- CEOs of European technology companies told CNBC at the Web Summit technology conference this week that the continent should adopt a “Europe-first” approach to tech, after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory.
- Andy Yen, CEO of VPN maker Proton, said Europe should “step up” and “be aggressive” to counter U.S. Big Tech firms’ tight grip on many important technologies, such as web browsing, cloud computing, smartphones — and now artificial intelligence.
- Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Lithuania-based used clothing app Vinted, urged Europe to take the “right choices” to ensure it doesn’t get “left behind.”
If there’s a way for that to happen without just building equality abusive and exploitative mega corporations of similarly monopolistic scale, that seems like a very good thing.
Though I honestly kinda worry the only way to really compete with the US would be for Europe to make choices that are similarly shitty as all the ones we’ve made here in the states :/
We need to push for open source software, contribute existing FOSS projects, and focus on open standards and interoperability - that way companies know if they don’t play fair people/governments can move to other suppliers more easily.
Properly punishing US tech companies for their shenanigans would help too.
If you are an EU-citizen support the petition for an EU-Linux.
And publiccode.eu, if the code is paid for with tax money it should be open source.
I was supporter #2000! Now I feel special.
👏👏👏
Voted. There is OpenSuse, but I’m not sure how percentage of European it is.
wiki says it’s sponsored by the German company SUSE, however the webpage says OpenSuse LLC 🤨 It does say represented by some dude in Germany in the imprint. Maybe a translation from the German GmbH, which does translate to LLC in English.
Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg, privately owned by Swedish finance. It was at times owned by Novell and they moved headquarters to the US. It’s the copyright notice which says LLC, and their US branch might be contributing a lot, the imprint says… what, exactly? This is German-style “responsible in accordance with MStV” type language but without mentioning that treaty, and it’s not an organisation or person but “the chair” of… “the board” of… what organisation? I couldn’t find any bylaws, legal identity or such. An implicit German association? I guess that’s what stuff would default to push come to shove. Represented by an address in Germany. Which indeed is the address of SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, but an address is not a legal entity. Maybe the site is managed from the US and some German lawyer said there needs to be an imprint page and the US side just completely misunderstands what’s that supposed to be and why it’s a thing in Germany.
They are indeed pretty international, with development happening largely in Germany, Czechia, Bulgaria, India, China, and the US. The US branch does much of the marketing and some development (e.g. anything Rancher, i.e. Kubernetes).
That said, the offices that grew most in recent years are those in India and those in Bulgaria, whereas Germany went on a hiring freeze. I could imagine that the US and China offices of Rancher also grew quite a bit.
Properly punishing US tech companies for their shenanigans would help too.
Proper antitrust enforcement would help literally everybody except the very wealthy - which is why they pour so many resources into preventing it. If you want to change things, support any politicians, policies, or public officials which take antitrust action (basically anybody who does what Lina Kahn has been doing for the past 4 years).
In quality of life, especially if you add equality and time-off variable’s we’re not lagging behind the US, we’re squarely beating them.
But in the neoliberal GDP growth rates, which is the only thing capitalists seem to care about, yes we’re lagging behind.
If there’s a way for that to happen without just building equality abusive and exploitative mega corporations of similarly monopolistic scale, that seems like a very good thing.
These companies invented the important stuff before becoming abusive and exploitative mega corporations, so it should be possible in theory.
Best our politicians can do is to give our money to Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to store all our data in the US.
If you don’t like it you can let them know through any of Meta’s social networks or X.
Vote for different people (Pirate Party for example), sign petitions like EU-Linux, use Linux and opensource yourself, and talk to your friends and family about it. Nothing will change if we do nothing.
I once campaigned to have a law that says the Portuguese institutions have to use open standards to store information. The law is in the books for 13 years (and now I feel old), and very little changed because the organisations that were supposed to enforce it don’t give a fuck.
Good job! Keep going 👏 We need more people like you.
Tbh if its done the right way i 100% support this. I think europe should do this with other markets too. Remain open to trade but dont be reliant on it. Also the european space program should step up.
Nah, we don’t need that stupid nationalism that usa has enacted and destroyed that country
As long as it doesn’t devolve into some form of regressive nationalism (or in this case infranationalism).
Proton
Random Lithuanian clothing app
Lolwtf
Exactly illustrates where Europe’s tech sector is at. It only has a few tech companies, that were founded in the post dotcom bubble era, that people outside Europe would know. If you’d ask an average American to name a European tech company they probably will name an old German company like Mercedes or if they follow financial news ASML or Nokia or something but nothing that has been founded in the last 20 years. They probably don’t even know that Spotify is from Europe. Europe failed to build titans of industry of the 21st century.
If you’d ask an average American to name a European tech company
You’re probably right for the typical American, but I could do Skype (Estonia), Spotify (Sweden), and SAP (Germany).
Many business-to-consumer tech companies – like, online services and such – have relatively high fixed costs and low variable costs. That is, you pay about the same to develop software whether you have one customer or a billion customers, and the cost of adding servers to add capacity for more customers isn’t all that high.
