Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
I know people in the US are focused on DOGE, but over here in Europe, the impression is that the US completely destroyed its soft power this week. The expectation is that especially US tech will be weaponized, so people are switching search engines, studying dollar alternatives. If you think I am exaggerating, read the FT, Times, etc...
Are people talking about this - do they take it seriously or believe there is no alternative to US tech? What does it mean for US startups, California and global tech?
316 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadIn addition, tariffs will be put on cars coming from the US.
Plus, US is now recognized as a very unreliable partner in terms of defense, that Europe regrets buying their systems.
I don't even know how Europe would respond to that, and I live in Berlin.
Canada… not so much. For all the talk, he'd be absolutely screwed if he tried. If you think Fentanyl is a problem now, wait until it's supplied for free by drones sent by Canadian civilians paying for it out of pocket because they've never heard of the Geneva Convention or the Chemical Weapons Convention.
(Harder done than said, of course; if it was that easy to mess with populations, western Russia would be high as a kite right now).
Even if the sanctions would include, e.g. all Trump assets (like the Scottish golf course) being seized.
Also, france has a first-strike policy.
So even without US troops, europe will be fine.
A sizable part of the population has wanted the US out of especially germany for a looong time now, so those movements have become pretty popular again. I haven't heard "ami go home" in a long time, but right now it's common.
It's served us well having a member of NATO saying they'll go full-on nuts. One of the best deterrents ever. Thanks France, with love, USA.
Can you provide a source for this? It would be big if true, in particular the Germany claim. I've not heard it and couldn't find things with a quick google search.
Germany is currently already doing nuclear weapons sharing with the US, i.e. they have access to US nuclear weapons though of course with some restrictions.
What you wrote sounds like Germany would be working towards having new nuclear weapons to be produced in Europe without US involvement and shared without US restrictions.
The political work for it is being done right now. However, I reread my comment and realized, it could be interpreted as "actively working at the weapons" instead of the political framework. My apologies in that case.
[1] https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/nuklearwa...
I think that's quite an important difference from your original wording.
Edit: seen your other comment, that clarifies: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/merz-consider... -- this is already a surprise to me, even though it is well short of self-made nukes.
France (and the UK) having an independent nuclear deterrent is because they (/we) didn't want to risk someone like Trump when the USSR was still around:
“The General himself had asked whether we would be ready to trade New York for Paris.” - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v14...
A powerful conventional army capable of proportional response is the only realistic deterrent.
The entire point of the doctrine is that any sane person in charge of a country('s military) would never risk getting their own country nuked just to attack another country, so having nukes on your side means that no one else will attack you.
This...does somewhat break down when we end up with people in charge of nuclear countries who are not sane.
Certainly something for the invader to think about, isn't it.
So I guess my question is aren’t Europe already by themselves?
If push came to shove, the only ally Ukraine needs to equal Russia (as it is today) is Poland.
They'd rather not have to as it would be expensive, but Poland could match 100% of current outside assistance for Ukraine[0] for a smaller fraction of their GDP than Ukraine itself is currently spending on the war[1].
The USA and Russia agreeing with each other to carve up Ukraine would be a much harder battle.
Well, it would be harder unless DOGE actually does make good on the claim of $2T cuts, because the only way of reaching $2T without touching the "mandatory" budget (mandatory = social security etc.) is to delete the entire armed forces and the CIA (and basically everything else) and just under half the interest payments on the loans, which in turn means they'd have no power to carve anything up.
[0] $380bn over the first 2 years according to Wikipedia, so lets say $190bn/year
[1] Ukraine plans to spend ~$53.7 billion in 2025, about 26% GDP
Poland's GDP is $915, 26% of that would be $237.9 billion / year.
No wonder; the US tanks could just roll over one of the reasonably-sized european cars...
I bought this car six years ago paying for the FSD feature upfront, and since then Tesla and their CEO have been constantly lying about it. I’ll never buy another car from this company just for this reason.
I think Musk probably sees the writing on the wall. Tesla’s brand is destroyed in Europe and they can’t ship these promised advanced features in this market. But he doesn’t mind giving up the European market because he’s got a sweet deal at home where his businesses are now part of a 1930s-style union between corporations and authoritarian government. The gains from that arrangement far outweigh the headaches of trying to sell cars globally.
