life "living in their parents house".
Building an independent Europe is not compatible with the current European ethos of work/life/life/life balance, and will likely result in Europe either coming back to the US, falling into economic chaos, or moving into daddy Xi's house. They are a socialist country after all...
>> The difference is, Europeans used to trust their US partners
> There never was a relationship of mutual trust
Technically, you're not disagreeing with GP. :)
Or :( I guess.
How much do you guys suffer about this work life balance, I can't wrap my head around the level of brainwash you guys have been through to use concepts as socialised wealth and wellness as a bad thing
these evil europeans wanting to have a break from work! how dare them!
And productivity per head is much higher in many more socialist economies. Which makes sense as it's basically GDP/hour.
are you sure you're working? There is no one from europe in the top net worth
/s
Neither the European welfare state nor China's authoritarian leftism are socialist. They are, respectively, welfare-state capitalism and nationalist "socialism" (aka Naziism).
On the European side, socialism is a question of who owns businesses. If the majority of businesses are owned by the people who are working at those businesses, you have a socialist economy. Welfare states, regulatory regimes, and high tax rates do not change the ownership of businesses, they are about who provides the infrastructure around those businesses. If you have an economy where infrastructure is owned by a liberal nation-state, and businesses are owned by whoever gambled capital on the venture, then you get a capitalist economy. If your infrastructure is privately owned by individuals, then those owners become feudal lords and you get feudalism.
On the Chinese side, you might point out that there are laws that require CCP ownership of all businesses, eat the party line that says the CCP is the representative of the working class, and say, "hey that's a socialism". But this ownership and representation is purely nominal. The average Chinese worker has more or less zero political agency; speaking out gets you censored and harassed. How is that worker ownership? If, say, America started punishing individual shareholders who voted against Trump-aligned board members, we'd correctly recognize that the shareholders do not meaningfully own their businesses anymore.
"Moving into Daddy Xi's house" would be stupid. The EU and China are not aligned on basically any core value; it'd basically be a surrender of one to the other. Actually, to be clear, the EU isn't even aligned on basically any core value with itself[0]. In fact, I would argue that's a way bigger headwind than European workers being used to a top-heavy welfare state. The EU has the resources to build a sovereign cloud, or run its own military, or source its own energy. But for each one there are challenges posed by the uniquely decentralized structure of Europe:
- Europe could build a sovereign cloud, but probably not one for each member state. So they're going to have to agree what country holds the data, and agree that that country can and will spy on all the others.
- Europe could fund its own military, tell NATO to pound sand, and re-colonize America for the trouble. But who runs that military? Given the history of EU politics, it would be France and Germany, and every other country in the EU has a history of being colonized by France or Germany. They are not trustworthy.
- Europe could fix its energy dependence, but Germany thinks nuclear power is Satan and wants to backstop renewables with the dirtiest-burning coal you can mine.
You'll notice a recurring theme here. The problem with Europe is not its fiscal deficit, the perceived laziness of its workers, or what have you. It's the lack of trust. The most trustworthy member state of the European Union was the United States of America, and so that's why everyone put their data on American servers, and let America dominate NATO, and so on. This is not Europe getting kicked out of the nest, it's the kids realizing their parent is a gaslighting asshole and that all their siblings, including themselves, are cut from the same cloth.
[0] Trump's current tariff actions and threats of territory annexation have galvanized the European public against America's government. However, prior to Trump coming back, Europe was full of far-right nutjobs that were just as cringe. Actually, a lot of them are still in power in Europe, and they're way more competent and cunning than Cheeto Mussolini.
It is US themselves that have decleared they are a hostile enemy to Europe now. China had made zero claims to annex parts of Europe. USA makes claims to annex parts of Denmark. China officially does not say their goal is to overthrow European democracies but US says their goal is to change the democratic govts of Europe.
They control Europe's digital infrastructure and are able to increase rent to usurous levels (tarrifs!) because Europe is dependent on their digital services. Without digital sovereignty, Europe has no sovereignty and will quickly become a modern colony from which wealth will be extracted.
The reason the US is able to raise rents (tariffs) has nothing to do with Europe buying US digital services.
The tariffs are on European exports. The problem is Europe has a weak domestic consumer market and is dependent on selling stuff to the US, not buying from them.
The EU has a services deficit compared to the US, the US has a goods deficit compared to Europe. Together, they are almost in balance, the difference is just 3% of total trade [1]. Put differently, the US and the EU need each other. This is why Trump is using footguns.
[1] https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...
The problem is really that Europe has a few dozen weak consumer markets. If there really was a proper single market, I suspect the EU would be much more competitive in digital services.
Unfortunately despite their best efforts this isn't something Eurocrats can simply will into existence. The most important prerequisite is a common language, and there is zero political will to do the only sensible thing and establish English as the official common language of the EU.
[flagged]
> Nonsense. Unilaterial tarrifs are not how trade agreements work. This is pure extractive rent.
What do you mean by "unilateral tariffs"?
> The reason the US is not able to extract the same rents from China is that they have digital sovereignty and the US cannot just pull the cloud plug from them.
The US has higher tariffs against Chinese imports than European imports.
[flagged]
> want to annex a European territory
Greenland is not in europe. It may be a danish colony but that doesn't make it "european territory" any more than french guiana is. EU territory? Sure. But europe is a penninsula on the western flank of eurasia.
Edit: huh I had no idea how complicated the classification of eu territories is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_territories_of_members...
> Greenland is not in europe. It may be a danish colony but that doesn't make it "european territory" any more than french guiana is. EU territory? Sure. But europe is a penninsula on the western flank of eurasia.
You are right that Greenland is not in Europe (it sits on the Nort American tectonic plate).
It is also not an EU territory, however, it is linked to Europea through Denmark. European influence exists through governance, education, and trade.
Most Greenlanders identify primarily as Kalaallit (Inuit) and Greenlandic, not European.
Does that mean Hawaii isn’t part of US because it’s far away from mainland?
You got it baby, free hawaii
How do Hawaiians feel about this? Just in case: what would you consider a valid qualification for Hawaiians, for their opinion on this matter to be material? And how many of them support an independent Hawaii?
I looked online but didn’t find any hard numbers, only vague movements. Scottish independence for example seems to have substantial , if minority , support. If the same cannot be said for Hawaii, then this comment feels… like a cop out.
Hawaiian land is being sold off regardless of democratic legitimacy.
Perhaps it is better to argue they should exercise indigenous control than wait until the concept is a farce
>How do Hawaiians feel about this?
As is the case when it comes to indigenous populations being displaced and slowly replaced over time: they don't get to have a choice. Hawaii was mostly Japanese in the early 1900s having already displaced previous arrivals, and today less than 15% of the population considers themselves native hawaiians. The remaining 85% are there _because_ Hawaii is not independent, why would they ever hold a vote for it ?
See similar cases in New Caledonia, the Falklands, and more.
Its not a colony. Stop diminishing the agency of Greenlanders.
Of course it's a colony; this is just an observable fact. This is true regardless of how Greenland polls. Agency is immaterial.
It’s not more a colony than Purto Rico is. Would you say US would be OK if China annexes Purto Rico because they are a colony of US?
US foreign policy is nearly as dimwitted as european foreign policy is. Of course puerto rico is a colony.
But also, actually, if China did annex puerto rico? Snap snap snap. Good for them. They really made it out the hood. May god look upon the rest of us so positively
And Hawaii is not in America. Certainly neither is Guam etc.
What kind of argument are you even trying to make?
> And Hawaii is not in America. Certainly neither is Guam etc.
Sure, no argument here.
> What kind of argument are you even trying to make?
Mostly that characterizing Greenland as European is just as insane as characterizing French Guiana that way. Or the falknlands, New Caledonia, Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Aruba, Curaçao, Anguilla, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, etc etc. These are colonies—not part of europe, and should have been made whole decades ago with the resolution of WWII, and their continued presence as "rightfully" part of European nations destabilizes our globe.
Europe is welcome to extend its economic privileges to all nations of earth, and I for one will continue to argue for kicking us out of Hawaii and Guam while ensuring we don't further engage in predatory trade agreements.
Of course, I don't expect any of this predation to cease anytime soon.
Would you say that US attacked Japan first because Japan never ever attacked US? Only Hawaii which is not American.
I don't spend my time holding opinions about which state jerked off on the other's face. But hawaii is certainly not american
[flagged]
Oh, so US is giving up their claims to Purto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii, etc? Or are American imperalists holding on to their colonies?
God willing? Absolutely.
Worst of all, they are holding on the most of North America
What a bizarre description of what the US did.
Greenland has been inching towards independence since the seventies, because that's the common ambition of greenlandic peoples and it's slow because there are rather deep ties between Denmark and Greenland. These ties are to some extent very negative for the greenlanders, they're generally discriminated against and have been viciously mistreated at times, but a quick clean cut would also be quite painful for them.
In the seventies Greenland joined the EU predecessor EEC with Denmark, quickly realised that europeans were emptying their fishing waters and in the early eighties left the union. It's the only entity to have done so. Then the independence process trudged on, they self-manage in many areas now, even more since a 2008 referendum where some 75% or so voted in favour of independence. Since 2009 there is a law that says that Greenland can become independent whenever they want, as long as it's approved by greenlander referendum and the danish parliament.
To the extent they're a colony international law also clearly gives them the right to unilaterally declare independence. A majority of greenlanders are likely still in favour, but a majority also would prefer to postpone it if it would result in worse living conditions, since that's what polls usually conclude.
Ignoring half a century of rather delicate politics and independence ambitions the US shat all over it and said that they wanted to buy it, and then several years later said that they might just annex instead. This is quite belligerent and nasty behaviour, which in my opinion should have caused european countries to start dumping US bonds and stop answering calls from the White House.
> if it would result in worse living conditions
Well nobody is forcing Denmark to be a dick about decolonization, nor a dick to all the people it never colonized. That's a choice.
> This is quite belligerent and nasty behaviour
So was colonizing, well, anywhere. Europe still hasn't been appropriately punished for this. And yes, the US deserves to be punished severely for its own brutal conquests.
Denmark isn't "being a dick about decolonization", it's just that they happen to be very kindly subsidising half of Greenland's budget, which causes even many enthusiastic about the idea of an independent Greenland cause to think that leaving might be a mistake.
Conversely, the leader of the present day United States threatens to colonising Greenland by force to show off how powerful he is. Ergo Europeans, particularly Greenlanders, have little reason to trust the US
> Denmark isn't "being a dick about decolonization", it's just that they happen to be very kindly subsidising half of Greenland's budget, which causes even many enthusiastic about the idea of an independent Greenland cause to think that leaving might be a mistake.
Brother, spread this pro-colonization propaganda elsewhere.
> Conversely, the leader of the present day United States threatens to colonising Greenland by force to show off how powerful he is. Ergo Europeans, particularly Greenlanders, have little reason to trust the US
Conversely? Brother, they are the same thing.
Fine, be that American whose ignorance of world affairs is exceeded only by faith that anything its government does, dastardly foreigns do worse...
I am no liberal
You know nothing about this, so stop spreading your made up lies. A roadmap for Greenlandic independence is in place. The Greenlandic parliament is controlling the speed of this process.
[flagged]
It is European right now. It's under European sovereignty.
No, it's a colony. Calling it european is an affront to everyone with the ability to read
A European colony is European.
