If the past few months have taught us anything, it's that Europe is so cowed and poorly-led that they'll knuckle-under and submit to whatever. In fact, if this is true, they probably won't even invest in local alternatives for fear of retaliation.
That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
Cory Doctorow at keynote in Pycon this year said pretty much the same thing - now that tariffs had imposed the cost that US always used as a threat to get their own way, what’s to lose now?
I tend to agree but
1. We risk Balkanisation of the internet
2. Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed - which will just end looking like a sped up version of the Matrix screen
3. If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities (which let’s face it is the destination of search and posting text or photos).
The power of social media is the power of a phone in every frigging pocket of every adult on the planet.
So we end up with normcore social media, partly because regulation will ramp down the extreme reactions of the algorithm, and partly because LLMs will replace a lot of queries, and they are mostly normcore because they are based on every written word ever, and that is a huge anti-extremism weighting
Until nations actually implement serious cybersecurity enforcement, this is a good thing.
> Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed
A massive part of the modern-day propaganda machine. It's worse than awful and it's intended.
> If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities
Ultimately, this is a better direction. But the regulations need to be carefully curated for freedom instead of suppression. Unfortunately, current political climate and public sentiment isn't going well for public safety.
The natural gas supply among other things. Europe has made itself first dependent on Russia and then on the US for the basic survival of its population.
Europe is hardly dependent on the US for gas. Russia still supplies more gas than the US does, and even when the current US and Russian supplies are combined they are less than the total Russian supply in 2021.
I understand how economics function. If you drop supply 10% for a basic necessity then prices will go up by much more than 10%. You don't need to stop something, just reduce it enough to drive prices way up to the point where people can't afford them.
Gas is stored over many months and then mostly used in the winter. So you cannot quickly impact consumer prices in the way you suggest. Supplies in general are now more diversified and flexible, so any supplier can be replaced more easily - LNG by ship is far easier to replace than gas that relies on pipelines.
Man, if only humans could have invented splitting of the atom, it might have made a nice energy source, especially for countries with low oil and gas reserves.
You underestimate how fast Europe in crisis can reactivate direct imports from Russia. Trump pushing for peace doesn’t understand that it will also open the way for lifting sanctions on Russian energy sector. If he succeeds but alienates Europe, that will inevitably happen. We are back in the age of realpolitik.
Handing over a loaded gun pointed at your head from one dictator to another is hardly a wining strategy. You also underestimate how much Russia and the US are likely colluding.
One of those suppliers demanding you don't tax and censor their online services. The other is pointing weapons (that they buy with your money) at you. There is a time for market competition, but this ain't it. Now if you were suggesting developing domestic energy supplies, that would be a different story.
Please don’t expect me writing a full political program here elaborating all aspects of foreign and energy policy. It’s a forum. Domestic energy supplies won’t come faster than imports from existing sources. They are imperative but need time.
I see US made weapons destroying Russian assets in Ukraine every day. I see US troops facing off against Russia in Poland and the Baltics. This is a nonsense conspiracy theory.
You don't understand. The situation in Europe is: the left has failed, and broken into pieces that are currently mostly still in a few parties, but those are ready to shatter into 100, at which point ... the extreme right has 35% of the vote, and the center parties has all but broken down.
That means the moderate right (think laissez-faire pro-immigration pro-business, the only remaining other voting bloc) and extreme right (hate based parties) control, easily, 50% of the vote. They are not currently allied but the problem is that a shattered left is not something the right (or anyone) can work with. If the left fully shatters, the right will be forced to join the extreme right.
So right now, it takes essentially EVERY small insignificant party cooperating not to hand EU countries to the extreme right (yes, in Germany there's more margin, in the Netherlands less, France is on the brink, ...)
That makes your "dumb" not dumb but a serious catch-22. Any compromise that makes ANY party that has 5% of the vote walk out is a total non-starter, because one vote of non-confidence and "hitler gets elected again" so to speak.
