> If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores
Apple could easily block this, and in the situation described here of a complete rupture with the US, they would no longer operate and sell phones in the EU. If Google decided to do the same, that essentially leaves Europeans without smartphones. Microsoft could "brick" the rest of the EU's digital infrastructure overnight if they so wished, or were compelled to do so.
This makes the transition described in the article much more difficult. Although likely more urgent, from an European perspective.
1) The moment US decides to completely exit EU and brick their devices, China will step in and provide the alternatives. Or it will trigger some tech arms race inside Europe, and we will see European providers rise up.
2) US Tech companies can't afford to pull out. They might do some short-lived performative black-outs to show European customers how dependent they are, and they will for sure run to the government, who in turn will start trade wars. But in the end they simply can't afford to just pull out completely.
As others have mentioned, not only is it a danger to their own revenue, but the US stock market is being carried by these tech companies.
The US has always profited the most from providing products / services which are better and cheaper to Europe, to such a degree that organic growth has been naturally suppressed.
> 2) US Tech companies can't afford to pull out. They might do some short-lived performative black-outs to show European customers how dependent they are, and they will for sure run to the government, who in turn will start trade wars. But in the end they simply can't afford to just pull out completely.
Yep, case and point is current situation in Russia, where US companies "pulled" out due to sanctions, but not really.
Not only that, but also... only a small percentage of people actually wants this and / or would do this, the vast majority of consumers doesn't mess with their stuff even if they could.
Same with the alternative app store support, it reminds me of when the EU mandated Microsoft to offer a Windows without Media Player. It didn't sell, because consumers don't actually care much - Media Player wasn't obnoxiously in the way.
HN is an anti-Trump fanclub of people who think they know better, while pointing out that worst trait of Trump is that he thinks he knows better, hence the downvotes.
I've spent a couple of decades in the Danish public sector of digitalisation and in the private sector for global green energy. 10 years ago people would've laughed if you talked about leaving Microsoft and iOS in enterprise. Now we all have contingency plans for just that, and a lot of organisations are already actually doing it. So I would argue that there is more of a crack, but I'm not sure the post-american internet is going to be all that great. Because unlike the open source and decentralised platforms which are taking the place of US tech, the EU is going to regulate the internet. There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies. Which obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but it's how you can view the EU. With one hand they do so much to protect consumer rights for us citizens, but with the other hand they build a survailance state.
Of course that is how democracy works. You'll have multiple factions working toward their own goals with very different ideologies, and the EU has a lot of that. For the most part what comes out is great, because compromise is how you get things done when there aren't just two sides. For survailance, however, there are really just two sides and the wrong one of them is winning.
>There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies.
This is a Danish blindspot, Europeans do not trust their governments in large (France is fractured, Southern Europe has endemic corruption, Germany is increasingly authoritarian in order to keep heterodox parties out) and this is in part the source behind the flare up of "far-right" movements in the continent. The infamous EU chat law doesnt help either, and all the abuses of Germany in their misuse of hate speech to punish speech is not a positive development. We do not have real alternatives to most American tech services, and administrations are unwilling to move to Linux based alternatives.
The EU is also not interested in strengthening the domestic software market by engaging in selective protectionism like the Chinese, because of the extensive lobbying by foreign and domestic actors which are the incumbents and see no interest in a competitive and dynamic environment which would destroy them.
The idea that EU surveillance is greater than US surveillance is almost certainly mistaken.
In fact, a huge reason that the EU is looking to move away from U.S. commercial providers is that they can’t guarantee they won’t be giving the U.S. govt information about EU users even if they setup completely independent EU based entities.
The reason why it might appear that the EU is more heavy handed is because the EU is actually passing limited tailored laws, publicly, that explicitly state the limitations of those laws.
The US govt, on the other hand, has already passed broad blanket laws that allow them to get any data from any U.S. corporate entity with the flimsiest of warrants which those entities are not even legally allowed to publicly reveal.
The U.S. govt doesn’t need to pass any surveillance laws because they already essentially have unlimited power over the data being collected by US corporations.
The reason is money and control. That's it. Believing otherwise is foolish.
They don't really give a shit about privacy or whatever is the supposed agenda of the day. It's about not paying as much to the US and being able to control the infrastruscture.
I trust EU govs less than I trust US companies. At least I know that for the companies it's just about making more money and there isn't that many downsides for me outside of having to pay one way or another.