You can call anything anything you want. Why not call greenland australian?
Of course you'll look ridiculous regardless
That's just silly. Is a Frenchman French, even if he lives in the US?
This is an asinine comparison. You need to inquire about the identity of the french man's slave
It's not. European is a descriptor of sovereignty here, not one of geography.
Is your wallet yours, even if you leave it somewhere?
So use the right words: "greenland is the property of denmark"
That's what the possessive descriptor "European" means, yes. Which is why it's weird you're so against it. I'm not really sure what you're arguing at this point.
"European" is a geographic adjective. It does not apply to domination of other places. No amount of willpower will make the places that europe chooses to rape "european".
It's not purely geographic. It's possessive, it's cultural.
A Spanish dish is Spanish outside of Spain as well, as is a French song or a Danish person (the relevant one in this case!).
> It's possessive, it's cultural.
So you admit that the relationship between denmark and greenland is one of violence, not affection?
It's one of ownership. That's what possessive means.
Yes. You're talking about a relationship born of violence. Who would ever endorse this?
Thats how literally all state sovereignty everywhere in the world works.
Ok, so why cry over greenland when you know how this works?
Who's crying? We're defending our interest.
Currently Denmark participates in financing Greenland, pulling the rug on it would likely not be pleasant for the greenlanders and if they did I'd count that as rather dickish unless the greenlanders had a near consensus on the issue and asked the danish parliament to do it.
Well, some justice have been sought and won, but a lot remains. To me it seems like an attempt at distraction to clump together the treatment of the Mau Mau and the nuking of Algeria with Denmark's relation with Greenland.
Besides economic relations, independence for Greenland would also mean that they would need to seek justice to a larger extent through international courts and in at least some cases it's likely easier for greenlanders to find justice in danish courts.
Ok, why doesn't denmark finance birundi?
> Well, some justice have been sought and won
And yet denmark hasn't burned. How do you remediate this contradiction?
> To me it seems like an attempt at distraction to clump together the treatment of the Mau Mau and the nuking of Algeria with Denmark's relation with Greenland.
Believe me, britain deserves far worse than just being burned down. But denmark still must face justice
You make it sound that the brits were the bad guys, when it was an elite top % pulling the strings and the rest were mostly trying to make ends meet.
But yes agree, the elite extracting wealth from the colonies back in the days, and still are extracting wealth from your average Joe, deserves far worse.
Colonies can only address this at the granularity of the nationalism with which they were presented. If every-day brits don't want to be blamed, they need to make their own rebellion to show they aren't party to the evil done in their name.
I think this is true of my own country (the US), and it's hopeless. I think most americans are ok with the evil done in their name. I wish I had better advice or insight.
But pretending like two imperial powers arguing over greenland is some great injustice just spits in the face of humanity. Have some fucking dignity. Greenland deserves better than to be treated like a piece of property
It does, through NGO:s, humanitarian aid and african development and investment funds.
If you think a war for liberation is appropriate for the greenlanders I suggest you move there and agitate in local languages for this.
> It does, through NGO:s, humanitarian aid and african development and investment funds.
Oh? so you're pro continued rape of africa? How has that worked out? Which african peoples are asking for this at this point?
Christian charity failed generations ago and it's pathetic to see people still voicing support for it
Why do you want to punish the Greenlanders? They would rather be a Danish colony than an American.
Look the danish punished greelanders many generations before us. Pretending this is justice is just evil
[flagged]
And then Americans wonder why they are being viewed as a hostile enemy of Europe…
> It was supposed to be something akin to United States of Europe
No, it never was.
> but instead in devolved into a bureaucracy
No it hasn't:
"There are two striking aspects of this rejection of EU bureaucracy. First, in comparison with other, comparable entities, such as the US federal bureaucracy, the EU’s administrative apparatus has a marginal size. Specifically, the EU, which is responsible for more than 440 million citizens, employs only around 60,000 people, while the US federal bureaucracy has more than two million employees that govern a territory with about 330 million inhabitants. Accordingly, the EU bureaucracy is comparatively small and far from being the “bureaucratic monster” which it is frequently portrayed as."
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2023/09/04/why-do-so-many...
> that regulates the shit out if everything,
I'm thankful for that. That is why our food is way better and way healthier than the shit the US makes it's citizens eat.
> is incredibly socialist and the EC thinks it is above everyone else.
LOL. No it's not "socialist" and the European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. If you really think the Commission behaves as if they are above everything else (they do not!), I pull an American president.
> That is why our food is way better and way healthier than the shit the US makes it's citizens eat.
The US optimized for convenience, affordability, and variety.
You can eat very healthily in the US, but it requires more intentional choices. In many (not all) EU countries, the default option is closer to healthy.
> You can eat very healthily in the US, but it requires more intentional choices.
It requires money too. If you are poor your choices are naturally limited and in the end you are dependent on government regulations to eat at least somewhat healthy.
> It requires money too. If you are poor your choices are naturally limited
Yes, because the US optimizes for convenience, price, and variety, so you see more industrialized food.
On average, poor people in Europe eat healthier than poor people in the US, but still significantly worse than wealthier Europeans.
> On average, poor people in Europe eat healthier than poor people in the US, but still significantly worse than wealthier Europeans.
Sure. But in the end the EU feeds it's citizens healthier food than the US does. That's all I'm saying. I'm glad we have those regulations.
We agree.
What's interesting is JFK Jr. (our Secratary of Health and Human Services) has a stance that Americans eat too many ultra-processed foods. He wants people to eat more whole foods and fewer additives. He questions conventional warnings about saturated fat and supports dietary changes than include more full-fat dairy and meats. He prefers education over bans or mandates.
> He prefers education over bans or mandates.
And that is not working for the poor of which the US seems to have plenty for a developed country.
The poor have no choice, even if they are educated, and the food industry is fine with selling them garbage. It's legal to do so after all. AFAIK food is generally even cheaper in Europe than in the USA. Even with those regulations.
Regulation is about setting minimum standards for acceptance, not specifying exactly how.
This means that if I walk into a random croissant shop and buy a croissant, I don't subsequently have 2 days of food poisoning.
Arguably, healthier being the default is also good. The less I personally need to think about this, the more I can think about other more useful things.
> There are two striking aspects of this rejection of EU bureaucracy. First, in comparison with other, comparable entities, such as the US federal bureaucracy, the EU’s administrative apparatus has a marginal size. Specifically, the EU, which is responsible for more than 440 million citizens, employs only around 60,000 people, while the US federal bureaucracy has more than two million employees that govern a territory with about 330 million inhabitants.
that's because the EU co-opted existing member state agencies instead of creating its own
e.g. the german federal department of agriculture effectively is controlled by the EU (almost all of its duties are an EU competence), but 100% of its costs are attributed to germany
this makes the EU look much more efficient than it is
It makes them lool as efficient as they actually are. Being able to use existing infrastructure is good.
Socialist is a very weird term to use here. The eu is the epitome of neoliberalism, even more so than the us
Tge EU is liberal just as much as I’m asian…
The EU in its current form is mostly about markets. It routinely pushes for the sacrifice of government monopolies to the altar of the free market (see for a recent example the french train network). Most of its regulations are to ensure a level field for a balanced market.
Hell it pushes for free markets even when it makes very little sense (the eu electricity market and its weird idiosyncrasies are an artifact of that)
It basically bans member governments from printing money and imposes very strict limits of 3% GDP on government deficits. For reference the US deficit was 5.9% gdp this year, Almost twice as much. this greatly limits government control over the economy.
> imposes very strict limits of 3% GDP on government deficits.
You might want to check that information. This very strict limit is only enforced on selective EU countries like Greece for example.
France has had routinely yearly deficits above 3% in the last 10 years and has never been worried one bit about it.
For the record the French deficit was around 5.4% this year and it is set to increase again next year as the parliament is completely blocked and a budget compromise cannot be reached.
Even the so called debt ceiling defined in the pact of stability is mostly ignored. Italy and France are both well above the 100% debt to GDP ratio when the treaty says that every country within the EU should be at or below 60%.
> It basically bans member governments from printing money
It only bans the ones that have adopted the Euro. The countries that have declined to adopt the euro are free to do as they please more or less.
The euro countries though may not be able to print money, but they just get the ECB to do it for them via quantitative easing which has been used since 2008 and only recently stopped when the interests rates started climbing after the pandemic.
You get that EU mostly is a free trade union? You know free trade that MAGA hates (I heard Americans today love tariffs).
Then you are very Asian.
[flagged]
> Even Zelenskyy acknowledged that the US provides more aid than the EU. And this is despite the fact that Europe has twice the population and doesn't have a vast ocean between it and Russia.
Why does the population matter at all? The US GDP is $30T and the EU GDP is $21T.
Why does location not matter at all? We're halfway across the world, why should we be the ones contributing the majority of the funding?
> Isn't it exactly the opposite, and it was the EU that attempted to overthrow democracy in the US (and failed)?
What are you talking about? According to US intelligence agencies, bipartisan Senate reports, and federal prosecutions, Russia, China, and Iran have been singled out at running disinformation campaigns. The EU has never been accused by the US of trying to topple democracy in the US.
>the EU has LITERALLY provided less aid to Ukraine than it has given to Russia
The EU is buying resources from Russia, not providing aid to it.
Potato, Potato. Whether giving money with no strings attached or some strings attached, guess where that money is going to go.
They are not "giving" money. They are exchanging them for resources. Russia gets the money but loses resources which it could've sold to other countries instead.
Ah, you're totally right. Europe is getting the better end of the deal Russia is practically getting scammed, exchanging goods for profits they can redistribute to fund their war.
They did not, this is all political ragebait journalism and memes.
Disbanding the EU is an official goal of the new US security strategy.
Divide and conquer is working well it seems.
There is no conspiracy, sorry.
It is not. I know the media has pushed this ragebait to get engagement from you, but you can literally read the official policy document.
I have read the document, it certainly implies that the EU is a problem and that the US should support 'patriotic' parties in pulling away from it.
It's a short read (30 pages, large font) so it's well worth looking at.
A majority of Europeans also think the EU has major issues. This does not constitute being anti-Europe.
Please read the document before making this determination.
> A majority of Europeans also think the EU has major issues
I don't disagree with you in principle here, but do you have a source for this?
The EU is not Europe. I never see any pro-EU sentiment anywhere besides on HN and Reddit. Talk to Europeans and they hate the EU and see it as an oppressive foreign power. Except for the Germans.
> Talk to Europeans and they hate the EU and see it as an oppressive foreign power.
Your framing is off, I'm afraid.
Across Europe, most people see the EU as more good than bad, especially compared to the alternative of countries acting alone. At the same time, support is often cautious rather than enthusiastic.
I've never seen any pro-EU attitude in the European countries I've lived in. Except for among the political and media class. But those aren't representatives of the general population.
But I haven't lived in central Europe, like Germany, Belgium, etc. Where the attitudes seem to be quite pro-EU.
The original statement still stands. Europe is not the EU. The EU is not Europe.
Voter turn out is extremely low in certain central and eastern Europe for EU elections. I think it was down to under 20% in some places a few years ago.
I had hoped that the UK would vote to remain and Europe would move away from a centralist, authoritarian model, but it's got worse especially since 2020. The EU is its own worst enemy.
> move away from a centralist, authoritarian model,
EU is authoritarian? Why do you think that?