My "dumb" is what got you into this situation. I notice you left Denmark off that list. Wonder what's different there? Perhaps if your center-left / center-right parties realized, like anyone with a brain did well over a decade ago, that mass third world Muslim immigration into Europe is the stupidest political idea of the 21st century so far, you wouldn't be in this position. Perhaps if you realized your political foot gun is the real threat here, and not your own citizens who oppose it, you wouldn't be worrying about a "hitler gets elected again" scenario.
Mass immigration is the only thing currently saving Europe from demographic collapse in the working age population. It is the only thing keeping pension systems afloat for the moment. It is faltering, the working age population will still collapse (and immigration is not saving anything but the huge cities. In the south of Europe entire regions are essentially depopulated and those regions are growing despite mass immigration)
Yet another problem where there is no choice. Or there is a choice between "collapse now" and "collapse in 10 years".
We're seeing a repeating theme here.
And no worries: the EU governments are going to use spending cutbacks to get themselves out of this situation. Which again is the stupidest thing imaginable, because I can't even imageine a way to make that work ... but here we are.
Demographic collapse is a myth. Japan has been in it for a couple decades. Sure, their economy is stagnant, but their standard of living is still very high and it is nothing resembling a "collapse." Arguments that we must allow mass immigration or face dire consequences are nonsense.
I'd look up a few more stats and stories about the situation in Japan. Their economy has been stagnant ... well they call it a "lost decade". Despite the name, "decade", it's coming up on 36 years now. Outside of the major cities (and frankly inside, just to a lesser extent), everything has crashed - from education to grocery stores, to apartment sizes.
>Mass immigration is the only thing currently saving Europe from demographic collapse in the working age population.
Then why hasn't EU economy been boosted to the moon by the millions of mass immigrants who came to Europe since 2015 and has instead fallen behind the US and China even more? Show me Europe's AMD or Nvidia that an illegal migrant founded.
Maybe because mass illegal migration is a failure since in the 21st century western economies, people aren't identical cogs you can slot in and achieve proportional economic growth like you're playing Age of Empires on the PC, but they all have different history, norms, values, upbringing and education that makes some cultures more successful than others, and what made European continent and other historical settlements of Europeans from North America to Australia, wealthy and highly developed nations today.
There are reason some countries are successful even after getting ravaged by wars, and why other countries are perpetual failures, and that's due to the culture of the people inhabiting those lands and not to the landmasses themselves that define the borders of their countries. But if you want to perpetuate that successful culture then you need more of those same people, not more of other totally different people replacing them.
A German engineer or Portuguese doctor can't be replaced by uneducated illegals coming off boats even if the -2 + 2 = 0 Excel sheet math evens out, societies in developed economies just don't work like that, they need skilled labor sharing the same values and cultural norms to guarantee they'll integrate and work well together and not lead to ethnic conflicts due to the massive cultural and ethnic differences.
If you want to replace lost European doctors and engineers you need to optimize legal migration for importing trained doctors and engineers of similar cultures and values, not accepting all uneducated illegals from failed countries as that just leads to increases in crime, social unrest, ghettoization, welfare use and most importantly a collapse of societal trust, which in turn will cause social and racial conflicts and crime similar to what the US has to deal with, and we're already starting to see the same issues happen in Europe too except without the multi billion dollar tech companies that immigrants create in the US. Worst of both worlds.
To put it another way, if you need a plumber, what anyone sensible does is you call around, put some ads, and hire a plumber. But what Europe has done instead of looking for a plumber, is leave the front door open for anyone to come in off the street, hoping a plumber might walk in along with the rest of homeless and junkies who now squatted in their home but can't tell them to leave because they feel guilty for them, and now you have a messed up house that no skilled plumber wants to come into and your own family hates you too, so you failed on both fronts. That's the wrong way to hire a plumber.
> Then why hasn't EU economy been boosted to the moon by the millions of mass immigrants who came to Europe since 2015 and has instead fallen behind the US and China even more?
