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- cross-posted to:
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In order to protect their sovereignty, the continent’s leaders must invest in a digital ecosystem independent of America
In order to protect their sovereignty, the continent’s leaders must invest in a digital ecosystem independent of America
That would just increase the trade deficit and would make Trump even more mad about the EU economy outcompeting the US.
In reality software and digital services are a product category that is extremely easy to substitute. The emperor has no cloth in that regard.
Weeeelll, we are not quite there yet. DDOS protection for example, only proper company in the EU is Myra, but they cost 10k/month minimum.
Other places are trying but its rough around the edges. For example hetzner does not have all products in terraform, some of their IPs are on blocklists and they don’t care, etc.
Bitdefender is a Romanian company. They might have something for you.
The problem for large institutions is that they very often have specialized software relying on some American software or being American themself. More often then not that means converting large amounts of data from a propietary format into something useable by another software. The company selling the original software obviously does not want that to happen at all. Also both programs work in different ways, so data might have to be split in non obvious ways.
Then you need to retrain the workforce to use the new software, which probably does not work properly to begin with.
There are also often dependencies. Like Microsoft Office Add-Ins from third party vendors. They will not like going to Libre Office and it is likely not easy either.
Not saying it is impossible, but a transition takes years and is going to lead to some serious problems.
This legacy type software doesn’t stop working over night, and while the move to cloud services is more worrying in that regard, this problem is mostly a legal one and the EU could easily change its laws if it would see a need. In fact recent EU legislation explicitly allows suspending patent and copyright protections if foreign software vendors are trying to weaponize this.
[citation needed]
At least on end user devices, It’s not easy at all to move completely to non-US operating systems. Quite a few places tried and failed to move to Linux.
The critical parts of Android are open source. Many Chinese vendors have versions for the Chinese market that do not depend on any US non-foss software components and the EU could easily do the same. Development would probably slow down, but a smartphone from 5 years ago (with security patches) is not really worse than a brand new one.
The failure of bureocracies to move to Linux is and was organisational and political, not technical.
I am not saying that US software and services are not the most convenient. That is why they dominate the EU market of course, but they are not essential and there is no technical or legal (patents) reason why they they couldn’t be substituted quite easily.
Anyways, it is largely a political choice of the EU to import these services, as the US has little else to offer and as good allies (in the past) we found ways to make it work despite the glaring economic imbalance of the US economy.
True, but that doesn’t make it any easier. People are very, very stubborn and dumb about this and at least here in Germany most people (including politicians) don’t even see the issue with being entirely dependent on US tech corporations. And that’s despite the huge scandal about the US secret service literally spying on the German chancellor’s phone.
Do. Or do not. There is no try.
… by which I mean that the attempts that failed were not real attempts. It’s like giving up fossil fuels. You know the right thing to do. The benefits are long-term. Immense as they seem, the transition costs are temporary. That it’s difficult is not a good reason not to do it.