It is restricting freedom of expression, and increasing public surveillance.
The EU is what held back the surveillance in the UK. Post brexit they went all in on surveillance.
Both the UK and the EU are rolling in censorship, surveillance and digital ID.
You've literally just contradicted your own post in this thread.
No, I haven't. Both the UK and EU are doing many of the same things. You can argue that the EU is bureaucratic without supporting bureaucracy within the UK. These are not contradictory positions.
You claimed that the UK leaving was bad as they were more liberal, and then noted that they were also doing lots of anti privacy stuff. Seems a little contradictory to me.
It insists on things like "corruption is bad", "human rights are for everyone including gays" so naturally certain conservative groups find that authoritarian.
Human rights are for everyone, not just people you agree with. If you bring in censorship, surveillance and smother protest for people you disagree with, you will find it getting used against you yourself at some point. Europe has imported this false binary from the USA, and it is not benefitting it either.
The EU has its fair share of corruption, but it is is better at hiding it than developing countries. Its current president Ursula Von Der Leyen is a fraud who appears to have cheated at university, and only got to where she did due to wealth and aristocratic family connections.
also things such as chat control and surveilling the entire populace, but I'm sure you must be right that the problem people have with it is that they say "corruption is bad"
Chat control is a Swedish proposal that has consistently lost in the Parliament. We should of course keep fighting it but at least as a Swede I know things would have been much worse without the EU.
> Chat control is Swedish proposal.
It was pushed by Sweden but also by many other countries including France (which loves to give lessons of democracy to the world by the way and is very much at the forefront of human rights or so they say) and Hungary amongst others.
> has consistently lost in the Parliament.
It has consistently lost so far. Secondly the reason it has lost is because people like me took the time to actually reach out to any MEP who would take my call to tell them to oppose this law. If we had waited for the EU to react and put a stop to this madness, we would still be waiting.
This law should never have been proposed in the first place anyway. The fact that it was proposed and debated is a shameful action in itself.
> I know things would have been much worse without the EU.
How can you know for sure? You can't. Since it originated from the EU commission, it stands to reason that without the EU commission it would not have happened.
You believe that the EU is good because that is your belief. The European countries existed for 100s of years before the EU. There is no reason to think that they can't go back to this state in the future.
One definition of authoritarian is "enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom".
It would seem to me that the recent spate of sanctioning individuals - e.g. for 'disseminating misinformation' without a legal definition of what that actually is would be an example of authoritarianism. A direct attack on freedom of speech and thought.
Which Europeans have you "talked" to? Discord and twitter don't count. People moan about the EU like they moan about their own national government.
Opinion polls on actually leaving the EU show a minority in favour. Most Europeans saw Brexit play out and realise sticking the finger up at your neighbours is not a winning strategy.
Brexit was ironically mostly an anti immigration vote. It has thoroughly demolished the involved parties that the one thing promised has not come to pass.
I guess real life doesn't count either? Good that we can rely on HN and Reddit, where the pro-EU sentiment is strong. I just haven't seen that in real life, which is why I suggest maybe it might be particular to Germans and probably Belgians and Dutch.
Where have you lived in the EU? I think that the EU is mostly mediocre rather like our national governments.
That is more indicative of the company you keep than the actual reality on the ground.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/657860/member-states-show-stron...
Spanish guy here: no, we don't hate the EU, quite the opposite. Please stop feeding on right-wing propaganda that wants to destroy us.
Unfortunately you live in the wrong time and age. You'd like to report to your local commissar when somebody expresses opinions and ideas against the cherished government - "he's a right wing propagandist who seeks to destroy us!". But it's not the 20th century anymore, and all you can do is scream into the cyber void.
Dude please, my country endured 40 years of a fascist government, we know a few things about right wing propaganda...
Accusing anybody who doesn't love the government of "spreading propaganda" is not a sign of knowledge. It's a sign of an obsolete 20th century mindset and perspective on life.
Next perhaps you're going to accuse me of "Staatsfeindlichkeit", which the German leadership was screaming in their denouncements, before the people tore down their walls.
"Verunglimpfung des Staates" - "Insulting the State", this awful, awful crime, is something I'm going to continue doing however I fancy. Millions of people were killed for that right, so it's not something I'm ever giving up.
Not loving the government is OK. Heck, hating the government might also be OK.
Insisting that we European citizens hate the EU when it is not true, and then doubling down with accusations of censorship when the whole thread points out your mistake, is downright stupid. But hey, if that makes you happy as some kind of freedom fighter, go for it.
When you start talking about "right wing propaganda that will destroy us", then I only hear echoes of the government worship of the 20th century. As I said, the EU is not Europe, nor the other way around. And that's mainly what's upsetting hackers. They live in a fantasy that the EU is in some way like the USA. I know that quite a lot of Germans, Dutch and Belgians consider themselves "EU citizens". And maybe Spaniards as well. Nobody in Northern Europe considers themself an "EU citizen" or gives any value to the EU. They consider themselves people of their own nations only, and the EU as a foreign influence.
I have met plenty of people from Finland, Sweden and Denmark who were all pretty happy with the EU. I guess it helps that we all work in big international projects, so we get to talk to lots of different nationalities on a daily basis.
> Talk to Europeans and they hate the EU and see it as an oppressive foreign power.
Maybe you should get out of your right-wing bubble.
- EU approval among its citizens hits record high as security fears grow, poll shows (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-approval-among-its-c...)
- Nearly three quarters of EU citizens (74%) say that, taking everything into account, their country has benefited from being a member of the EU. (https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3378)
The EU is busy clamping down on freedom of expression and forcing through Digital ID. It isn't some paradise.
There are things I like about the EU, but it also has some things horribly wrong.
> It isn't some paradise.
Compared to the USA it still is.
The EU has better healthcare and welfare overall, but fewer individual rights in other areas. Less gun crime (although this depends on region). Poverty levels vary a lot across the EU.
Americans take homeschooling for granted, for better or worse, but it is banned in some European countries like Germany.
Also the USA allows groups such as the Amish their liberty, which would be extremely unlikely in much of the EU where state interference would either force them out or destroy them.
The US has umpteen issues but is much better for freedom of expression frankly, although it is being steered away from that.
Right now EU is not arresting own citizens for failure to provide ID card while america does that even when said people have id card.
EU is not demanding 5 yeara of social media public from kids entering in.
EU is not killing fisherman to feel manly.
EU is overall more democratic and more free. The parts that sux Hungary and Slovakia dont sux because of EU, but despite it.
It is ok for Germany to not have homeschooling.
The EU is not more "free". There are a lot of things you can't say or will get shut down for. Most of the EU does not have the same freedom of expression or religion that the USA guarantees in its founding documents. The collective cannot have freedom if the individual does not. That includes the right to disagree.
The EU and USA are going down the same road. Social media is a part of this censorship of open discussion and is usually American based, but works hand in hand with the European governments. Both European and American governments seem happy to deceive citizens into a surveillance state.
It is unacceptable to ban homeschooling. Some children need to be homeschooled, because of disabilities, or even high intelligence. Given the fact that Germany has suffered from both far right and far left dictatorships within living memory, anything that does not promote blind obedience to the state should be encouraged.
Many parts of Europe retain a feudal mentality, which includes constant deference to authority.
I've seen what a complete crapshoot state education is first hand. My god daughter came out of school recently and can barely read and write. I had to suffer through it myself...
I find it amusing that homeschooling is so vilified and stereotyped. All the homeschooled children I know are BETTER educated not worse. Contrary to the stereotype. Schools have massive bullying issues and are often bad environments for neurodiverse people. Schools are very Lord of the Flies.
Home schooling is of course only as good as the people teaching but the same is true of schools. Most state curricula prioritise the state and adoration of the state... funnily enough
Not all European countries have banned home schooling. Not even all members of the EU.
As for neglect and abuse of children, the public schools is where you will most readily find it. Including bullying until children commit suicide. And school shootings. Which is a lesser risk at home. No matter which continent.
No one said all EU countries have banned homeschooling. That is just one issue.
Schools are a haven for bullying, both by students and teachers. I did have some good teachers but some of them were also the most cruel and abusive people I've ever met.
Please tell me more about the daily school shootings in Europe.
> Such as?
Well, we can't say them.
(but it involves nazies, denying genocides, hate speech, and this kind of stuff. It also depends on the country)
> Such as? I honestly can't think of anything.
Jacques Baud, recently sanctioned by the EU for promoting conspiracy theories. https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1802...
He is not an EU citizen and, as a foreigner, acts as a mouthpiece for a hostile dictatorship. The US has sanctioned similar people too, most notably Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2559
I've read somewhere that Americans understand freedom as "freedom TO", shiny Europeans understand freedom as "freedom FROM". This is extremely visible in this thread and probably a cause of many misunderstandings.
This is definitely the case.
There's philosophical terms for this: America emphasizes negative liberty ("freedom from interference by other people. Negative liberty is primarily concerned with freedom from external restraint") , while Europe emphasizes positive liberty ("the possession of the power and resources to act in the context of the structural limitations of the broader society which impacts a person's ability to act")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty
the eu is better for online freedom of expression, with its GDPR regulations
GDPR is decent, but the governments themselves are pushing surveillance so it is two steps forward and one back.
I don't give very much for statistics and opinion polls. People tend to give the answer they think they're "supposed to give" in those. I base my assessment on my experience from talking to people in real life.
> Maybe you should get out of your right-wing bubble.
Your comment is nasty, but I don't think you're this nasty in real life. Probably you're just blowing off some steam online.
I'm from the EU. I don't know a single person that is against EU. Everyone among my friends and colleagues, including me, is strongly pro-EU.
At least I know that's a bubble, because I know anti-eu people exist in my country too. Get out of yours.
Likewise, I've never met a person who has said they are for the EU or even strongly pro-EU. So it must be a question of which of the EU member countries you are in or other kind of bubbles.
> Get out of yours.
I suggested in my original post that Germans seem to be pro-EU. And probably neighbouring countries too. Here in this thread also appeared a fanatically pro-EU Spaniard. In Nordic countries, I've never met a person who would admit they were pro-EU. Of course they must exist, since presumably half the people voted yes to join, a few decades ago.
In the end it seems to be no more complicated than people who benefit financially from EU redistribution of money are pro-EU and the people who have to pay the bill for it are against the EU.
Every single EU countries population prefers EU leadership over their own national leadership.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/657860/member-states-show-stron...
fwiw: I definitely am paying the bill. But I'm also strongly pro-EU. Taxes are a membership fee for a functioning society.
As I said, I don't give much for opinion polls. And comparing two sides as you do now, doesn't mean that people are fond of either side.
You can prove anything with statistics. The last opinion poll I saw for my country of birth was both the EU and the national government at a less than 50% approval rate.
Ok so you trust your gut and lived experiences more that population statistics. That's a totally valid approach but it's very easy to misread the popular opinion as your friends are not a random sample.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Stop generalising. You don't know what Europeans think at all "except for the Germans"
I have an idea of what I'm talking about. I say that the EU is not Europe. Nor is Europe the EU. People in these conversations need to understand the difference, because it is significant. Norway, Great Britain, Iceland and Switzerland aren't in the EU.
All of those bar the UK are in the EEA though.
Yes, but those are only trade and border agreements, and don't give the EU influence on internal political matters. Compare similar trade agreements between other nations, such as between the United States and their neighbours.