EU govs are fundamentally destructive, so whatever they end up doing you can be sure it will terrible for everyone but themselves.
> ... 10 years ago people would've laughed if you talked about leaving Microsoft and iOS in enterprise. Now we all have contingency plans for just that, ...
If, at long last, Trump doing insane things can help get rid of that piece of undescribable turd that Windows is in the EU, please just please Trump: go take the Groenland.
As an EU citizen I'm gladly giving Groenland up (even if it's not in the EU but belongs to Denmark which is, itself, in the EU) if in exchange I don't ever have to see a computer running Windows ever again in Europe.
> There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies. Which obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but it's how you can view the EU.
I would rather say for quite a lot of people in Germany it's that they neither trust the Federal Government nor the EU government nor the US-American tech companies.
> Now we all have contingency plans for just that, and a lot of organisations are already actually doing it.
Who has actually done it?
What are you going to use instead? You could move servers off MS cloud platforms (although very little has actually happened and there seems to be very few places with a firm commitment to do it) but I am very sceptical that anyone is going to move client devices to anything other than MS, Apple and Google controlled OSes.
Cory's new book is also a pretty cool read, glad I found his work. Shows the enshittification processes big tech went through really well. Also touches on the post-american internet.
I'm not sure what benefit any country outside of the USA gets for honoring trade agreements that bind them to enforce US anti-circumvention, US copyright, and US DRM. A fortune awaits any country who has the guts to say "you know what, USA, we're going to allow blatantly copying your shit--what are you going to do, tariff us? Oh, wait, you already are!"
"Freedom exists in the tension between equals" - TFM (one of those "self-described libertarians" this article speaks of).
Simply by being powerful, the US became the weapon of choice by the worst people to censor and block anyone they didn't like (socialists, libertarians).
Now that there is a multipolar world, with competing principles and goals, it's a lot more work to evict your enemies from the entire internet.
Maybe countries need to seriously consider stockpiling old hardware. Rather than sending ewaste to Southeast Asia for “recycling”, old laptops and smartphones could be the only things usable in a future fractured world.
Recent incidents with Grok creating sexualized pics is yet another example of "enshittification", IMO. This is also the result of too permissive laws + monopolies, which only erodes trust.
This post highlights Enshittification, which in genera; is the process where platforms start out serving users, then shift to exploiting users to benefit business customers, and finally hollow everything out to extract maximum profit for themselves.
> If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.
I have twoo problems with this idea.
1. Users are extremely lazy and anything that doesn't work out of the box doesn't gain any commercial traction. See: Epic Games Store, Amazon App Store, F-Droid to some extent.
2. Apple already allows alternative app stores inside of Finland (the entire EU, actually). There's the issue of Apple's bullshit installation fees, of course, but with Epic covering those so far, cost doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to the proliferation of app stores.
While I'm all for an iPhone running free code, commercial interests for alternative app stores won't be what will bring forth these improvements.
Jailbreaks aren't stopped by being ostensibly illegal to do. They're stopped by being a nigh-impossible attack conducted against an adversary that keeps hardening the systems against it.
Which is why the fight for unlocked bootloaders and software freedom is such an important fight. It's theoretically possible to create an "unbreakable lock" and forbid the users from having any control over the software forever.
Which is why user freedom must be legally mandated, and engineered into the hardware on the ground floor. You can't rely on being able to "hack the freedom in after the fact".
European countries are de facto vassals of the US. Not because they have to be, not because it benefits them, but because this is what the politicians and their voters want.
Instead of taking care of Ukraine themselves, and providing security guarantees to Ukraine themselves, they expect the US to do it. Instead of supplying Ukraine itself, they need the US to do it. And all of this against an opponent, Russia, that is on paper almost entirely insignificant.
As things stand today, European countries cannot survive independently with US support, making them effectively vassals. And what is worse is, most of the political elite in Europe hate the Americans that they have made themselves completely dependent on.
I don't really like this status quo, as a European I think this is pathetic and embarrassing that we are entirely dependent on US without any need for us being dependent on them. But I don't get the elites that complain about the status quo on one hand, and on the other hand refuse to do anything to change it.
Europe is in a tough spot these days, trying to unwind decades of economic partnership with the USA while simultaneously trying to fend off Russia from Ukraine.
In a sense the EU is in a bind because it refuses to accept that the U.S. has moved on.
If the EU does that they can throw off a lot of shackles that they’ve imposed on their relationship with China, and part of that deal could be China stopping funding Putin’s insanity.
