That choice was made years ago. This is like native Americans realizing that they have to invent rifles.
We have a lot of expertise in the field of technology and the building of this kind of systems, so that is not the problem.
Citation needed. Who has the knowledge to create social networks or neural networks in Europe? Who is going to make them popular?
Lemmy would be promoted much more if people cared about creating European data, with a neccessary debate about copy rights.
The Netherlands has ASML that could produce the chips needed for AI.
That’s one part of the process. Others can buy ASML machines but only TSMC has the best processes to build the most efficient chips and yet again other companies know how to design those chips.
This is USSR playing catch-up with Western digital technology all over again. It’s a bit arrogant to think that Europe can do it simply by dedicating resources to it. Those in power have ignored those who knew what was coming. How are they going to know to whom they should listen now?
I am old enough to remember Siemens SL45 mobile phone and Symbian but European politicians focused on killing those. If we see Big Tech in Europe it will be Social Credit System and Chinese style surveillance. Europe politics is corrupted to the ground. They say they hate corporations and take money from them after that.
Open source and socialised software across the EU please, not predatory big tech companies.
Starting with the assumption that the US does many technology related things better, we should just adopt a mantra of making second-best copies of whatever the US does better.
Catching up is always quicker and cheaper than being the first to get there.
Invest in copying.
Finally, first real feasible comment about EU catching up to US and China. This is how countries like Korea, despite how tiny it is compared to the EU, still grow so well economically and stay #1 in various areas of competition. They play ‘catch up then compete’ game so well and are probably the best at it. They become #2 or top 5 or whatever in many things, synthesise them together to become #1. Even integrated solutions of these #2 offerings combined are what makes their packaged offerings so compelling.
Even better, do it in the public! FOSS is the way to go
China is way ahead of the US, this will take a long time and even then will never work.
Why ban? Tax it.
The point is to have a growth sector.
You need to have something shitty to see if the other thing is good. Otherwise we will just build EU-approved Meta that does the same shit from all over again.
And use the tax money to help fund open source alternatives? Yes please
This is all talk. The EU and European countries are articulating what they know their population and the EU tech sector wants them to do BUT in the end, they will do none of it. Maybe vote a few laws, fund a few cheap FOSS projects that will never truly be applied/ used by EU countries except for a handful of cities, public services. But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.
Talking spaces such as this lemmysub are places where we, the end users and creators can collaborate to pressure them to at least consider things and get out of this Trump/Xi dependency our politicians want for us.
The EU is slow moving. That can be detrimental to techhnological arms races sometimes, but the stability it provides also has a lot of benefits. Currently they are consulting start-ups in a bid to streamline innovation and incentivize venture capital. Germany is now actively trying to make business administration easier. So the necessary steps are being taken, but it will take time to implement as is the wont of the EU and its member states.
All change starts with talk, but I do think that European politicians see the acute need for a new innovation framework that is tailored to the times. Even when that framework is in place it will take several more years to visibly notice results. But then the EU per definition looks at the long game, so it’s not a bad thing per se.
I think you have missed a few chapters, it’s not slow moving it’s glacial age moving. The free software policies have been already talked about since 2003., that’s 22 years ago. None of this is new, it did not appear with trump, nor with the Russian invasions. It’s way older projects and it all remains as talks, memorandums, conventions. Never anything enforced, GDPR is not enforced seriously, DMA will not be etc…
Let’s not kid ourselves anymore with the voluntary inaction of the EU.
You cannot understand how sorry I am about it. I am the result of a intra European wedding, I went places thanks to EU collaborations, I owe my wages and work hours in big parts to EU wide regulations. I still am an EU cheerleader in many wide ranging subjects. But on this one, in which European countries have the most economic, work opportunities , attraction pole, social benefits to reap for future generations. They are too much listening to the FANGS and banks and not enough to economists. It’s basic lip service that has been going on for too long.
Better enforcment of GDPR and DSA may be enought to effectively ban big US tech without passing any new law.
High tech doesn’t have to be abusive.
How about no??
Silicon Valley is an epicenter for the world’s most expensive narcicism. For 5k a ticket you’ll get first rate sycophancy, the kind Nero would enjoy. There’s probably about as many dead sex workers buried underneath silicon valley as there are indigenous corpses underneath boarding schools.
No joke, Silicon Valley needs to die - in a fire.
True but that is probably not what the vision is supposed to be.
This brings up a point I’ve been meaning to make for awhile: I don’t think Europe has it in them.