> Yes, but those are only trade and border agreements
Honestly goods and service regulations are probably the biggest infringement of sovereignty as it signs all of your companies up to arbitrary standards. That may be a good idea, but to pretend that it's somehow less important than other pooling of sovereignty seems strange to me.
[flagged]
> The US literally wrote a national security strategy describing that it wants to dismantle the EU.
The official 2025 NSS document does not explicitly state a US goal to dismantle the European Union.
The strategy is highly critical of the EU's direction and Europe's trajectory in ways that critics could say could indirectly undermine EU cohesion, but there's no formal language saying the US wants to dismantle the EU.
Critics interpret the tone and strategic shift as potentially indirectly weakening EU cohesion if taken as encouragement to nationalist or Eurosceptic political forces.
Heh there's two versions, the one with the spicier additions has not been officially published.
https://archive.ph/eT1FY
> Heh there's two versions, the one with the spicier additions has not been officially published.
I hear there's a third version.
Let me know once papers of record start reporting about it then.
[flagged]
What socialism? What are you talking about?
The EU parliament has a conservative majority [0], as does the Council. [1]
It's a right-wing organization. I wish there was socialism, mate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_European_Parliament#Curr...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union#...
So this is why they give out subsidies left and right? Is this why they are working on increasing taxes?
Right now in politics you can claim to be whatever you want and your policy stance to be opposite: I am on the right but I vote left wing measures.
All of those are right wing policies, designed to support an inherently broken system of capitalism.
Left wing would be the state owning the means of production.
in what was is subsidies socialism?
what ownership control does the state have over the means of production?
Every year the percentage of European GDP driven by government spending rises by roughly 1%. We just hit over 50% on average in the Eurozone.
So they have over 50% control, and this will only rise as the population further ages, eating all productive activity in the economy.
It doesn't matter who 'owns' the means of production if the government is post-facto seizing a controlling stake in all economic activity via taxation and deficit spending (phantom taxation via inflation). Europe is quite literally eating its private sector like saturn devouring his son.
[flagged]
This article is about FAFO for MAGA loyalists in the USA. Well, MAGA has FA'd with US-European relations. Now they get to FO where it takes us (i.e. over the waterfall, isolating the USA from everything good in the world.)
I doubt there's ever going to be an FO. What does Europe have of any value? What was the last thing of relevance they've done? Help with WWII?
What was the last thing the US did of any relevance? Help with WWII. Just as stupid claim.
I mean, we still borderline run the world, so there's that. In this very OP it's major news that Europe is trying to move off of US technology, because we're just so dominant.
only for the remaining part of the decade, if the US is lucky
trump pissing away a century of hard-won soft power handed the century to China
> trump pissing away a century of hard-won soft power handed the century to China
Right, it's all Trump's fault, not the fault of the boomers that sold our country's manufacturing base out to China in the 60's onward which gave them their start, and that we've never recovered from.
But no, I'm sure it's the orange man who still hasn't done 1/3rd of the things we voted him in to do, that is the problem. Average deportation rates are still below Obama's terms, "Mr. President, there's too much winning!!". What a joke, I wish he did half the things you all claim he does, we'd be much better off.
Americans really need to consider stuff outside their little bubble sometimes and think about how their country is just a gear in a much larger system.
Of course American power is being pissed away by the guy hurting the transatlantic alliance American power was built on in the first place.
Your internal generational squabbles don't concern us. How you present yourself externally does, and that's worse than it's been in a long time.
> Your internal generational squabbles don't concern us.
Of course it doesn't, like how European's view of Americans doesn't matter to the vast majority of us. Every country has some sort of 'bubble', or a set of concerns and shared history only relevant to the in-group. I couldn't give a rats ass about the generational history of Europe either, for instance.
> How you present yourself externally does, and that's worse than it's been in a long time.
Well, of course, I'm sure the potential of not recieving massive military aid anymore, and no longer having the ability to run the country dry, would be very noticeable. If that was the cost of maintaining Europe as an ally, then being viewed in a more negative light is simply a necessary expense.
> Well, of course, I'm sure the potential of not recieving massive military aid anymore, and no longer having the ability to run the country dry, would be very noticeable. If that was the cost of maintaining Europe as an ally, then being viewed in a more negative light is simply a necessary expense.
See, this is exactly what I mean with my above post.
The US is a rich and powerful country, but it's actively sabotaging the foundation of said wealth and power.
The "massive military aid" was free power projection for you guys, giving your military access to another third of the globe. It was also a massive subsidy program for US industry, with us buying your stuff.
US wealth is built on access to our market, yet you were convinced you were the ones doing us a favour.
Truth is, the US has been the wealthiest and most powerful country, not by accident or by divine providence, but by our grace.
Nero is burning Rome and the plebeians are cheering him on.
Project 2025 was just political rage bait and rumors too, until it wasn’t.
It can be both. The document is massive, very contradictory and incoherent, and most of the people hysterical over it haven't even read it. Look I'm no fan of the trump administration but people should have concrete concerns, not waving around "project 2025" like some symbol of the country's imminent collapse. Unfortunately, our country is nowhere near collapse and this administration is not going to be the thing to bring it down. Though they're trying their hardest, i will admit.
Talk of how it might be interpreted is rather beside the point when the administration appears to be implementing a particular interpretation and SCOTUS appears to be fine with that, whether or not it is a selective one. Those are the concrete concerns of which you speak.
It is helpful to have the document publicly available, but only if enough people heed its implicit warning.
I would argue the concrete concerns we should have is the fact that we seem to be committing economic suicide, which will have decades of economic and sociopolitical fallout. If you think people have an appetite for fascism today, wait until you see what decades of deflating economies will do.
Their VP and one of their government-linked oligarchs is meeting with literal Neonazis in Germany that are trying to topple the constitutional order: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/14/jd-vance-afd-meetin...
To say they're not anti-Europe is either hopelessly naive or cynically ideologically aligned with their goals.
If the #2 or #1 most popular political party in Germany are "literal Neonazis", I think Germany and likely Europe as a whole has a much bigger problem than whatever America is doing.
Those two are not unrelated.
It's a result of deliberate media manipulation and hybrid warfare by the US and Russia.
Let's not forget Israel.
I see.
Well, foreign intervention and propaganda in democracies is nothing new. It is well documented all the way back to the time of ancient Greece.
So your contention is that in Germany and perhaps other countries (France?) some of the most popular political parties are popular only because their partisans are uneducated dupes or worse, in thrall to foreign powers. Perhaps you would be better off ideologically not supporting democracy - it sounds like it is not for you. Of course democracy has its problems - and people voting for dumb ideas is one of them!
You can either accept that it's your duty to convince your citizens you are right to win their votes, or you can insist that everyone else is wrong and democracy means they should shut up and vote only the "right" way in accordance with establishment approved opinions and go about what Europe has been doing, which is to continue to pursue unpopular policies and blame Russiia/nazis/America/the Internet/free speech for their problems.
European center and left parties could suck all the oxygen out of the room and starve the far-right overnight if they simply introduced and enforced major immigration restrictions - but it's precisely this which is not a Establishment Approved Idea and deemed Unthinkable Hate. Democracy, as long as your opinions are allowed.
> So your contention is that in Germany and perhaps other countries (France?) some of the most popular political parties are popular only because their partisans are uneducated dupes or worse, in thrall to foreign powers. Perhaps you would be better off ideologically not supporting democracy - it sounds like it is not for you. Of course democracy has its problems - and people voting for dumb ideas is one of them!
I don't! I think authoritarian leftism is the way to go as most people are too stupid for their own good tbh.
> European center and left parties could suck all the oxygen out of the room and starve the far-right overnight if they simply introduced and enforced major immigration restrictions
Economic suicide. Why would anyone argue for this? Europe might as well just nuke itself.
Granted, if I were a conservative European, I would also be pro nuking myself.
[flagged]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany
AFG are Neonazis?
Indeed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/turmoil-in-ger...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liais...
[flagged]
From the wikipedia article you just linked to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na...
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#German...
[flagged]
geberation there will be no more real germans
I would be very surprised if this type of speech is allowed/tolerated on HN.
Heavens to Betsy, someone online just disagreed with the Correct Political Views! Better ban their account and send an officer to their door to arrest them now, before they can further poison our beautiful free democracies with their right-wing propaganda.
The Trump administration really does have a point about anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe. You'd be very surprised because you're used to European censorship regimes reaching beyond the continent and limiting free speech online.
[flagged]
It's not tolerated because it's not the truth, even if your feelings are hurt by that.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
We've had to ask you several times before to avoid commenting like this. Once again, please stop. We'll have to ban the account if this continues.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter who or what you're replying to. You've taken a flamewar 15 comments deep. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
My apologies, tomhow. I got a little bit carried away.
Is it actually anti-europe to ask europe to meet its NATO obligations?
This is a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the comment or articles you're responding to.
>The US government has decided that it is anti-Europe.
Most of Europe does meet them. It is mainly a few countries like Spain which does not.
Whataboutism.
The linked articles are not about NATO obligations.
The American public schooling system in action yet again here. 3rd grade reading comprehension in no way stops them from loudly proclaiming some of the dumbest shit possible.
Literally this.
"The US is gonna have their FO moment aaaany day now, they're gonna regret messing with us Europeans!"
"Bro you haven't even kept your end of the deal on your NATO military spending."
Turns out despite all the hubub, the 'superpower' fading the fastest was Europe after all.
> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software.
My belief is that there is no problem with the Chinese equipment, just scare-mongering from the US because it has no manufacturer of 5G equipment. And Europe jumped on the bandwagon just because.
For decades trusting the US was no problem at all. The relationship was mutually beneficial. Cooperation and trust among nations is possible and Juche (completely self-reliance) is not a worthwhile goal at all. So, sure, cooperation is great and should always be a goal – it also secures peace (people who are economically intertwined are less likely to go to war with each other).
The issue is the US burning up that earned mutual trust. And at some point you have to sadly abandon ship. Cooperation is great, trade is great, but not under all circumstances and all the time.
Have you already forgot the Merkel Phone incident?
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-spy-agency-tapped-g...
Trusting the US should be considered a problem since decades.
This is not uncommon between even allies: https://www.dw.com/en/german-intelligence-spied-on-white-hou...
The issue has less to do with intelligence silliness, and more to do with the fact that the overall geopolitical objectives of the US can not be trusted, and that rift has grown to a point where self-reliance on critical infrastructure may be in Europe’s best interest.
That's a small blip on the timeline. If you want some serious, long running stuff, you should read Crypto AG scandal.
>Crypto AG
The cracked encryption was not given to "friends" but country's like Libya
> not given to "friends"...
US started to eavesdrop on Turkey and Greece first. Germany pulled out of the project by citing this is going too far for them. Some citations from news:
The Germans were taken aback by the Americans’ willingness to spy on all but their closest allies, with targets including NATO members Spain, Greece, Turkey and Italy [0].
Operation Rubicon [1] has a map of spied countries, incl. NATO allies and "friends".
I failed to find that great long-read article. If I can find, I will attach it here, too.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rubicon
[flagged]
See, this is a clear example why hypercynicism (everything has always been maximally evil all the time already) is not at all helpful. You lose your ability to differentiate in your cynical zeal to cast everyone as maximally (undifferentiably) evil all the time.