Personally, I think it would be great if various foreign countries reacted to the Trump tariffs by repealing laws compelling them to defend various intellectual property claims that primarily but not exclusively benefit large American companies. I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, in large part because this issue just has very little to do with US tariffs at all, and affects business relationships in non-US countries as well, and is clearly just Cory Doctorow's long-standing hobbyhorse that he cared about decades ago when the world and US political landscape looked very different. But I largely agree with him on this point, so sure, whatever.
I also think it would largely be good if European institutions used more free software hosted directly by the people who use it, rather than relying on software platforms ultimately run by American companies subject to American law. Like Doctorow, I thought the same thing 15 or 20 years ago as well.
There's also the important caveat that American free speech law is the best in the world, and in particular other anglophone countries, not to mention European countries in general, routinely arrest and charge people for political speech on social media that would be unambiguously protected speech in the US. Yeah, it's bad that Larry Bushart was jailed because the local sheriff's department interpreted his joke about the Charlie Kirk assassination as a terroristic threat, but this was ultimately one local sheriff and prosecutor being basically individually corrupt - charges were dropped because there is no legal basis in the US for making jokes about people getting politically assassinated on social media to be a crime, and he's apparently suing the sheriff's department over this. I hope he wins. Lucy Connolly in the UK spent a year in prison for her social media tweets and the prime minister of the UK defended the conduct of the UK criminal justice system. I do not think that a social media platform run by a company directly subject to UK speech law (or the laws of most other countries around the world) would be dramatically better than the status quo.
> And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.
This is wishful thinking - the average person actively evading ICE right now is a low-wage laborer from a 3rd world country who either snuck over the US border or overstayed a visa years ago because they judged that living illegally in the US was better than staying in their shitty 3rd world country. Any person who is actually a qualified technologist probably has some better options than illegally immigrating to the US with their minor children.
Also any children that an illegal immigrant has on US soil are legally natural-born US citizens by the 14th amendment. ICE has no power to deport them, and indeed those anchor babies can potentially use their legal status as a way to get other members of their family including the illegal-immigrant parents who bore them some kind of legal status in the US.
> Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.
This is simply not true. The way to amass a billion dollars is to either be a local elite in a 3rd world country taking advantage of oil resources, or to be a founder or extremely early investor in a company that gets world-changingly big. Misery and privation is the default state of humanity, humanity has only conquered that to the extent we have so far...
That’s a long speech but it’s interesting. I recommend to read it, it brings interesting point. Although experience tell me none of them will become true.
I've noticed some OSS orgs have been shifting their center of gravity to europe recently. Notably the Eclipse, Linux Foundations, and soon WikiMedia.
VCs and politicians forgot that Silicon Valley did not appear out of thin air, it was the product of public research and open-source ecosystems that made the internet revolution possible.
If the US betrays these ecosystems too much, they could migrate and make another tech industry flourish somewhere else.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in here – e.g. the Polish trains and the ventilators.
Though I wish he'd tone it down a little occasionally. (This is why I'm not an activist.)
It's interesting as for the first time I've found myself mildly encumbered by DRM, notably some old Apple FairPlay files I bought prior to 2007 (or 2009) - which I can't play in non-Apple software.
But these are minor inconveniences compared to servicing costs of trains, tractors and so on, which get passed on to the rest of us indirectly.
I'm not sure if "disenshittificatory" will ever catch on. I'd propose d17n for disenshittification, except there's already a d18n for a project that masks sensitive fields in databases..
The irony of this talk is that the prospect of the US having its own de facto "Great Firewall," albeit one imposed from without rather than from within, doesn't sound that bad to any American old enough to remember what the Internet was like before its successive waves of global Septemberings: https://old.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1l5bhfo/total...
The Twitter/X location experiment/debacle laid this bare, showing how much low-effort, divisive, often racially or religiously antagonistic content directed at Americans was actually foreign (e.g., the Indians LARPing as white nationalists with classical statue avatars).
halfway through reading it and while i like this guys attitude and agree wholeheartedly with what hes saying, if any country does what hes suggesting they'll be sanctioned, have their leaders kidnapped or get nuked... who's gonna go for that? best you can do right now is step quietly and try to build your nations strength for the coming conflict.