I believe it works better in the US. Elsewhere in the world it’s still practically useless, yet they’ve been selling it for years on the pretense that it’s just around the corner.
Cruise control on a Volkswagen is smarter than “FSD” on a Tesla. It’s just sad for a 7,500 euro feature.
It's like rain on your wedding day
Max Hastings: The trauma of Trump: can we still do business with his America? - https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-trau...
FT: US tech will pay a price for Donald Trump’s approval - https://www.ft.com/content/2347e5d3-cbc2-4128-a108-bb89558e3...
FT: How Washington plans to defend the dollar - this is about Crypto - https://www.ft.com/content/bfafb8f7-bd1c-48bb-85f4-8ba25475c...
FT: Donald Trump considers tarriffs to counter Big Tech service taxes: - https://www.ft.com/content/558b5a20-c25e-483d-8fdc-bbfd2923a...
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
If you have similarly significant, unbiased sources presenting some contrary view, it would behoove you to share them, rather than chiding.
If you just want to share your personal views, that is also welcome. The tone-policing and attacking reliable, unbiased sources is pretty empty, though.
> If you just want to share your personal views, that is also welcome
I meant your personal views on the topic (how Europeans view America lately), rather than your personal views on media bias.
Not that you can't share those, too, but it doesn't add to the discussion about how Europeans view America lately, and to be honest, the talking points I saw were pretty tired.
> I honestly believe the only way to get at "unbiased" sources is to triangulate all the bias
If you indeed believe that, and you have any sources with a reliability and bias level equal to FT (whatever you feel that may be) which you think are necessary to "triangulate all the bias" on this topic, please go ahead and share them.
I mean that quite literally. Go ahead and try it. Assume the devil's advocate for any contemporary sacred cow and see how far you take it before you reject the position as not merely wrong but absurd or declasse.
Are you European? Do you live in Europe? Tell me how "Europeans" view the US at the moment.
You were linked a reliable, low-bias source answering this question, but it's seeming more like you just want to spread FUD about the answer and complain about the media, rather than actually discuss the topic.
Your empty talking points about media bias, while unhinged ("propaganda" thrown out multiple times), are quite tired, and it doesn't seem like anyone here (least of all myself), is interested in the distraction of retreading such tired metadiscussion that one could see repeated ten times an hour from bots and humans alike while browsing truth social, if they were so inclined to so subject themselves (I no longer am).
Feel free to reengage with the actual topic if you're interested in talking about it, rather than being upset that other people are talking about it. Please don't reply just to complain at me about the media again.
I don't expect that I'll change your feelings about the topic**, and I don't want to oblige you to keep replying in a post about a topic** which you personally don't like and personally don't want to discuss.
* – all of these are shallow dismissals from you here
** – how europeans feel about american tech lately
You have an opportunity here to share these equally-biased, equally-factual sources you've been talking about which provide alternative perspectives on the topic*. You can take that opportunity or leave it. Personally, I'd love to read them and learn their perspectives, but as far as I can tell from what you've linked, they don't exist. Don't you want to help others "triangulate", as you called it?
If you just don't like FT or don't like the topic*, that'd be a different topic (and not one that interests me).
* – how europeans feel about american tech lately
It seems clear to me now, that the dependency on US tech needs to be reduced _a lot_, and I sincerely hope this current political storm will bring renewed interest in protocols and European tech
It has many links to articles with an European viewpoint.
But you have to read between the lines as EU media does not like to write "this is too crazy to be happening, what are they thinking?".
E.g. a title like "Macron calls emergency European summit on Trump". How bad do you think it has to create a EU summit solely for handling the new US relationship?
tldr: large increase in EU military and which has to be EU made. US is seen as ending "rule of law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law) and has become an unreliable partner, great loss of soft power and prestige.
Suppose the war ends. Will the Europeans keep boycotting the cheap russian gas?
Tarriffs are a nuisance to the US - the US doesn't export much.