> See, this is a clear example why hypercynicism is not at all helpful
> lose your ability to differentiate in your cynical zeal to cast everyone as
Somehow calling 1 party out fits your example? Where is the everyone? In no way do I think everyone or every country is evil.
Contrary, yours is a clear example of a superficial take on everything.
[flagged]
Do you need a hug?
No thanks, i ve seen those who went that way before, none of that praying mantis hugs for me please..
>> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
> Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software.
The logic is don't use infrastructure of people you don't trust. If Europeans don't trust Chinese, then don't use Chinese infra; if the Europeans don't trust the US (anymore), then don't use US infra. The Europeans could trust the Canadians, and use Canadian infra for example.
> Europeans don't trust Chinese, then don't use Chinese infra; if the Europeans don't trust the US (anymore), then don't use US infra.
I'm seeing the EU being singled out as unreasonable for avoiding the risk represented by buying their whole infrastructure from companies with deep and blatant ties to CCP's armed forces.
Somehow these critics are omitting the fact that most of the world, specially asian countries, have also banned them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem...
Yes, there is a lot of affinity towards Canada in Europa, I feel. Last Bastion of Democracy on the North-American continent, and not part of the whacky Trump-Atlantian Hemisphere.
Canada is as democratic as the UK…
Without agreeing or disagreeing, I will note that GP specifically called out North America
As in "not very"?
China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian. They're also preparing for military activities to expand their territory.
It's not that each country needs to develop their own, but it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.
Like Saudi Arabia and formerly the Saddam regime (when he sold oil in USD)?
While compatible world view is used as an argument against diplomatic and economic relations, in reality it’s just a bonus, not a requirement. What’s important is plain old cost benefit and national interests. The US is still a better ally for EU than China, but it’s gotten drastically worse fast. And while China has territorial ambitions, they are nowhere near EU. The US is the good old status quo ”devil you know”, but it’s abundantly evident now that nobody really knew them, including many of their own political elites domestically.
On diplomacy timescales, ignoring China because of human rights concerns is exceptionally short-sighted, both for EU if US continues current path, and for global stability in case conflicts escalate between China and US. There is no choice that guarantees EU will have a strong ”human rights” ally in 10 years.
> China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian
Let's also say that democracy is very important internally. But as a EU citizen (or even better as a middle east citizen) whether they're democratic or authoritarian makes very little difference to me- I don't get a say in what they do. And in the case of the ME, it wasn't China or its allies that reduced several countries to rubble, it was the democratic US.
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view
There are no such things as "incompatible world view" but certainly closer or more distant ones. And I think the fundamental values of the US are pretty far away from those of the EU.
By definition democracy and authoritarianim/dictatorship are no compatible
I'm not sure I understand what it means to be "compatible". We are talking about different countries with different regimes of course: in what sense two countries are or aren't compatible?
Only with a single nation.
Between nations, if that were so, no trade relationship would be possible between your go-to examples of each.
[flagged]
We can see the same with everything in the US.
Huawei became very competitive to Apple. Outsold Apple in it's home market. Huawei got banned.
DJI has a near monopoly on drones. No US company could compete and players like GoPro shut down their consumer drone projects. DJI got/is about to get banned.
Tiktok was dangerous to Meta. TikTok got almost banned/forced-sold.
Chinese EVs are better than almost any US offering. Chinese EVs got banned (by 100%+ tarrifs on them).
Sale of AI and Chips to China got banned. No ChatGPT or Claude offered to us here in Hong Kong.
This is all the US Tech sector can do now. Short term this will go very well but long term this leads to the US falling behind and behind because American companies have artificially created barriers where they aren't forced to comepete anymore, meanwhile the world moves on and has a competitive environment. Innovation will move faster Ex-USA
I fly a DJI Mini 5 Pro, use a Huawei Freeclip 2 earphone, a Huawei GT6 watch, a Xiaomi Silicon Carbon powerbank, an Oppo Find N5 foldable. Most are better/unique compared to what you can even get in America. And that's only the beginning. That's only 2025.
> Huawei became very competitive to Apple. Huawei got banned.
How would you explain Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.?
> DJI got banned.
Untrue.
Supply is constrained and future of new product availability is uncertain because of FY2025 National Defesnse Authorization ACt, which requires a security audit by late Dec 2025. If that doesn't happen, DJI could automatically be added to the FCC's restricted list, which could block new products from being certified and sold in the US.
In the meantime, for sale at Best Buy, Adorama, B&H, Walmart, etc. e.g. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1737927-REG/dji_cp_ma...
> Sale of AI and Chips to China got banned.
Your argument is that US tech companies do not have the ability to compete, but this example doesn't support your claim; in fact it does the opposite.
But even so, your information is out of date. Nvidia is now allowed to sell its advanced H200 AI chips to China. The whiplash is dumb, but the move is aimed at maintaining US AI leadership, support American jobs, while addressing concerns about China's military AI development.
As a former Huawei phone owner, and a present Honor phone owner, Samsung LG and Sony does not hold a candle to the quality on offer from Honor and Huawei.
And this is coming from someone who has owned multiple Samsungs over the years.
Huawei embeds ads in the stock apps. How can you have ads in a file manager app?
My default has always been replace the stock apps with the ones I'm most familiar with, so I never noticed the ads tbh.
and DJI is now effectively banned. Oh sorry... only 'new models'...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3337398/us-bars-appr...
I agree generally that protectionism is bad, but the examples you present are just the US (finally!) doing to China what China has done to the world for decades. They rely on relatively unencumbered trade in Western markets, while locking their own markets up from outside competition.
And yet you can buy a Tesla in China or an iPhone or any luxury bag or or or. Plenty of brands. It's not quite as black and white as people think.
What you're talking about is social networks/messengers/news which are limited not so much for competitive reasons but national security reasons. They like to control what people see which is something a Google, Meta or X cannot guarantee.
You can very much buy US software, e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/zh-cn/microsoft-365/buy/microsoft-... etc.
You can buy a Prada bag, a Ralph Lauren sweater, the newest iPhone or Mac, a Model Y, adidas or Nikes, Adobe Photoshop... etc etc
> DJI got banned
Not sure how that statement squares against the fact that a lot of major US stores (Amazon, Target, Costco, Walmart, B&H Photo, Microcenter, etc.) have DJI products available for purchase, as well as that there is literally a physical retail DJI store[0] within a ~20min subway ride away from my apartment in the US.
0. https://maps.app.goo.gl/yAUyv6LcmKMbsSyX6
I was too early with my 'got banned' statement. Is 'about to get' banned would be correct.
https://www.theverge.com/news/831241/dji-ban-us-trump-fcc-cu...
According to the "Huawei cyber security evaluation centre" (HCSEC) oversight boards annual report to the national security adviser of the United Kingdom (note: HCSEC was a joint lab between NSCS, GCHQ and Huawei with a lot of access to internal documentation and firmware source code and so on to check if they are telling the truth when they promised there is no backdoor for the chinese ministry of national security in the 5G equipment) their quality and basic security processes are so bad, that it is believable that all the vulnerabilities are unintentional. However they did improve in the years prior to being kicked out, so you are not wrong that it was somewhat of a bandwagon move following the us sanctions.
> Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software.
USA claims and treats Europe as the ennemy. Not every country treats every other country as the ennemy.
USA is, right now vicious and less trustworthy then China. Which is unfortunate cause China is not trustworthy.
> just scare-mongering from the US because it has no manufacturer of 5G equipment.
Even if that were accurate, which it isn’t, what exactly do you think the US stands to gain by Europe buying 5g from someone other than China (like the European providers Ericsson and nokia)?
Control. The equipment made by Ericsson or Nokia uses US made components which can be used just like what the US accuses China of.
Secondly, it stops China gaining as much experience in this field as it could have.
Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech, reinforcing the US's position as a global powerhouse. (Meanwhile US tech is built on the shoulders of their allies.) Now we see these same allies are starting to look inward and invest in technology they own completely because the US is acting decisively not like an ally. Something unthinkable since WW2.
I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.
I agree, this is a good thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. Airbus obviously has a large amount of military work, and its data needs to stay in Europe.
What we also need is a faster acceleration of military spending so this can happen with more companies.
> thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market.
They are not. It can hurt Airbus very much if a provider says they can provide a certain level of hardware/software for 10 years and in three years the RAM or storage goes through the roof and the provider is not big enough to absorb all the losses.
People don’t choose the hyperscalers because they are based in the US, they choose them because they are too big to fail and have pretty much unlimited resources and have multiplr streams of revenue.
Airbus is ~30% government owned by France/Germany/Spain and others. It is funded both as a private business and as a European "champion" to compete with Boeing.
It is also likely to get the majority of the European civil, commercial, and military orders now.
There is no reason why Europe can't build a hyperscalar cloud service. The skills and the software and hardware are all transferrable technology.
European defence budgets are being ramped up, spending some billions on data centres and comms is a no-brainer as part of that.
European governments contracting to a European cloud provider would be more than enough to fund the provisioning.
I would expect a contract review for millions in hosting to review how the company will mitigate those costs. Normally you would expect them to contract away the risk themselves. In fact the current rise in RAM costs is due to exactly this, big hosters contracting for long term RAM certainty.
There's a futures market for RAM prices if you want to hedge that risk. No different than corn.
> There's a futures market for RAM prices if you want to hedge that risk. No different than corn.
Yeah, and that's a fine vehicle for insuring against this risk for a finance company or for an individual.
I am prepared to be wrong on the following take (as it is based on nothing more than just "it came to me in a dream"), but my hunch is that neither Airbus nor the EU state governments are currently even attempting to hedge the RAM price risk by accumulating a RAM futures stash on the market.
Of course it's a good thing. It's an excellent thing. Is there any European company or individual arguing otherwise?
Country of Ukraine? Those suckers who bought F-35s or at least paid for them? And few other cases.
Long term, I agree with you.
What's the problem with F-35s? Israel actively uses them and appears to be very happy. They provided them advantage no one platform could.
> What's the problem with F-35s?
They will not be very useful in a conflict against the US, since the US can basically disable them remotely.
The problem is about politic, not F35s capabilities: US is a strong ally of Israel but many don't feel the same in Europe.
[flagged]
> Almost all computer equipment companies are from US.
Made in a few Asian countries. I think it's kind of funny reading the contents of your post and how it ignores Asia, that's actually behind most of it. How much of a Dell PC is US-American?
> > Almost all computer equipment companies are from US. > Made in a few Asian countries.
Using European technology (ASML).
Was it laziness and stupidity, or was it protection money. I thought the deal since WW2 was a US security guarantee, in return for letting the US have our money. A protection racket. Or perhaps it was more like Europe paying tribute to its colonial master.
Anyhow it is clear the protection is not to be relied upon, so it is time to stop paying. It is dangerous making deals with gangsters. It is perhaps more dangerous to change the deal. But when the protection is not there, it is time to build strength.
Well done to France for maintaining its independent nuclear deterrent through this era. Britain made a mistake letting that go
> I thought the deal since WW2 was a US security guarantee, in return for letting the US have our money
No. The Marshall Plan was about rebuilding Europe so it could be a military ally against the Soviet Union. The trade stuff came afterwards.
Was the Marshall plan the only piece of policy between the US and Europe since WW2?