Because immigration at this level only managed to keep the workforce constant. It did not grow it.
> Show me Europe's AMD or Nvidia that an illegal migrant founded
You're probably right, immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan won't found microchip companies ... and we all know who does do that ... European immigrants.
Most EU countries are losing 1-2% of their young population to emigration (5% of their workforce) PER YEAR, almost exclusively to the US (and yes, Trump has not changed that despite either Trump's own promises or the left's depiction of the US as the new Nazi Germany).
> But what Europe has done is leave the front door open for anyone to come in off the street ...
No, not really. Europe is in total panic because of young people leaving Europe en-masse. Mass-immigration has actually been able to keep the economy stagnant, which is a major miracle given the numbers.
If you stop immigration, the emigration won't stop, so EU countries are going to forbid emigration while still allowing mass-immigration. (that's the next step people currently don't see coming. There are already a lot of measures in place in EU countries to stop anyone "worth it" from leaving. Google "exit tax")
I find your post funny in a very ironic way: you are acting as if being in power actually gives you a choice, actually gives you the power to change things. Yes you can choose whether to hire Bob or Barbara, Irena or Stefan as your secretary, but you can't change anything fundamental. I mean, I guess I'm not the US president, maybe he can, but a lot of positions are very disappointing on that front.
>Because immigration at this level only managed to keep the workforce constant. It did not grow it.
Why is the number of the imported workforce relevant and not their added value? What are you gonna do with millions of unskilled immigrants if the workers you're loosing are experienced doctors and engineers? 200 unskilled workers can't replace a retired doctor you need right now to care for your medical condition.
Unless Europe's economic goal is to compete with India and Bangladesh on being the sweatshop of the world, then this strategy makes sense.
>You're probably right, immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan won't found microchip companies ... and we all know who does do that ... European immigrants.
Actually Taiwanese immigrants in this case, but don't focus on microchip companies, that was just an example I was using to make the point that Europe needs more skilled immigrants that create high value industries like the US does, rather than more kebab shops.
>almost exclusively to the US
I don't think the EU emigration to the US is that big of an issue. The bigger issue is the collapsing healthcare and welfare system including state pensions that draws ever nearer to us like the Titanic to the iceberg, as the massive bottom of the population pyramid approaches old age sickness and will need A LOT of care. You can't just throw unlimited unskilled bodies at the problem and expect it to solve itself while ignoring the additional problems this also creates. Plus you now also need to care for the illegal immigrants you took in who are sick and can't work because you didn't vet them.
The core issue is that Europe's welfare state and asylum system without any caps, have been badly engineered from the get-go by the boomer generation, who wrote cheques their kids and grandkids now have to cash, which is unsustainable no matter how you try to jerry-rig and duct-tape it today with unskilled immigration, it's still gonna collapse eventually without a ground-up economic reform that the Eastern European countries went through after the fall of communism, as no country can support the infinite population growth required to support the healthcare and retirement lifestyle that boomers engineered for themselves of living till 85 but stop working at 65 resulting in a 20 year vacation funded by the next generations. Retirement was meant to care for you when you're too sick and old to work, not to be a 2 decade long jet-set holiday.
>you are acting as if being in power actually gives you a choice, actually gives you the power to change things
You definitely can change things for the better if you're willing to be tough. However nobody in EU politics has the balls to call a spade a spade, so we're just slowly heading towards that Iceberg in a managed decline.
And why is nobody asking "WHY has the left failed" and explain it? Winning over voters to your side isn't that hard. You just have to talk to them, see what they want, and give it to them, or at least negociate a compromise. That's it.
So, have politicians on the left bothered engaging in conversation with the voters to discuss their grievances and work with them on their issues to win their votes back? Or have they ignored their citizens' issues from their ivory towers and resorted to calling everyone who disagreed with their unpopular polices "Nazis", "fascists" and "alt-right supremacists"?