The UK actually did some innovating, I mean Alan Turing himself was a Limey, and back in the day they had the likes of Sinclair and Acorn, and they invented the ARM processor, they’re one of very few nations to have a processor architecture to their name. Basically the rest of computing innovation happened in the United States, like the industrial revolution before, we took what Britain invented and ran with it. Meanwhile Western Europe has had fuck all influence in the last 50 years of computing. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, sure…by an Englishman. 35 years later, let’s take a look at the top 50 visited websites worldwide and see just what Europe has done with their groundbreaking tech.
Of the 50, 30 are American. The top nine: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit and Wikipedia, are American. Tenth is Yahoo Japan followed by Yahoo!. The UK does not place on the list, and only four websites are from the EU: Xvideos and XNXX are French, Xhamster and Stripchat are…What’s the adjective for 'from Cyprus?" Cyprian? Cyprese? Cypriot, apparently. “Honorable” mentions to Canada and India for their only entries, Pornhub and Eporner respectively.
Meanwhile, South Korea makes the list twice for Samsung.com and Naver.com, which is apparently their Google; they do everything from search and email to online payments and ISP. I’m pretty sure that if the US is descendant, the future is Asian, not European.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Europe has got nothing that even sort of competes with any of them, so for the last few months they’ve been publishing headlines about another township switching their computers from Windows to Linux. At one point there was announcement that EurOS or whatever they were going to call it was going to be a fork of Fedora…because they forgot SuSe Linux exists. They boldly announced they were switching from getting software directly from Microsoft, to getting it indirectly from IBM. For their x86 computers.
I simply don’t think Europeans have it in them; the ones that did moved to the US over the last century and a half.
Oh great. The rest of the world is apparently only good for getting fucked over…literally.
We need to get our shit together people!
The absolute best Europe could do would be to get machines running a RISC-V architecture running Linux in production and distribution. RISC-V was developed at UC Berkley, GNU at Harvard based on UNIX from Bell Labs and the Linux kernel by a Finnish-American named Torvalds. ARM is probably closer to production ready than RISC-V but you’ll have to pay licenses to England and Japan for it.
Oh, and that’s all desktop and server stuff. You’ve got an even deeper ditch to dig to get anything mobile that isn’t based on Apple or Google tech. Not even Microsoft managed that.
Even if you did get that done, which you won’t, you will have built “European digital sovereignty” upon the crumbs that fell off of America’s dinner table. The 21st century was invented in Britain and built by the United States out of parts manufactured in Southeast Asia while Europe masturbated. And this was perfectly acceptable until this year, with the election of Tariff McBlusterCuck. Now you’re gonna do it on your own.
Sure.
Nobody is going to be a slave to a narcissistic, fascist nation.
Username checks out.
Am American in tech. I would like to come help. Actively trying to get out of this country.
“American silicon valley, European silicon valley, all made in Taiwan”
~Some Ukrainian guy probably
Breaking news: oil found in Europe.
No Eurotechbro stuff, thanks.
European tech? Sure. But only if fully decentralised, peer to peer, FOSS, copyleft and all that.
And oh also, bars out fascists.
Then it has to be tax funded and will never be self sufficient unfortunately. That means if political winds change, these products will die.
This is just me being a realist. I would of course prefer all of Europe to move to FOSS for the public sector.
So not monetizable. Will never happen, too many interests, and EU is always weak to bribes.
Yes, please!
In addition, we must work to create a European Big Tech industry.
yes, but also facepalm this is still missing the point
Big Tech industry
^ taps the sign above my head
THAT is the problem, yes the US version is one of the more aggressive cancers but recognize that the US is a product of the US mindset that worships big tech.
People are running out of water for their families because a category of techbro running my country consider the power hungry datacenters powering this AI “techboom” more important than human lives.
points at the sign
In a much more regulated environment you would have recycled water instead of destroying families water supplies.
A lot of these critiques are of unregulated capitalism as opposed to the entity of big tech itself. Now can you have big tech without unregulated capitalism maybe not, there’s a reason it’s as broken of a system as it is.
who has run out of water due to a data centre?
secondly that sounds like a local government issue
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/09/big-tech-datacentres-water
Nothing about this problem is local.
So what, we in the middle east should go fuck ourselves and always depend on others or something?
what about it?
this has to be stupid tech story of the year
wow they’re building a data centre in the uae call the police
You’re just some joker who wants to watch the world literally and figuratively burn, fuck off
if the data centres are powered by renewables then there is no impact, go fuck yourself
Giant fucking if, and what about anybody anywhere says that they’re going to make the investment for renewables, they’re lying
How about helping businesses actually stay in Europe. It’s almost impossible to scale up in europe due to insane moats everywhere.