> Was the Marshall plan the only piece of policy between the US and Europe since WW2?
What do you think.
>Britain made a mistake letting that go
https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-11/united-kingdom-nucle...
It is not clear what point you are trying to make?
That Britain has a nuclear deterrent.
Wait so the US is supposed to provide security at no cost forever? Are you talking about NATO or something else? The only thing I see a problem is all countries paying the same rate to be in NATO.
The cost is us buying their stuff instead of building our own.
Wouldnt say its laziness.
The US has a long history of funding the Silicon Valley expansion using Darpa and other federal agencies for example.
Europe never had such a thing, and they had a fragmented market for a long time.
The big money is in the US, thats why the talent goes there.
And where would Silicon Valley be without CERN, that created the www?
Silicon valley has its origins with HP and Intel, producing hardware and chips.
Yes, the www was created at Cern, but this is only a small part of the whole tech industry and history as a whole.
Also before that, Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet, was created and funded in the US by the military and the top unis.
This trope with CERN/EU created the WWW is just chauvinism. That contribution to the internet is just infinitesimal small. Just stop repeating it as it was the cornerstone of today’s world.
Is just one little stone in a gigantic castle made in the united states. I’m European, and I think is just silly to look who “invented” each thing, trying to feel patriotic about that. Every invention is based on other inventions, research, ideas and necessities around the world. Trying to put flags on it, is just stupid.
Is the castle made in the US? Why cut it off at precisely that point?
Where was binary logic invented? Where was boolean algebra invented? Where was the turing machine invented?
Hell, we can go back even further. Where would any of this be without Aristotle?
Of course, this castle has been built by many many stones. But I think it's fair to say most stones came from Europe.
Could be, but so what?
The fact is the US and China are steamrolling us with their IT companies since decades.
We need to wake up and do it ourselves.
>> Is the castle made in the US? Why cut it off at precisely that point?
Because I was talking about this “internet was invented in CERN”, which is just not a little bit true
About the rest: So what?! Thanks Thanks Europe and Europeans!! We just killed 6 Mio. Judes and burned people in the middle ages… but wait. We invented the Web!!! And we can forget everything that came from Asia and middle East also. All is our merit!!! Again, my point is it is stupid to say some country invented X.
What kind of cheap chauvinism is that? Please give me a break. Many things where invented everywhere in the world, and I could not care less, because that will not make me better or worse because of being part of a country which borders were defined not 100 years ago.
The starting point of this thread in HN is about starting to develop some kind of digital independence, because frankly, the EU may have GDPR, but in everything else is much worse and stuck like 5 decades ago.
Everyone knows Al Gore invented the internet.
Your words are displaying the mindset that is the main driving force behind the currently ongoing decline of the American empire. Incredible hubris paired with ignorance and a lack of self reflection. Great qualities if you want to go further down that line.
Almost all computer equipment is from China.
Production yes, but design is firmly in American hands - for now.
Well, the currently best OS widely deployed is Chinese only. HarmonyOS, a microkernel OS replacing Android on Chinese phones. About 10x faster development than in the US. And secure, unlike Linux.
Fuchsia never made it widescale. They started a couple of years before the Chinese and then got stuck
"Best OS" as determined by who? Even just checking the Wikipedia page for HarmonyOS is sure to give a chuckle:
> supporting both tablet mode and full desktop counterpart in line with Huawei MateBook
I'm sorry, "MateBook"? Lol, I wonder where they possibly got the idea for that name from.
> More on the laziness and stupidity of their allies.
s/laziness and stupidity/corruption/g
See, for instance, what happened to Gemalto.
> Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech
This is a disingenuous straw man. The allies are derided for literally freeloading on US military protection while underinvesting in their own defense.
Freeloading?
My country spends less on defence as a percentage of GDP than the US. But it spends much of that with US companies. This is not Freeloading. It was a deal. Cancel TSR-2, and buy American and we will lend you some money. Cancel your nuclear program and buy US submarine launched missiles and we will help you look after yourself. Now let Visa and Mastercard skim off all your transactions and we will keep you secure to keep the money flowing. Sweetheart tax deals for US companies to operate, and we will keep you safe to keep the money flowing. It is not Freeloading, it is colonialism
Agreed those things exist, in most contracts one or both parties feel they are not getting a 'fair' deal and will renegotiate terms, this is very common.
I can hear the whoosh going over the head of anyone associated with Trump. Thanks for trying though.
The current U.S. President has insisted that Europeans are freeloading. Given that he’s been the primary proponent of this idea, and given that he’s been cutting off aid and has made cutting off this “freeloading” the central plank of his defense strategy, the U.S. defense budget must have gone down significantly right?
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5656174-trump-si...
> The bill approves a record $901 billion in military spending for fiscal 2026
Oh…
Obviously faulty logic. This isn't a zero-sum game. In fact, the whole point is to increase our combined combat power.
For too long European NATO countries have kept token militaries lacking any substantial combat power. They have centered their national defense strategies around holding off Russia for just long enough for Uncle Sam to swoop in, fight the Russians, and save the day. But the US does not have the combat power to fight both Russia and China. So our total combat power must increase. Should the US bear this increased burden alone? Or should the rest of NATO finally get serious about funding and fielding effective militaries?
European states have been freeloading, and US defense budgets are not going to decrease just because Europe finally starts to take some responsibility for its own defense.
How's that? How many Middle Eastern refugees are America sheltering from the fallout of American aggression and the regimes it props up?
The US isn't anywhere close to paying its way.
Pray tell, how much of, say, the latest Afghanistan war did the US pay and how much do their allies need to bear? The rebuilding of a whole country, the reinstatement of the Taliban regime, the destabilization of the region, and the still ongoing stream of refugees? The political aftermath of which is still felt in Europe.
Europe could have simply denied entry to the refugees and avoided their entire refugee problem. It's especially silly to blame the US when most EU states strongly supported the downfall of Qaddafi and Assad.
That's the thing though. Most European states (inside and outside the EU) consider the US their strategic ally, and they will support whatever it takes to make that strategy work. Policy at international level is made for strategic reasons, and you have to look at what countries do, not at what they say.
The strongest state, economically and military, can get away with a lot others wouldn't, since everyone else will want to be on their good side. The new US administration has clearly shifted in terms of what they say, but not yet much in terms of what they do. Maybe Ukraine will be the exception here.
[flagged]
Does the US plan to pay for this wall?
> Building a wall and shooting on site anyone who crosses it is a very simple and effective method of keeping immigration in check.
Ah yes a wall, like that famously effective one that Trump built. Tell me has US managed to actually finish it yet?
I'd argue the savages are the people shooting civilians.
The EU is so much more civilized by bribing Turkiye [0], Libya [1], Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia [2], and other nations to shoot and/or indefinitely detain them for you guys instead.
Yet we as Americans are the savages.
European civil society needs to drop this charade of moralizing and being "rules based". The reality is EU policymakers are equally as mercurial and open to making deals with devils. The issue is a subset of you guys have a weird form of "white saviourship" and sense of exceptionalism.
Finally, a plurality of us Americans either never had or no longer have blood ties with Europe. As an Asian American who used to work om the Hill, I myself and my peers increasingly ignore or overlook Europe despite having went to college with a number of your up-and-coming decisionmakers. In 2025, the majority of us Americans are Latino, Black, Mixed, Asian, or multi-generational White American.
Any positive historical ties we had with Europe (in reality, a fluke from 1939-2011) was because of 1.5 gen Central and Eastern European immigrants turned NatSec Advisers like Kissinger (German), Albright (Czech), and Brzezinski (Polish). From a soft power perspective, when we don't look inward we increasingly look to Latin America or Asia. And economically as well - our total trade with all of Europe is barely $975B compared to $1.5T with all of the Americas and around $2-2.5T with Asia.
[0] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/03/the-eu-turkey...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/05/eu-dea...
[2] - https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-06-01/mass-arr...
What are you talking about? Are you guys shooting people at the border?
I was reacting to the guy above, not Americans.
[flagged]
> The allies are derided for literally freeloading on US military protection while underinvesting in their own defense.
1. No one forced the US to spend a bajillion dollars on defense.
2. The US did so out of their own free will, and out of self-interest: their power hegemony allowed for peaceful trade routes that benefited the US economy and US corporations.
3. Their own defense against what? What threats, until fairly recently, did the Europeans face that they needed to spend money protecting against?
> Their own defense against what? What threats, until fairly recently, did the Europeans face that they needed to spend money protecting against?
Same ones the US built the most expensive army in the world to defend against
Let's not pretend this was something the US didn't want for most of the last seventy years.
Guess which country had never any interest in a strong (politically and militarily) Europe, to maintain the world hegemony?
A Europe with an independent defense is dangerous competition for the US. Maybe it means that some international trade will be done in Euro. Maybe it means foreign policies in Europe's interests.
It seems every single comment in the thread is understanding "cloud" here to mean AWS vs Hetzner. But it's clear from the first paragraph of the article that what they actually mean is MS 365 Dynamics vs SAP. They primarily want a managed ERP + CRM solution, not servers.
Cloud must be the most uselessly overloaded term ever. I have no way of knowing what you are actually talking about when you use it.
Cloud always means "somebody else's computer".
If only. But it can also mean your own computers ("private cloud").
My experience is that when people say "private cloud", they usually mean a VPC or similar that is located on somebody else's computer.
I'm sure some people use the term correctly, at least sometimes!
Even that isn't generic and broad enough. I've noticed so many people mean SaaS when they say cloud. That isn't even a hardware or server or infrastructure meaning. It's referring to a whole cohesive IT product that you subscribe to.
Actually I'd say "cloud" says more about the business model than it says about the actual product.
In there early days of cloud there were actual definitions created for it. Nobody seems to remember or care any more.
SAP needs servers though, if they buy SAP hosted in AWS that kind of defeats the purpose.
Indeed. And SAP has no cooperation with any European cloud providers, afaik. It's the big three plus alibaba. SAP wants to move away from on-prem, but I guess it has a solution for critical applications. Maybe that can be shoehorned onto OVH or something.
Not entirely true. You can do SAP RISE on Telekom (not Open Telekom Cloud, forgot the name of the thing) and as far as I know STACKIT is currently in beta. Apparently the AWS Sovereign Cloud will be possible as well. Its just way more expensive because Microsoft and AWS use their monetary power to give SAP better offers (just guesswork obviously, its not like SAP would tell you).
It seems OVH does support SAP. https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/solutions/sap/
How good/bad it is, I have zero expertise.
SAP runs its own cloud/IaaS in addition to running its workloads on the hyperscalers. It's been doing that for years internally, and that SAP cloud is now being extended to be open for direct consumption by other companies:
https://learning.sap.com/learning-journeys/exploring-sap-con...
I will be servers as well. Eurostack cloud providers. We are involved in one of these - a large car company doing the same.
As far as I know SAP is more capable and widespread, so I don’t know why they were using Microsoft in the first place.
Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere.
People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete.
This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product.
We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.
> If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself
I have tried Lambdas and then got this "oh-shit moment" when I have realized that if AWS would be to kick me out, I would be absolutely screwed.
Now I am slowly dispersing and using VMs instead and avoiding all the AWS-specific stuff as much as I can.
Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself
IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos …
Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in
Most cloud providers have the same exact issue that AWS has: they're US based.