Because I only saw a lot of the latter and none of the former. Isn't it wild how if you diss your electorate, they won't vote for you and cause you to loose elections? It's almost as if that's a known self regulating feedback mechanism of democracy, that the left refuses to acknowledge and seeks to blames someone else for their self inflicted failures.
The problem with the left is that they've been ideologically captured and refuse to acknowledge or even discuss the pressing issues the population wants to discuss because of the optics of those issues (like illegal migration and asylum abuse) go against the ideological purity tests of the left whose policies often are the root cause of those issues. Isn't it obvious that if run a country on optics instead of Realpolitik and common sense, shit will hit the fan eventually when the bill is due and people will vote you out with both hands?
Realpolitik would be for Europe to exploit its shale gas reserves instead of banning doing so.
Yes, we need to move away from fossil fuels but the reality is that we are still dependent on them so we may as well look at strategic independence and economic gains and produce what we can ourselves.
Realpolitik would be for Europe to understand that geography isn't going to change. Russia will always be your next-door neighbour. USA will always be an ocean away. Also, Putin is not immortal.
So, your long game should be to forge amicable relations with your next-door neighbour, rather betting everything in your relationship with your manipulative friend on the other side of the pond. In the meantime, you should also become self-dependent.
Your suggestions are far off from realpolitik. This is the recipe followed post-WW1, which brought us WW2. Europe itself is the proof that cooperation and good relationship among neighbours are the policies that bring peace and prosperity.
And Putin is not an idiot to attempt expansion to lands with no ethnic-russian population. Such thing is clearly not feasible without the power structures of the former USSR.
WW2 was brought by the humiliation and starvation of the German people by the European winners and by their own politicians, and Hitler easily capitalized on that making his rise to power a slam dunk.
People like to think that if they would have assassinated Hitler early on, WW2 wouldn't have happened, but that's wrong. That would have just left the power vacuum empty for someone else to capitalize on the German populations' grievances and start the war.
The history lesson is to make sure the masses of people are taken care of by their leaders, not to start censoring, imprisoning or assassinating political opponents who capitalize on the peoples' unhappiness.
That is not a viable option for us if we need full replacement. Strategic independence will remain a goal, but in the meantime we need whatever works. Let Trump and Putin compete for access to European energy market.
It is a viable option. It might not cover all our needs (I don't know) but that does not mean we should not minimise imports and maximise domestic production.
Normcore is fine. I'd rather have normcore than rage porn curated for profit.
What's not fine is US oligarchs using social media platforms to influence elections - something Musk and Zuckerberg have both done, on the record, with fines to match.
That's not fine anywhere.
The US seems to have persuaded itself it is, but the EU - rightly - has other priorities.
There used to be a very vibrant internet before "search and discovery", it was very balkanized and that was GLORIOUS. Social media is cancer anyway, if people stop using them altogether it will be a net benefit to humanity. So I see all this as a good thing.
But then why hasn't that happened already? The US tech sector didn't develop out of any centralized plan. It's purely a creature of chaos and self interest. What makes you think an equivalent can be formed by central planning? Even if it could, the actions of the EU in regards to censorship show that such a beast would be 1000x worse than the US tech companies it intends to replace.
Relying on well developed tech from a reliable long term ally makes sense, it's hard to deploy enough resources to compete when the resulting products will likely be worse. But that calculus has completely changed, the US is no longer a reliable long term ally. The EU's reliance on US tech is an utterly massive security and economic liability. Maybe their own products would be worse, but that'd still be better than alternatives that can get sabotaged or yanked away at a moment's notice.
A decade ago I would have expected EU alternatives to be much worse but I'm less sure these days. Most US tech companies have moved past the innovator stage and spend most of their efforts on rent seeking and marketing.
All that said, I don't actually expect the EU to handle this well. They've been fumbling long term threats with regularity, and I don't they'll suddenly start doing better. They'll probably muddle along with most of their US dependencies until a massive disaster hits them in the face.
There has been a much stronger capital supply than in a shattered group of countries.