Obvious problem is anticircumvention laws are just as much an interest of the EU and others. These laws pass power from the individual, and the EU (its corps and govs) are just as interested in exercising power over the individual.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 81.7 ms ] threadApple could easily block this, and in the situation described here of a complete rupture with the US, they would no longer operate and sell phones in the EU. If Google decided to do the same, that essentially leaves Europeans without smartphones. Microsoft could "brick" the rest of the EU's digital infrastructure overnight if they so wished, or were compelled to do so.
This makes the transition described in the article much more difficult. Although likely more urgent, from an European perspective.
1) The moment US decides to completely exit EU and brick their devices, China will step in and provide the alternatives. Or it will trigger some tech arms race inside Europe, and we will see European providers rise up.
2) US Tech companies can't afford to pull out. They might do some short-lived performative black-outs to show European customers how dependent they are, and they will for sure run to the government, who in turn will start trade wars. But in the end they simply can't afford to just pull out completely.
As others have mentioned, not only is it a danger to their own revenue, but the US stock market is being carried by these tech companies.
The US has always profited the most from providing products / services which are better and cheaper to Europe, to such a degree that organic growth has been naturally suppressed.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Yep, case and point is current situation in Russia, where US companies "pulled" out due to sanctions, but not really.
Same with the alternative app store support, it reminds me of when the EU mandated Microsoft to offer a Windows without Media Player. It didn't sell, because consumers don't actually care much - Media Player wasn't obnoxiously in the way.
Of course that is how democracy works. You'll have multiple factions working toward their own goals with very different ideologies, and the EU has a lot of that. For the most part what comes out is great, because compromise is how you get things done when there aren't just two sides. For survailance, however, there are really just two sides and the wrong one of them is winning.
This is a Danish blindspot, Europeans do not trust their governments in large (France is fractured, Southern Europe has endemic corruption, Germany is increasingly authoritarian in order to keep heterodox parties out) and this is in part the source behind the flare up of "far-right" movements in the continent. The infamous EU chat law doesnt help either, and all the abuses of Germany in their misuse of hate speech to punish speech is not a positive development. We do not have real alternatives to most American tech services, and administrations are unwilling to move to Linux based alternatives.
The EU is also not interested in strengthening the domestic software market by engaging in selective protectionism like the Chinese, because of the extensive lobbying by foreign and domestic actors which are the incumbents and see no interest in a competitive and dynamic environment which would destroy them.
In fact, a huge reason that the EU is looking to move away from U.S. commercial providers is that they can’t guarantee they won’t be giving the U.S. govt information about EU users even if they setup completely independent EU based entities.
The reason why it might appear that the EU is more heavy handed is because the EU is actually passing limited tailored laws, publicly, that explicitly state the limitations of those laws.
The US govt, on the other hand, has already passed broad blanket laws that allow them to get any data from any U.S. corporate entity with the flimsiest of warrants which those entities are not even legally allowed to publicly reveal.
The U.S. govt doesn’t need to pass any surveillance laws because they already essentially have unlimited power over the data being collected by US corporations.
I trust EU govs less than I trust US companies. At least I know that for the companies it's just about making more money and there isn't that many downsides for me outside of having to pay one way or another. EU govs are fundamentally destructive, so whatever they end up doing you can be sure it will terrible for everyone but themselves.
If, at long last, Trump doing insane things can help get rid of that piece of undescribable turd that Windows is in the EU, please just please Trump: go take the Groenland.
As an EU citizen I'm gladly giving Groenland up (even if it's not in the EU but belongs to Denmark which is, itself, in the EU) if in exchange I don't ever have to see a computer running Windows ever again in Europe.
I would rather say for quite a lot of people in Germany it's that they neither trust the Federal Government nor the EU government nor the US-American tech companies.
Who has actually done it?
What are you going to use instead? You could move servers off MS cloud platforms (although very little has actually happened and there seems to be very few places with a firm commitment to do it) but I am very sceptical that anyone is going to move client devices to anything other than MS, Apple and Google controlled OSes.
You say this with no irony as an american..
Simply by being powerful, the US became the weapon of choice by the worst people to censor and block anyone they didn't like (socialists, libertarians).
Now that there is a multipolar world, with competing principles and goals, it's a lot more work to evict your enemies from the entire internet.
I have twoo problems with this idea.
1. Users are extremely lazy and anything that doesn't work out of the box doesn't gain any commercial traction. See: Epic Games Store, Amazon App Store, F-Droid to some extent.
2. Apple already allows alternative app stores inside of Finland (the entire EU, actually). There's the issue of Apple's bullshit installation fees, of course, but with Epic covering those so far, cost doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to the proliferation of app stores.