Not Hetzner tho
I hesitate to call Hetzner "cloud". Hetzner is an EC2+S3 competitor, not an AWS one. IMO the minimum for being a real cloud is you need hosted Postgres, hosted Kafka, hosted Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage. Without the first three Hetzner is just not in the same product category. Nobody sensible buys AWS for the comically overpriced EC2.
Another missed component is a real autoscaling load balancer. This often gets missed and taken for granted. Possibly due to if you haven't seen a good one (AWS) you might not realise what you're missing. Most aspiring "cloud" companies have fixed capacity single tennant load balancers which is not cloud in any definition.
Is it so hard to wire up some health/load checks and hook the provider API to spin up more VPS?
Is it really so much cheaper to pay for "hosted" apps rather than just plumbing your own on VPS/metal?
It's far cheaper to do it yourself, but the entire point is that you outsource the management of the service. Lots of people don't want to deal with database failovers, or - god forbid - deal with Kubernetes control plane issues.
On the opposite, it is more expensive, and any large enough company should probably at least consider renting metal rather than services. For a small org, though, it lets you avoid a lot of infrastructure/ops work.
If your threat model is AWS deciding you break their AUP, the issue is with you doing AUP breaking stuff. This ain’t your personal Google Play account.
I really hope regulators don't back down on this.
Half a billion people shouldn't be reliant on whether a guy with clown makeup is having a dementia moment.
Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country. Actually in house not big tech EU "sovereign" cloud wink wink nudge
> Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country.
For some EU functionalities there is eu-lisa which develops and hosts services - mostly for police, immigration, biometrics and a slew of others.
The problem is that they are very closed environments with a lot if bureaucracy involved and the development is done at snail pace.
> The problem is that they are very closed environments with a lot if bureaucracy involved and the development is done at snail pace.
Wow, so they're authentically European! Glad to see they're off to a great start.
It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship.
Airbus has the ability to move their data to another location, but it is very problemetic that all people with a social account can't. Sure, you can delete your Facebook account but it will take years for you profile to be gone because we all know your data is sold to other parties.
My only option is to keep in mind that everything I put online will one day be read by some evil entity. Even my IP address that Hacker News might store (I don't know, but servers log stuff).
> It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship.
I know, watching the fall of the UK and European countries has been really depressing to see. It's unfortunate, but it seems the US will have to carry the torch alone going into the mid-to-late 21st century.
At least we agree that a country turning into a corrupt dictatorship is depressing to see.
I hope this is satire, especially in the light of these latest news.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cbs-60-minutes-story-tr...
Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager". It's a step in financing EU sovereign cloud providers.
> Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager".
And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
Your comment may be sarcastic, IDK; but if it is I concur.
Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism".
The US government has decided to kill innocent fishermen en masse and labelled its victims "narco-terrorists" as a justification for these crimes.
We absolutely do not need Palantir.
> Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism".
Labelling like this works both ways you know.
Seems extremely dangerous to be doing those kinds of things with software from someone politically hostile. Perhaps the EU should be weaning itself off that too?
> And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
You can make exactly same argument for client (phone) scanning and depreciation of encryption.
Please add a /s we can't afford sarcasm in this climate anymore
The sarcasm is too damn high!
> And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
By doing police legwork and by prevention work (i.e. offer help to pedophiles, don't go and wreck MENA countries for funsies, but invest in helping the civilian populations).
I don't think Airbus is fighting terrorists, child abuse or political opponents. So what is your point ? Airbus is fighting industrial espionage.
Missed the sarcasm. But FWIW, all three are legitimate threat actors for a strategic airplane manufacturer.
I don't see how child abuse content is a risk for a airplane manufacturer but that is not how Palentir is used at Airbus.
I'm talking about the Skywise data platform.
https://www.aircraft.airbus.com/en/services/enhance/skywise-...
this might be rather unrelated to the article, but I hate seeing companies being bought up by the US in europe and it especially makes me upset to see that the american president has the audacity to claim that european countries are just leeching off the US when in reality the whole world feeding the US is what allows it to do things that would cause any other country to go bankrupt.
I do not understand what this is supposed to be about.
What is this "Euro Cloud" and what does it have to do with "ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management (aircraft designs)"?
For example I am not aware that Microsoft, Amazon or Google offer any PLM services. The companies offering those would be Siemens, Dassault and so on. Is the issue that those PLM providers are themselves running on Microsoft, Amazon or Google Services? But then the issue is with Airbus needing to force their suppliers into changing where there services are delivered from, but AFAIK these PLM providers offer on prem services, so it seems like a relatively trivial issue.
What exactly is the "Euro Cloud" supposed to mean here, what is the actual issue with Airbus switching their PLM to on prem? TO be honest I find it hard to imagine that this isn't already the case. So what is going on here?
> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
It would be nice to know what the requirements are. There are plenty of providers in the EU happy to sell cloud services
They should read HN.
Don’t they know you can get Hetzner servers starting from $5/month?
This sounds funny now. But Hetzner has been moving into a cloud direction consistently. They recently rolled out VPCs, load balancers and all that. They are slowly building the blocks to provide what we generally call a cloud.
Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
If you need much more than compute, managed k8s and blob storage, then you're architecting yourself for a vendor lock-in.
Absolutely not. There's a gazillion cloud providers out there with hosted postgres+kafka+redis and the other big open source softwares. Hetzner is just not one of them.
Please list them, especially the ones with managed services..
Hetzner, OVH and Upcloud. All of them have object storage, managed Redis,Postgres and K8S.
Most of the time the missing things are homegrown SaaS offerings of big 3 and identity services. You will not find equivalent IAM or BigQuery in indie clouds.
Hetzner has k8s? I only see VMs and block storage.
Scaleway as well
Please list them, especially the ones with managed services.
Welcome to the real world. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but this is what’s happened. That’s why everyone is doing AWS. To pretend this is a non-issue and can easily be fixed by investing a bit in development does not reflect reality.
At my last workplace we literally fixed this by investing a bit in development.
You worked at an industry giant like Airbus? Cool.
OVH? Upcloud? Scaleway?
(searching more I found Koyeb, bunny cdn offers deno similar to cloudflare workers)
None of these remotely come close to their US counterparts. Not by a long shot.
Because they don’t offer every service AWS offers? They offer plenty of hosted databases, queues and what not that it shouldn’t be too hard to move things over. Especially not if you are on Kubernetes. Not if you are all in on lambdas of course but that is a problem in and of itself.
I had created this comment on your other comment on one of my other comments that there are no cloud providers and so I am wishing to talk about both of these at the same comment perhaps
I do not know about the others but OVH (even with all of its flaws) is definitely a cloud provider
I got so damn overwhelmed looking at all the services offered by OVH once and I found some niche services which would most likely be underrated by many but if one wants at scale cheap cold storage, I recommend OVH's cold storage because they cost only 2$ per month/TB storage long term but have only 12$/TB ingress/egress compared to the egregious 100$/TB (or so I have heard) AWS's outage and where you have to play this little dance of shutting down AWS itself or something to not pay it but I genuinely think that OVH has a lot of features
I am not kidding but when I say overwhelmed, I truly meant it so much that I had to take a walk outside to put things into mind, I was looking for partnership opportunities for OVH tho that time but in my mind I have rejected them because they are too big to partner at a small scale In my opinion
OVH has the 2nd most meaningful high content or similar metric (I forgot the website which shared it) after AWS, it had more high traffic websites overall even more so than gcp
Personally I do not like this complexity. Just give me compute and storage and let me handle the rest but I don't really like OVH thaat much (my opinions change overtime too) but please look more into it if you genuinely want european cloud provider, I am interested to know about it, What are the metrics which qualify for the "long shot", I am genuinely curious and wishing to discuss honestly.
But would you need those functions to run your ERP and CRM systems (see the article)?
Yes. At an airbus scale, most definitely.
But to give you another example (from the article): Try migrating Google Workspace to an EU solution. Actually impossible. I tried it myself, and gave up. The closest you’ll get is Proton, which isn’t EU to begin with and doesn’t even have half of the features Google Workspace offers.
Well proton isn't Eu but its switzerland and I think that proton is going to move some of their servers to germany after switzerland had this questionable decision which feared privacy services (including proton)
Proton recently got proton sheets/proton docs
Personally one of the largest issues I have with proton is the lack of extensibility. Like google has app scripts and similar api's but proton's lack of api's have frustrated me so much that I have built an api over scraping/using a puppeteer instance over it but its still in very finnicky state
Well, I am not sure about the newer BTP-based stuff, but the main ABAP-based core of an SAP S/4HANA system certainly does not need those capabilities, as it is still basically the same running in on premise systems. The priority of a couple of BTP apps might be quite low, if they are not starting from scratch.
Sadly there are still no European cloud providers. There are European hosting and VPS companies with aspirations but that's not the same.
Scaleway and OVH offer all the basics and more (kubernetes, networking, hosted dbs, queues, storage, GPUs etc). It’s google workspace/microsoft 365 that has no equivalent.
He is my free advise for Airbus:
1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place)
2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?"
If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century.
- [0] https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-...
do you really suppose replicating the technical requirements of a security-sensitive company of this size in-house would be so easy? I've been doing infrastructure for 25 years and wouldn't want anywhere near this project. but what you will no doubt find is a pool of overconfident volunteers creating exactly the kind of risk outsourcing the problem allowed them to avoid in the first place
The way I understand it is today is when I board on an Airbus I enter an hybrid of a mechanical and digital machine. I understand there is a lot of complex and sensitive software embedded/hosted on that plane that hopefully are not gonna kill me.
So computers are actually core to their business. They probably almost invented things like PLM too.
Nothing Airbus does is easy, this is why there are only about 2 companies like that in the world. This is why I do not see why their hosting have to be outsourced...
You had me right up until 21th
This administration has done more to undermine US power than probably any in history. This isn't a new statement either (eg [1]). Personally, I think that's not such a bad thing because we are the bad guys. I know people get all in their feelings when you say stuff like that but the number of democratically elected governments we've overthrown, just to get their resources, is indefensible.
This week it broke that China is pretty far along in duplicating EUV litthography. The US restricts ASML, a Dutch company, from exporting their best machines to China and Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese companies from exporting their chips to China. The second one was a massive mistake. Why? Because it created a marekt for China to produce chips because they had no other choice.
Geopolitically I think this is very similar to the USSR copying the atomic bomb in just 4 years after WW2 where US leaders either thought it was impossible or would take 20+ years.
The US has become unpredictable and unreliable. Ukraine is a big part of this because Europe is waking up to them having to be responsible for their own defense and that ultimately will undermine US power projection through NATO.
Since very early in this administration, probably back when the tariff nonsense began, I believed that Europe would be forced to distance themselves from US tech giants and at some point the EU would require cloud storage to be within EU borders and eventually require European companies to own and run that cloud rather than US companies.
China has their own version of virtually every tech company. I can see the EU moving in this direction for key functions and cloud is likely the first of those.
What's really precarious is the entire US economy is now essentially a bet on US companies owning a global AI future and I honestly don't think it's going to happen, mainly because China won't let it happen. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow for this and only the beginning.