US to EU gas trade is insane right now due to pricing and a 20% tariff won't change anything.
I think they absolutely will, yes. It will cost some money, just like spending more money on defense will, but from what I can see, no one in the European politic elite imagines a world where we can go back to buying gas from Russia.
It’s possible all economists are wrong. It is more likely they aren’t. Tariffs are going to hurt middle and lower classes.
For starters, they will shock well greased supply chains, that will cause shortages and thus price raises. Who suffer price raising the most? Then, protected industries will have quasi-monopoly power to raise prices (this is the populism behind tariffs). But other industries will suffer because they can't import their resources and have to switch to more expensive and/or lower quality locals. As an example: suppose that car makers are happy with tariffs protecting them from japanese cars, but now they have to buy expensive US steel, and have to move their assembly lines back to US where today is hard to find experienced and cheap workers. Because everyone always claim to want industry back, but then nobody wants a blue collar job if they can get a white collar one.
How fast can Ukraine scrap the parts of the pipeline going through their own territory?
Even those countries that would quite like access to Russian gas, may just not have a choice in the matter.
And given we've already seen some spectacularly poor decision making by whoever fires the various missiles[0] that end up hitting multiple different nuclear reactors in the area, there's a non-zero risk of the entire border region suffering catastrophic (though likely not Chernobyl-1986 level[1]) radiation leak incidents.
This also makes it somewhat of a moot point to consider any mineral wealth besides oil, or even a return to normality for food output, at this point.
[0] Zaporizhzhia: both sides blamed the other, and irregardless of who did it, the nature of the damage says it was done by shelling; more recently Chernobyl's outer barrier was also hit.
[1] I think Russia still has some reactors with positive void coefficient in Kursk (near where Ukraine's counter-invasion was), but Ukraine itself has decommissioned all their positive void coefficient reactors.
So it's not impossible for another Chernobyl, but it's really unlikely.
Technology, services, social media... the US export A LOT to Europe. Any iPhone sold in Europe is money that goes to the US, any app sold in Europe is money that goes to the US. Any Ad seen on the web/social in Europe is money that goes to the us...
"Apple recorded sales of over 101 billion U.S. dollars in Europe during FY 2024, reaching an all-time high across the continent. " [1]
If Europe would start tariffs on those, it would be a lot of money.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/349086/apple-net-sales-i...
Would you be up for making recommendations?
https://european-alternatives.eu/
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Protonmail (https://proton.me/mail) or Tutanota (https://tuta.com/) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen (https://filen.io/) for encrypted Cloud Storage
Infomaniak is great email.
Here’s the tweet: https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660
Some have interpreted this as a political signal. The Intercept article provides additional context and takes a more critical view: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
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one thing that seems tricky though, is smartphone OS software. Apple + Google is on like 99% of everything. i went few years with Sailfish, all fine.. but they support only 5y+ old devices, for a reason or another.. and i got tired of waiting, and switched to Android. hmmm
Thank you for the heads-up !
Also, it's not good that they do not have any status tracker that shows summary stats on uptime over the past, say, year so one can get a quick idea of how reliable the service was historically.
The status monitor only has entries for incidences from the past 7 days. It could have been down for 10 days a month ago, you wouldn't know this unless someone wrote about it.
_You_ know the service is new, but this isn't mentioned on the landing page either. They don't say something like "only 4 months old, public beta" - in that case I wouldn't feel negatively surprised.
I learned (the hard way) to have a plan b for everything. I'll study an emergency solution in case of a prolonged downtime.
This site is great for finding alternatives to any piece of software (not just OSS)
https://alternativeto.net/
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
> Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
Based on their comment it seems like they're pro-left, anti-liberal more than anything. They lament the Dem party's decision to reject Bernie in favor of corporate Democrats
They never once promoted Trump though
Truth is, GitHub has a whole suite of really great features that's hard to move. Especially for open sourced projects/communities
Yes, the code is replicated on thousands of machines around the web, but this concentration of control by a single company is extremely dangerous in my opinion.
The way events are unfolding these days, I'm really worried about what could happen.
Take for example Starlink and Ukraine... The USA threatened to shut down the internet service if Ukraine won't sign the rare minerals deal. A deal that would make Ukraine a colony of USA.
