cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27384100
The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.
The Chinese and the Russians did it, the EU dropped the ball and trusted the US like fools.
Now they have to build their own search, maps, productivity and social media platforms.
Good news. They can use open source stuff.
But they won’t
We already have a lot of these. For maps you have OrganicMaps or OsmAnd. For Waze we have MagicEarth.
What will be harder is indeed the productivity tools like office etc.
There is hope. Haven’t looked into it, but there is the French German docs project that is based on open source and available on GitHub (under some license that I haven’t checked)
German government in general is (or at least was over the past 4 years) also generally pretty pro open source.
Enjoy your economic boom Europe.
I hate how so many news outlets are using AI slop images in their articles now.
I believe that, given the pressure we are facing from various sides, Europe will begin to focus more on its own market. This shift could lead to the creation and enhancement of tools that we currently rely heavily on from the US. As consumers, we should prioritize purchasing from European producers to strengthen our market. Although, I would like to see businesses expand their product offerings across the entire EU, rather than limiting them to their home countries.
As consumers, we should prioritize purchasing from European producers to strengthen our market.
The other day someone recommended a website that shows you European alternatives: Go European
Well there’s always Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent I guess.
Or we can just stop piling mountains of useless oversized garbage and return to those good old 10-20KiB sized Web pages.
But how are
data leechesonline service providers supposed tospreadprovidedata hoarding toolstasty cookies?
Sure, why build sour own, independent infrastructure when you can instead outsource it to a company under an autocratic regime?
I figured my sarcasm was pretty obvious.
Have you heard the other sides arguments here? There is no obvious sarcasm anymore
Not really.
Poe’s Law in action :)