While I'm all for an iPhone running free code, commercial interests for alternative app stores won't be what will bring forth these improvements.
Jailbreaks aren't stopped by being ostensibly illegal to do. They're stopped by being a nigh-impossible attack conducted against an adversary that keeps hardening the systems against it.
Which is why the fight for unlocked bootloaders and software freedom is such an important fight. It's theoretically possible to create an "unbreakable lock" and forbid the users from having any control over the software forever.
Which is why user freedom must be legally mandated, and engineered into the hardware on the ground floor. You can't rely on being able to "hack the freedom in after the fact".
Oh, yeah, the US will send the CIA or the military in and take you out and make you take on IMF debt to ensure your future compliance.
Clearly, there are limits to what tech alone can accomplish.
Instead of taking care of Ukraine themselves, and providing security guarantees to Ukraine themselves, they expect the US to do it. Instead of supplying Ukraine itself, they need the US to do it. And all of this against an opponent, Russia, that is on paper almost entirely insignificant.
As things stand today, European countries cannot survive independently with US support, making them effectively vassals. And what is worse is, most of the political elite in Europe hate the Americans that they have made themselves completely dependent on.
I don't really like this status quo, as a European I think this is pathetic and embarrassing that we are entirely dependent on US without any need for us being dependent on them. But I don't get the elites that complain about the status quo on one hand, and on the other hand refuse to do anything to change it.
If the EU does that they can throw off a lot of shackles that they’ve imposed on their relationship with China, and part of that deal could be China stopping funding Putin’s insanity.
I also think it would largely be good if European institutions used more free software hosted directly by the people who use it, rather than relying on software platforms ultimately run by American companies subject to American law. Like Doctorow, I thought the same thing 15 or 20 years ago as well.
There's also the important caveat that American free speech law is the best in the world, and in particular other anglophone countries, not to mention European countries in general, routinely arrest and charge people for political speech on social media that would be unambiguously protected speech in the US. Yeah, it's bad that Larry Bushart was jailed because the local sheriff's department interpreted his joke about the Charlie Kirk assassination as a terroristic threat, but this was ultimately one local sheriff and prosecutor being basically individually corrupt - charges were dropped because there is no legal basis in the US for making jokes about people getting politically assassinated on social media to be a crime, and he's apparently suing the sheriff's department over this. I hope he wins. Lucy Connolly in the UK spent a year in prison for her social media tweets and the prime minister of the UK defended the conduct of the UK criminal justice system. I do not think that a social media platform run by a company directly subject to UK speech law (or the laws of most other countries around the world) would be dramatically better than the status quo.
> And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.
This is wishful thinking - the average person actively evading ICE right now is a low-wage laborer from a 3rd world country who either snuck over the US border or overstayed a visa years ago because they judged that living illegally in the US was better than staying in their shitty 3rd world country. Any person who is actually a qualified technologist probably has some better options than illegally immigrating to the US with their minor children.
Also any children that an illegal immigrant has on US soil are legally natural-born US citizens by the 14th amendment. ICE has no power to deport them, and indeed those anchor babies can potentially use their legal status as a way to get other members of their family including the illegal-immigrant parents who bore them some kind of legal status in the US.
> Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.
This is simply not true. The way to amass a billion dollars is to either be a local elite in a 3rd world country taking advantage of oil resources, or to be a founder or extremely early investor in a company that gets world-changingly big. Misery and privation is the default state of humanity, humanity has only conquered that to the extent we have so far...
VCs and politicians forgot that Silicon Valley did not appear out of thin air, it was the product of public research and open-source ecosystems that made the internet revolution possible.
If the US betrays these ecosystems too much, they could migrate and make another tech industry flourish somewhere else.
Though I wish he'd tone it down a little occasionally. (This is why I'm not an activist.)
It's interesting as for the first time I've found myself mildly encumbered by DRM, notably some old Apple FairPlay files I bought prior to 2007 (or 2009) - which I can't play in non-Apple software.
But these are minor inconveniences compared to servicing costs of trains, tractors and so on, which get passed on to the rest of us indirectly.
I'm not sure if "disenshittificatory" will ever catch on. I'd propose d17n for disenshittification, except there's already a d18n for a project that masks sensitive fields in databases..
The Twitter/X location experiment/debacle laid this bare, showing how much low-effort, divisive, often racially or religiously antagonistic content directed at Americans was actually foreign (e.g., the Indians LARPing as white nationalists with classical statue avatars).