I wish there was a way to automatically mirror those things to Codeberg as a backup. For issues/PRs that shouldn't be too hard to do.
Starlink is a legitimate concern because in some places there were no other choice, hence a captive audience.
Take for example Gmail: I remember 10 years ago it was free even for companies up to 100 users, then 50, then 10, then 0... The same with Google Maps, before it was free and later, after reaching a large user base, they changed the terms and above a certain number of visits per month it is a paid service.
Nothing wrong with that of course, but once you are inside their services, they make it really difficult to change providers. It is possible, of course, but in some cases it requires a relevant effort and many prefer to pay after being lured with very different promises.
I recently read the story of how Google took over Yahoo! as a search engine, they used a "Troy horse" ... and when Yahoo! discovered what happened it was too late.
Back to Github and MS ... MS has a very long history of trying to boycott Linux in any way possible (and I also remember what they did to BeOS) ... I think these are very valid reasons not to trust them. They didn't buy GitHub because they're nice and want to help open source ... the first thing they did was kill the Atom IDE. VS is full of trackers,yes it is open source, but also a mean to steal data and information directly from the computer of the developer.
The main problem for me here is the lack of principles, values. The only principle they follow is to try to become overly rich in some way. The US companies have a long history of trying in every legal and almost legal way to avoid paying taxes.
Until a few years ago, Amazon was always in loss in Italy because they transferred the profits (as inflated costs) to their subsidiary in Ireland and the Italian taxpayers gave back every year millions of Euros to Amazon as tax credits. This is not capitalism ...
Launchpad.net offers project management and git code hosting and is run by a UK company (Canonical).
Are they still alive? i am somewhat hard-opponent of git, and still use bazaar - now breezy - as main repo storage, and only keep github as copy for PR, eh public relations, i.e. for jobhunt.
Are they still project-based? instead of person-based? It's the Person-based thing a-la-social-network that rocketed github into skies.. not git or MS
If you have the time and are interacting with the account, take the second to change it away from gMail. Insisting on doing them all immediately is setting up a Herculean task that'll almost certainly leave you demoralized. This gets your most-used (and presumably most important) accounts first,and feels much smaller and more manageable.
After 6 (or 18, whenever) months of this you can summon some motivation to change over the last 20 accounts and be done with it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/
If the point is to avoid US companies this won’t be useful, but if the point is to avoid Google specifically, it is an option.
I don't want to continue to contribute to making richer companies that try in every possible way to steal data and wealth from their customers and other nations with unfair behavior at the edge (or beyond the edge) of the law.
And if that is not enough to also use every possible way to manipulate the people's beliefs with false claims and evil psychological tactics.
This makes it hard for US-companies handling data of EU citizens to comply with EU privacy regulations. Some legal provisions have been made to facilitate this, but, to answer your question, what changed recently is that the Trump administration recently effectively incapacitated the "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" that was central to these legal provisions.
Above is my interpretation of matters, for a large part based on posts by a Dutch expert in these matters, Bert Hubert. In particular see this post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-you... and this news article it links to: https://noyb.eu/en/us-cloud-soon-illegal-trump-punches-first...
That is just the business part of things, the removal of DEI at all cost in conjunction with the Russian dealings and the statements from JD Vance are also a bit hard to be positive about.
We like the companies but the noise increases risk as opposed to European partners.
You yanks might think this is some display of your upper hand. Just wait until the civilized world turns its back on the greenback as the reserve currency. You will be so fucked.
EU has lagged US due to systemic issues like over regulation and limited investments. See Draghi's report.
America's image is toxic to everyone right now (including its own citizens). But I don't really see that many valid alternatives. It's not like Europe has done much to cultivate any kind of relevant software industry.
Doubt it though
For independent indexes, Brave’s search came from a German company and Yandex certainly isn’t American.
It's a massive opportunity for European-based companies to compete. I expect a lot more funding to start materialising here as a result.
But you're kind of showing here why Europe doesn't have the software innovation America does.