What you really need to remember about the current administration is we're not even 1 year into a 4 year term with everything that's happened and the entire foreign policy is kleptocratic not strategic in nature.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775985
I wonder if this includes Skywise, the Palantir-built data lake and design stack that they use for many many internal operations (design, airline support, manufacturing). Not sure what difference it really makes where the data is hosted if the folks doing the hosting call home to Colorado…
From what I've seen of Skywise, it is just a glorified SharePoint. Different systems upload CSV files that get turned into database tables. Then you can define views across these tables that other systems can consume by having them dumped to CSV and dropped on an SFTP.
Performance is not great, so you need middleware and batching anyway. As far as I am concerned, it wouldn't be a great loss if Skywise disappeared and just the SFTP with CSV:s remained.
I'm sure there are 10 other things nearly as bad. No reason not to start the journey.
And not just Airbus. Very quietly there is a lot of stuff being moved out of the US and away from MS, AWS, Google etc. Trump has absolutely no idea what he's doing and comes across as the proverbial bull in a China shop.
History books a hundred years hence will have some choice things to say about how we all stood by and let this happen.
Any concrete evidence of any of that outside of a few companies "exploring" the move? For most companies it's a non-starter
On a very small personal/hobby level: backblaze (which i like as a company) lost my business, moved stuff over to a European company. I'm not a multi million dollar business but I've started to do what i can.
Would have loved to visit the US and see all the things it has to offer, but absolutely not planning to in this climate. I think the US is currently at billions lost in just Canadian tourism?
Well, they really, really, really want it to be true, so surely that means it practically is.
In case any SME-sized companies here are wanting to do something similar but are looking askance at the risk/investment/hiring required, then we'd [0] love to talk to you.
We specialise in doing this but on a smaller scale. Eg. 10-100 person companies that have 0-to-a-few DevOps engineers. Included is DevOps time each month to use as you wish, we're on call for SLAs, around 50% reduced cost vs AWS/Google/Azure, etc.
Somewhat differently to most, we deploy onto bare metal. In addition to dropping costs we typically see at least a 2x speed-up overall. Once client just reported a 80% reduction in processing time.
CTOs like us because we're always on-hand via Slack (plus we're the ones getting woken up in the night), and CFOs like us because billing becomes consistent.
Anyway, blatant pitch complete.
[0]: https://lithus.eu/
adam@ above domain
It always puzzled me that big corps don’t have their own infrastructure. Surely there’s a point where hiring a team to manage it properly becomes economical at a certain point, and they take a lot of security risks out of a third party’s hands.
Ultimately this plays into China's hand. They have been promoting "sovereign internet" for many years now (to justify their tight control and the GFW). See the Wuzhen "World" Internet Conferences.
> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
I must be terribly fussy but this genuinely tripped me up while reading. What does this phrasing even mean? Is it an 80% chance of success? This seems like someone has heard the phrase "80/20 rule" and applied it somewhere it makes no sense.
Trusting the US is a bad idea.
Just ask Ukraine.
The same Ukraine that has taken 175 billion USD in aid from the US?
Been given aid*, they didn't rob your banks.
And is now getting betrayed?
Yes.
The headline is misleading. They hope to hope to move on-prem stuff to a European provider, but not all the stuff that is already on US clouds.
Sounds like they're adopting EU cloud but will continue to use Google Suite. Surely there are viable EU based alternatives further up the stack?
> The aerospace manufacturer...now wants to move key on-premises applications...to the cloud.
most of the discourse here is missing the point. it is not to migrate a cloud resource away from (assumed) US-based services, but rather moving to the cloud for core services.
now "sovereign" is the hot word in these parts, and of course it would be a priority. but if it ends up running American HW/SW, is it really being independent? regardless, the article also mentions Google workspace, which is not in the scope of migration.
regardless of which part of the fence one is in, things are easier said than done especially when IT services is a cost to the company rather than revenue stream.
Good, but how independent of US service providers is S/4HANA in practice?
I mean, they are offering their own, European cloud: https://news.sap.com/2025/11/sap-eu-ai-cloud-unified-vision-...
Weird.
If it matters so much, run your own computer systems don’t use any cloud.
So which one, scale way, hetzner... Tell us who wins ?
Given it was revealed that CIA specifically targeted 200million deals and above, it was political naivety amounting ti gross negligence on behalf of Airbus executives that it took them 10 years. Same for many other large organisations and countries, unbelieveable.
Why did it have to be Trump to make them take action?
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-wikileaks-economy/...
Maybe Trump kicked the DGSE out of Boeing
Sovereign from the EU regime?
Quite frankly, I'm astonished that large players like Airbus are/were still relying on US infrastructure providers at all, given public knowledge of ECHELON in the 90s and the BND-NSA espionage in the 00s.
Having worked with all major European clouds: Good luck, have fun opening a lot of support cases for things that should work ootb.
One of the reason is a lot of those "EU Sovereign Clouds" were malicious cash grabs.
It happened several times in the last decade:
- First politicians raise the alarm about "digital sovereignty"
- Then some create new EU sovereign clouds that are pitched/forced on corporations
- They usually do not work, get consolidated and then the scam is revealed
The biggest reveal was when we discovered and warned one of our client the Orange "Sovereign Cloud" (French telco partially owned by the government !) and built to host European most sensitive worloads was just handed over and run by Huawei [0] [1]. They were not the only one who did something like that.
I don't want to put actors like Hertzner in the same bag as they seem to be honest and really compete to offer a cheaper alternative to hyperscalers.
- [0] https://www.huawei.com/en/huaweitech/publication/winwin/29/o...
- [1] https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/orange-introduces-...
Didn't the Spanish govt just award Huawei a contract for their lawful intercept program? You can't make it up.
There isnt any irony here. Huawei equipment was investigated by British and German intelligence agencies and was found to have no backdoors. That's why some countries are heavily buying it.
Did you ever do it while waiving a $50m cheque though?
$50mm does mot get go very far. We’re a pretty small company (200 people) compared to Airbus and pay about $2mm/yr for cloud.
It's better than having the rug pulled from under your company one day. This is the point in history we're at unfortunately.
> It's better than having the rug pulled from under your company one day. This is the point in history we're at unfortunately.
Source?
Source??? A US administration that is completely out of control.
They're doing what they were voted in to do though? Most of what they're doing has high baseline approval ratings, just not in the specific implementation.
They've done great with those Epstein files. Totally published everything./s
This is pure fear-mongering
Tell that to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Why wouldn't a bunch of Airbus executives be next in line to be sanctioned by the US? They represent a threat to the profitability of Boeing.
I do, works perfectly if you know what you're doing. If you have no clue, jump to AWS and enjoy the lockin, if you do, jump to a EU provider, and enjoy not being locked in, and a vastly lower cost.
"if you know what you're doing"
lol my team has worked with every major cloud provider for a decade, but sure it's all our fault because incompetence.
good luck man.
edit: I never even implied that AWS lock-in something positive. I'm getting paid to move companies from cloud to on-prem because that's true sovereignty.
Great - an anecdote. Most company leaders just want to focus on their core business on top of proven tech that works.
"sovereign Euro cloud", ah good chuckle
Airbus is putting all its design on internet? wow...
You can have the data safely on-prem, connected to computers that are connected to the internet, or safely in the cloud, connected to computers that are connected to the internet. The threats are not that different.
Managing product data on the cloud does not mean public internet access, unless someone messes something up big time.
You'd be fooling yourself if you think any moderately complex company still hasn't moved to the cloud or isn't thinking about it (with rare exceptions)
Yeah, not really sure how a globally distributed manufacturing operation with a complex supply chain and customers all over the world that need access to data for their operations is supposed to function effectively without it.
(and I say that as someone that used to sell commercial aviation data that came on CDs...)
I don't think this is related to that "critical" stuff.
It seems there is a misunderstanding over the classification of 'critical' stuff.
We may all have a very different definition.
All I know: the second your are connected to internet, you are cooked.
I'm not sure what the 'critical' stuff is either or what the details of Airbus' network hosting and knowledge compartmentalization strategy is, but you're not going to run a globally distributed manufacturing business with complex supply and maintenance requirements without having technical specs, CAD files, diagnostic criteria customer records etc sitting on computers connected to the internet.
You do know that the Internet and "the cloud" are not the same thing, right?
> Airbus is putting all its design on internet? wow...
Not only Airbus. You see, cloud is secure, information is encrypted and only you have access to your data.
It would be reasonably "secure" if it is encrypted on a physically private network using in-house _modified_ _mainstream_ encryption algorithm, then after an over-the-air transfer then you can store it on a third party could under the control of foreign interests. Oh, don't forget the file names have to be encrypted too.
Everything else is, I am sorry to say, BS.
> in-house _modified_ _mainstream_ encryption algorithm
Why would a company without cryptographic expertise modifying an existing algorithm without any particular goal in mind just to be different, produce something more secure than the winning solution in an open cryptographic competition?
> directory names
And file structure too, preferably. Incremental sync could be done with XTS mode.
You need only cryptographic common sense: it seems you have no idea how much it is easy to modify a mainstream cryptographic software to add basic and robust cryptographic modifications...
Are you an AI?
I've been assessing systems that use cryptography for about 20 years as part of my work in information security, and I've never seen a customization that increased the security of a cryptographic algorithm over following the best practices.
Usually, non-specialists fiddling with cryptographic algorithms makes them much less secure. Developers who aren't cryptographic mathematicians should generally use a well-respected algorithm, follow current best practices, and treat that component as a magic box that's not to be tampered with.
>You need only cryptographic common sense
Sounds like the "I know a guy" kind of thing that shouldn't be done if you really care about security.
>Are you an AI?
Non-sequitur.
Doing such "customizations" (which are actually crypto 101) will break all attacks designed specifically for a crypto algo in mind. Even better if you lie on the crypto algorithm.
Ofc, that must be encrypted on systems which "cannot connect" (and you can go overkill with EM protection with a very good faraday cage).
If you are making such a technical pain for attackers, they will switch to social engineering anyway.
Algorithms like AES-GCM are standards because - when used according to best practices - there are no known practical attacks against them.
If someone has an attack that would defeat the cryptographic protection in a particular piece of software, the software is likely doing one or more of the following:
* Not using a modern, well-tested algorithm (e.g. using DES, a hokey custom XOR stream cipher, AES-ECB, etc.).
* Not following general cryptographic best practices (e.g. hardcoded or predictable key/IV/nonce, insecure storage of keys).
* Not following best practices for the specific algorithm (e.g. using AES-GCM, but reusing a key/nonce combination; using AES-CBC without applying an integrity-protection mechanism).
* The software is doing something that doesn't make sense, cryptographically (e.g. using symmetric encryption to encrypt sensitive data, but the data and the keys are necessarily accessible to the same set of users/service accounts, so there's no net change in security).
If such an attack fails because a developer has made changes to the cryptographic algorithm, a motivated attacker is likely just going to look at the code in Ghidra, x64dbg, etc. and figure out how to account for the changes. It's not a strong security control. I've been decrypting content stored using that kind of software for something like 20 years.
The correct approach is to verify that the use of a particular type of cryptography makes sense in the first place, then use a well-tested modern algorithm and follow the current best practices. i.e. using code from years-old forum posts will likely result in an insecure product.
Ofc, the code modifications and additional data are not public, neither they are online. And we are talking air gap transfer.
I repeat: the second you are online, you are cooked. Everything else is BS, probably somebody is trying to sell you something.
All you can do is to find compromise depending on the classification of the data.
And as I said, if you are making it too much hell for attackers, they will switch to social engineering.
Come on...