But your revenue grows linearly with the number of customers that you have.
As a result, it is really, really bad to be small if you are in that category. So it is very important to scale up quickly, so that you get as far away from that “one customer” area as quickly as possible. Lose money while you’re small, okay, but become large as soon as possible.
It’s easier to scale if there are few barriers to expansion.
My bet is that the major issue here is that compared to the US internal market, the EU’s internal market is relatively-fragmented. There are different languages – yeah, there are some interchange languages, but not everyone can speak them and certainly not everyone prefers them. There are greater legal differences among member states. I would give good odds that there are larger cultural preference differences, which will affect things like branding. So for a B2C company trying to rapidly expand from Finland to Germany and Greece and Ireland and Spain, you’ve got a lot of hurdles that a similar company trying to expand from California to Texas and New York and Virginia and Florida don’t face. And that tends to keep them small longer, which is really bad for companies with that high-fixed-cost, low-variable-cost structure. If you’re an investor, safer to invest in a US company that will probably grow and get big easily. Of course, you could start an Estonian company and then grow in something like the US market…but then you have to deal with the complexities of spanning markets from the get-go. I’d expect that the barriers there are substantial, or you’d expect to see things like companies starting up in, say, Uruguay and then growing in the US domestic market, and we don’t see that.
There are tech companies that originated in the EU. But it’s rare for them to be the big business-to-consumer sort. So I don’t think the issue is – for example – excessive regulation or some other things I’ve seen blamed (I mean, it might not help, but I don’t think that that’s the dominant factor). That should affect all tech companies, not just the big business-to-consumer variety. I think that market fragmentation is the big factor here.
Brussels is working on some of that, like legal differences across member states. Some will just naturally tend to smooth out. But some are just not going to go away in the near future; French consumers are probably going to want stuff in French, for example, and Italians in Italian.
There was some recent report I remember seeing from Mario Draghi floating around on either here or [email protected] that spent some time talking about market fragmentation as an issue for competitiveness.
EDIT: Oh, and OnlyFans (UK).
I guess the rest of the world better come up with a plan to deal with a Trump dominated US. Every single day it seems to be getting worse and he’s not even in charge as yet.
America can lecture us on how we respond to a dangerous hegemony, but first it better put a few safety pins back into its own machinery. Europe has first hand experience with strong men with a mission. Just building a passive Maginot Line didn’t seem to work last time.
Lol sure, try getting Microsoft’s fingers out of europe’s pie first
Sanctions. we need sanctions against US
Drop the dollar.
Good luck with that. How many times have we tried? Like almost every country in the EU tried to create the Silicon Valley of Europe and non of them are truly successful. Most Europeans just lack a Pan European attitude. Like every country rather wants to do it on their own and create a tech center in their own country and most Europeans are not willing to move abroad for work. In order for Europe to create a tech sector that can compete with the US and China it needs all of Europe’s brightest minds concentrated in one area competing with each other. Like how it is in the Bay Area or Shenzen. Sure there are jobs that can be done remotely but a lot of innovation happens in the lab or on the shop floor.
Europe just lacks the advantage the US and China have. A large single market that speaks the same language, is culturally pretty much the same and has cheap shipping. Like every European country has their own Amazon knock off that is only used within its borders because they failed to expand in Europe mostly due to the language and culture barrier and expensive international shipping. And now Amazon and AliExpress have swooped in and these local companies can’t really compete and have zero chance to grow internationally now.
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Huh, I didn’t know the heroin dealer from Pulp Fiction was a tech CEO
So when the EU says Europe first it’s totally okay, but if the United States says America first it’s totally toxic? Seems a bit two-faced to me.
Ftr,
- The EU didn’t say anything. Two random European CEOs said something.
- This would be reactive.
Ugh, more balkanization, protectionism and jingoism.
It’s a bad idea for the US. It’s also a bad idea for everyone else.
How is that ‘protectionism’ if you develop your own technology to gain independence? As someone already wrote in this thread, Europe can support Open Source projects, decentralization. That’s good for everyone.
Don’t get me wrong, everybody should be trying to manufacture some microchips inside their own borders - access to microchips is a national security concern for every country.
How is that ‘protectionism’ if you develop your own technology to gain independence?
Any actions taken to promote domestic industry over foreign is protectionism, by definition. If a government encourages the growth of domestic producers via tax incentives, grants, tariffs, etc (anything that adjusts the balance really) that is literally protectionism.
Okay, you say anything that promotes securing domestic industries is protectionism. Fine.
But then you say protectionism is bad across the board but don’t give any reason.
At least you need to give some arguments why protectionism that is constituted of securing critical infrastructure, providing safe® access to technology, developing independent, decentralised and open technology, etc would be worse than keeping sucking on the tits of US megacorps.
Why is the dependence on US tech corps different than the dependence on russian gas in the past (which I hope we can agree was bad)?