Americans are not inherently smarter or more capable of doing innovative things than Europeans. It's just that whenever a European wants to do something interesting, there's a handy European regulation making it harder or less profitable to do it.
If this American administration is the impetus for that to change, that would be good! But I doubt it.
Think technical debt with 0 refactoring ever, because you can't break the existing system, only grow it.
A refactoring, that's how I see what the government is currently doing in the USA.
(I'm French, living in Asia)
Not exactly a healthy refactoring, and it'll take decades to undo the damage if ever possible.
1- I think the previous administration used various agencies to avoid justice quite a lot. Heard of a laptop maybe? If agencies were shields for the last admin’s messes, why assume they’re pure now?
2- I wouldn't say republicans started the cultural wars over progressive ideologies
3- The US still votes, judges rule, hardly a dictatorship. Fascists charm everyone, while Trump and Musk two just piss half off
Seriously? Please read just a little bit of history and civics, and stop making false equivalences.
These moves are straight out of the bog-standard authoritarian playbook.
Under well-functioning democracies, the branches of govt (legislative, executive, judicial), and the branches of society (press, industry, business, academy, religion, sport, social, etc.) are all independent with a relative balance of power
Under fascism, all of these institutions are coerced or corrupted to serve the will of the executive.
Every move already done (not anticipated) is a decapitation or coercion attack on the institutions to force them to serve the will of the executive.
Over seventy moves already done have been challenged in court, and the judiciary, even those appointed by appointed by the same President, in the preliminary rulings have been ruled illegal.
No other administration has ever sued or prosecuted a Press organization or journalist for coverage they didn't like. This one already has in the first few weeks in office. That is not anticipating, that is observing fascist moves in real time.
The administration has already challenged the legitimacy of judges' rulings ("who are they to tell the executive how to rule?") and threatened to not follow judges' rulings. Again, in the first few weeks, and utterly unprecedented.
Russia and Venezuela also "still vote". The Rs have already introduced a bill, the SAVE act, which will disenfranchise most married women (require them to register to vote with a birth cert matching their current driver's license name). And that is only one attempt to disenfranchise anyone not a white male.
>> I wouldn't say republicans started the cultural wars over progressive ideologies
I would say they did. What you call "progressive ideologies" is simply living up to the ideals of the country — equal treatment for everyone. It does not take rights away from anyone, only allows everyone to have the same rights in public spaces, employment, healthcare, etc. It is the right wing who turned it into a culture war. It sure as hell was no one but the right-wingers who politicized and turned simple scientific public health measures like N95 masks and vaccinations into a culture war.
>>Fascists charm everyone
Seriously, the fact that Trump and Musk are not charming is your argument they are not fascist? You seriously think Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot, Chavez, Maduro, etc. etc., etc. charmed everyone? They managed to create chaos and barely get elected before corrupting their countries into their dictatorships.
Again, please get real, read some actual history, stop posting misleading nonsense and looking like a Useful Idiot (in the specific Vladimir Lenin sense).
The choice is then whether to lead and have an opportunity to influence and benefit, or to follow and have neither.
In other words, Europe's weakness and dividedness is a consequence of the soft power the US used to have. The EU has the capital (human and economic) to be a world power in principle, but never needed to.
This has all changed very suddenly. Whether Europe can rise to the challenge I don't know, but it's the first time in a very long time that there is a possibility of it happening.
I find the game theoretic view quite interesting here. Even if we interpret Trump's action in the best possible light, that he knows what he's doing and playing the madman strategy to get others to comply, the destruction of trust that this strategy causes makes it impossible in the long term to build mutually beneficial cooperative structures.
That is evidently not true. You being unhappy, doesn't make the whole world unhappy too.
The USA has a culture of startups because there you often get financially rewarded for winning. Startups are mostly a loser's game in New Zealand (Disclosure: I'm a very minor winner at the startup game over here - I have at least some skin in the game and some practical learning).
Improving regulations would help - however governments seem to lack the skills/incentives/motivation to choose good compromises.
> receive money from people like Marc Andreessen.
Money doesn't actually have morals: the point of money is it allows all of us to choose between morally conflicting choices based on prices and our bank balance. Money is a fungible representation of limited resources. I've never met Marc, but his writing seems fairly disagreeable to me.
Part of the reason Europe is economically losing is that Europe doesn't play economics to win.
Systems have their own emergent properties and Europe seems hell bent on regulating their systems so that European countries gift control to the USA for critical things.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099056
Let’s stop pretending that the individuals who voted for this administration actually wanted most of what it is doing. The majority voted off of feelings and will not like the end result. There is a lot of explaining away the stupidity and I find it really annoying.
It’s not a difference of opinion that Tariffs will cause a rise in prices, no matter what the current administration says.
They will care very, very much when it bites them in terms of higher prices and loss of jobs because of decreased tech exports. Dollar hegemony has benefitted the US economy tremendously over the past few decades; money rushed _into_ US dollar denominated holdings in the 2008 crash as one big example.
I wish I was kidding.
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It's beyond clear that the AfD are a far right fascist group. So clear that it has caused the majority of their leadership to change - explicitly citing them being anti-democracy and pro-russian and extremist - and the actual government's protection arm to consider then a threat to the nation's democracy:
> In January 2022, after a lost power struggle, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate effect and left the AfD, as he claimed he came to acknowledge that the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the liberal democratic basic order. Former party chairman and co-founder of the AfD, Lucke, had left the party in 2015 with the same remark.
...
> When party founder Bernd Lucke had left the AfD in 2015, he cited, among other reasons an "anti-western, decidedly pro-Russian foreign and security policy orientation" as well as increasing calls to "pose the 'system question' with regard to our parliamentary democracy" as reasons for his departure from the party.
...
> In March 2020, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (German: Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) classified AfD's far-right nationalistic faction known as Der Flügel as "a right-wing extremist endeavor against the free democratic basic order" and as "not compatible with the Basic Law", placing it under government surveillance.
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That other commenter is either ignorant to the point of negligence or a fascist themselves.
Example: Using starlink as extortion of Ukraine to allow USA to colonize them to retroactively pay for support.
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-could-cut-ukraines-acces...
Extortion and classic colonialism and imperialism.
Ukraine has been fighting for their life the last 3 years. And now USA opportunistically join with a new front.
I can tell you that the media cycle and conversation here (The Netherlands) has been very much about how we can move forward without the United States. People around me have been pulling out of American social media, dropping WhatsApp (which has been the biggest chat app here for a long time), and stopped using American exports.
It's even overshadowing the German elections, which would otherwise be the biggest news topic, as the election in Europe's largest economy.
A lot of people here have lost a huge amount of trust in the US, and I don't know if it can ever really come back.
Meanwhile our President also keeps threatening to invade sovereign territory (Greenland) of a NATO ally (Denmark) and using language w/r/t Canada that is almost indistinguishable from how Russia talked about Ukraine a decade ago. And Canadians are fucking pissed about it.
It's very, very different than his first term or even Iraq.
This time it is diplomats that are raising the flags. It actually has not yet arrived in the public sphere as drastically as it has in the policy side.
In the first term Trump was unprepared, now they had 4 years to prepare and it seems they are very methodical in dismantling US global influence, and but also dismantling structures internally.
As far as I'm worried about security of Europe or Far East allies (Japan, SK, Taiwan, Philippines), I'm worried about future of US itself.
Europeans see this as treason, and it is.
And mind you, that was without any Hitler salutes or calling astronauts "retards", that was "just" war under the pretense of being very concerned and wanting to avoid "a smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud". We knew that was bullshit, but at least there was this pretense, that kinda softened and muddled things a bit. This time, it's also war, but it's in Europe. And there isn't even any tribute paid to decency even in the form of bald lies and hypocrisy, there is just a deranged snarl.
We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)
We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?
And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.
Now we have a dim view of Americans.
There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.
The first question is how broad is this shift; is it really everywhere on the street or just in the "early adopters"?
The next question is how durable is the trend?
The things I've noticed here are reports of AfD rapidly losing 5% in the polls after Vance spoke in Munich, and a French right-wing leader cancelling his planned speech at CPAC after Bannon did a Nazi salute in his talk. When the US wannabe-Nazis are too toxic for European pro-fascists, that is saying something...