I work for a UK based company in the US. We also have scientists from all over the world working together. I think everyone working together for common goals is the ideal situation. Communication with people across the globe is one of the things that rocketed humankind forward in learning and technology. We don’t have pockets of people making the same mistakes and wasting the same time and resources trying to come up with all the new ideas; we get to collaborate. If we start hoarding knowledge and tech, we kick ourselves back to a worse point than where we are now.
I was watching a video this morning talking about China’s advancements in space exploration. It was talking about China offering to work with other countries, including the US, but there was a bill passed (2011?) that forbid space work with China without congressional approval. That seems like something that will hurt the US space program. The creation of the bill was due to the thought that China was doing mainly “taking” from the US and not giving back, which I don’t know enough to speak on, but now that China is in a position to “give,” we’ve already pulled back our hand and tied it. We can’t learn from China, and they can’t learn from us, at least by legal/above the table means.
It’s frustrating to see knowledge get locked away. I get there are valid and logical reasons to do it sometimes, but it is still sad to see. Most people here seem to be for or at least supportive of free information in almost every form, but then in situations like this, we fall back to nationalism for some reason or another.
It is good for countries to provide for themselves and their people, but when it starts to hinder another group is when we enter moral grey zones. When does it go from looking out for one’s own interest to hurting another group? Everyone will have a different answer to that, but I hope most individuals would prefer to collaborate and work things out with each other. I think that is common among individuals. Most of us are probably annoying at about half the things our countries are doing at any moment, and potentially cutting ourselves off from equally dissatisfied people that could help us from other places feels like a net loss for all parties.
First of all, your comment displays an admirable ideal. Yes, knowledge should benefit all of humankind, and I too yearn the day this ideal will be true. However, exchanging knowledge and technology with everybody right now would be just as naive. China is not our friend, not even just another country. It is a systematic enemy and an oppressive, authoritarian regime and exchanging knowledge and technology, even trading with it enriches China, enables its methods and sends a message of tolerance towards authoritarianism that should not be sent. Everyone engaging with China in such fashion makes themselves accomplice.
Secondly, you completely missed the topic. I am not talking about exchanging knowledge, I am saying we shouldn’t rely on untrustworthy partners. Trump is a senile, unstable and unpredictable corporate boss, not a politician. And his United States completely under control of his Republican Party is cannot be trusted. Hence, Europe needs to bit their shit together and become the geopolitical power it needs to and can be, or it will go down and be a mere pawn to China.
My miss was somewhat intentional, as I felt you both had some validity to your arguments, and I had wanted to acknowledge you both without looking like I was here to take one side or another, more to try to touch on the similarities you both had to your positions.
Not bringing production of things back to Europe in the current climate I agree would be foolish. Much like with the US trying to secure a future for chip production in our country due to our relations with China be touchy. In that way, it is a positive thing as you say. But it also brings a loss in relations with who we’re guarding ourselves against. I’d rather the US improve Chinese relations than put up new walls, and I’m sure at least to an extent, you’d like your country to be able to count on the US more than you can right now. If we succeed in securing domestic production for our respective countries, I still feel we’re losing something important, and I think that is what the other commenter was trying to get at, but not doing a great job of putting it into words.
I’m also aware I’m on an EU instance, and especially lately, I know some are tired of hearing opinions from Americans even if we don’t support what our pending government wants to do, so I try to tread lightly as possible now while still sharing my thoughts. I want to be respectful and not come off as a know-it-all. There have been so many times America has relied on Europe, I hate to see things getting to the point they’re at. While I can’t make up for what my government has done or will do, I still want to make and hold onto bonds between us where I can.
My miss was somewhat intentional, as I felt you both had some validity to your arguments, and I had wanted to acknowledge you both without looking like I was here to take one side or another, more to try to touch on the similarities you both had to your positions.
Then your comment was just bad at conveying that. Maybe next time try and point out what arguments you find valid and why.
I’d rather the US improve Chinese relations
I don’t want any democracy under the rule of law legitimize authoritarian and injust regimes by trading them. I don’t want to see metaphorical walls either, I’m German and we do have a history with walls (metaphorical and literal ones) after all. But I want to see governments being consequential in fighting for democracy and justice globally. We attempted ”Let’s just trade and exchange knowledge and they’ll see how much better our system is“ twice before with both Russia and China. How did it work out so far?
I’m sure at least to an extent, you’d like your country to be able to count on the US more than you can right now.
No. I don’t want to depend on anyone anymore. I want equal partnerships instead of this weird corporate colonialism.
If we succeed in securing domestic production for our respective countries, I still feel we’re losing something important,
And what would that be? What exactly would we lose?
I know some are tired of hearing opinions from Americans even if we don’t support what our pending government wants to do,
I don’t care where you’re from. Neither do I care about labels. I care about arguments, positions, ideas and proposals. Specific, tangible things that can be discussed.
@[email protected] No, investing your money into your own hardware and software isn’t protectionism. That’s obviously the right thing to do, even more so with regard to the current geopolitical landscape.
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Everyone I disagree with is literally a bot
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