I don’t know about people usage of tech.
But it’s now really clear that the US is not a reliable ally. ( not even getting into politics, just stability wise : it’s clear that a change of regime can have the country do a 180 in term of foreign policies. And it’s not a good look )
It doesn't matter lol
There isn't, broadly speaking. Oh yeah, gonna use OpenEuroLLM? Have y'all made the ePhone yet or is that still stuck in committee?
Other countries will moan for a bit, no one likes having their free money and handouts taken away, then realize that US technology is still broadly the only option, and its actually quite good and even other US companies cant compete with US big tech with all of the free money here, let alone the tech-backward eurozone. Right now its the UK forcing Apple to remove Advanced Data Protection for UK citizens (not the eurozone, to be clear, but adjacent and culturally aligned)
The "boycotts" are great for headlines though (don't worry, Apple's revenue this year will be larger than ever, as always). If y'all don't want to buy Teslas though, I get that; I feel the same way.
We're a deeply interconnected world. Few parts of it can be self-sufficient while retaining the standard of living they're used to. This is true for no region more than Europe. Europe, broadly, relies more on the productivity, output, energy, and innovation of America and Asia for their standard of living than any other region, including America and Asia on each other or on Europe.
The iPhone is an interesting example because Apple's Asia sales did drop last quarter; but that drop was compensated for by a ~$3B increase in European sales. That's the trend I'd bet money on continuing. Europe doesn't have any other choice, and except on some fringe issues Europe's purported culture and values align far more with even Trump's America than China. Europe cannot afford to not pick a side in that adversarial relationship.
Tbh, Europeans broadly trying to boycott American companies gives real "toddler throwing a tantrum because his parents made him eat broccoli" vibes. At best, its unserious. At worst, its only going to harm Europe. Europe should make efforts toward reducing its dependence on the rest of the world, but their leadership is deeply unserious about doing so, and even if they became serious it would take many decades to reach even the only America or Asia is at.
I agree with your response.
For the sake of the conversation I wish europe would have more industrial success story like Airbus or Ariane. And now it seems clear than the French doctrine on weapon production and energy is more valid than the English or German one.
Europe also has the express disadvantage of having a rather combative and expansionist nation to their east, who is allied with China. It relies on the United States for something like 70% of aggregate defense spending in NATO. I think we'll see those numbers shift, I hope we do, but as you say: It won't happen overnight.
But sure; if you feel that the country which participates in the systematic forced labor imprisonment and forced organ harvesting of ethnic minorities is a better cultural ally than the United States, even considering what the United States has done recently... well, maybe JD Vance is right.
My hope is, genuinely, as you first say: Europe needs to get its act together and become more self-sufficient. That's been a major topic of Trump's, and it would ultimately benefit the world, most of all Europe.
(Same goes for the other side of the geopolitical aisle: European politicians would have liked a much faster and much more comprehensive economic decoupling from China since at least the start of the Ukraine war. But feedback from the private sector was pretty clear that this would have been economic suicide. Hence the official stance is now "de-risking" instead of "decoupling")
EMEA has always been a soft market for tech. And it's always been a cost center for regionalization and compliance.
A move away from US tech is not necessarily new or surprising. But it's also not as damning to the bottom line as one would expect.
I will say that the tech sector in Europe is not nearly as robust. While alternatives exist for some products, they are not likely going to find international markets of their own. (Overgeneralization, obv).
In Sweden, Russia has always been the enemy.
My prediction is that France and Germany will soon join the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and it will be the end of NATO. UK will probably join the Maximator intelligence alliance.
The death of Five Eyes and NATO in 2025 was not on my bingo card. Good luck with your new alliance with the Russians, Americans!
> If you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien of the United States and you live abroad, you are taxed on your worldwide income. However, you may qualify to exclude your foreign earnings from income up to an amount that is adjusted annually for inflation ($107,600 for 2020, $108,700 for 2021, $112,000 for 2022, and $120,000 for 2023). In addition, you can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts.
Whaou.
Divesting from the rest of the world by introducing tariffs.
Enjoy!