The EU does not exist as a unit, it's 27 sovereign states cooperating. In the EU the single market is an achievement across countries, but can't compare with single large internal markets.
China as the second economy of the world managed to succeed with a centralised plan.
So I think market size and economic power is a bigger indicator than centralised vs not.
Tech companies are the least capital intensive of any industry (pre-LLM bubble). Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K. China has kept out foreign competition and applied heavy censorship across its tech companies, but they arose and competed as a free market amongst themselves, not by central planning.
That's why I can guarantee you that the EU will not block or eradicate US big-tech from Europe since such a massive trade war with the US will set it back technologically, economically and politically, but it will instead enter into a silent partnership with big-tech where "we'll let you monetize the EU userbase, and in return you'll spy on EU citizens for us through your datacenters here, turning in anyone who protests against us, censor anything we tell you to under "hate speech" laws, and push our propaganda to the top of the algorithm, this way we both win: you get to make money, and we get to keep our seats in power".
Basically it will be outsourcing the traditional government censorship, oppression and propaganda work to the tech private sector because it's 1000x more efficient that the government at this, and it also helps keep the image of those in power clean since if they get caught they can throw big-tech under the bus with some fines. It's literally the perfect setup.
How do I know this? Is it because I'm clairvoyant or have a tinfoil hat on? No, it's because US big-techs like Apple literally did the same deal for the CCP in China, so now that the can of worms has been opened, all the other countries want the same deal with big-tech.
And if you think the EU leadership is somehow morally above these types of practices, boy you couldn't be more wrong. Their unscrupulous use of Israeli Pegasus spy-ware and Palantir surveilance-ware proves they're not, they're cut from the same cloth as the rest. They'll gladly copy the CCP great firewall and give it a coat of blue paint with some gold stars on it and say it's for "protecting your democracy".
> That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
Europe at least has missed the last couple of trains on this. No one has trillions of dollars to spend and catch up with the US tech sector.
the best would be some kind of movement from the bottom that customers start to divest at least from some services. Help closest family and direct friends to:
- install Firefox/Zen as main browser
- install uBlock Origin
- switch to Brave Search / Qwant for search engine
- switch to signal for IM for communicating with your parents and loved one (still use WhatsApp elsewhere)
- help family setup passkeys using Bitwarden EU
- advocate that they don't need to buy the latest android but can get 2nd hand e.g. motorola edge+ (2023) and help setup your parents linageos
- when switching router pick one with openwrt support and setup AdGuard on the router (some asus routers already have such things build in)
So is better to do nothing because we cannot divest everything right now? You start by divesting partners that are getting complicated (this year US). Apple divest its supplies by using many different partners and stop using one if they having problem with one.
EU can for sure get a most of those you mentioned from South Korea and Japan who are also having issues with US. At least with those countries EU has stronger hands than with US.
One thing I don't know is the extent to which this stuff goes on all the time but just doesn't typically get air on news. In the past I remember hearing about stories about things hitting (I think) WTO courts. That's much higher up the escalation chain. It seems like to some extent there is an interested audience for this right now so the threshold for what is reportable has shifted. That doesn't necessarily mean anything has actually changed.
Bingo. Same stuff was happening under previous administrations but it was quiet. There is no advantage to airing your laundry. Take the Indian case, by having the deal aired, Indian politicians have had to look tough. The US could have gotten a better deal by making the threat behind closed diplomatic channels.
Amateur hour at the white house. (Or shall I say Trump hour?)
They're addicted to the content, not the apps themselves. If they no longer had access to Instagram tomorrow, and had to use another app which offered the same content, most users would switch without looking back.
If you have a 27 country bloc and are rationally limited to the actions of the most timid or compromised, it's pretty easy to manipulate the actions of the whole. We know Hungary is effectively a Russia proxy, for instance, and has massively influenced the response to Russia. Similarly a couple of EU leaders (Meloni, Orban) are Trump lickspittles/mini-mes so there again they'll deny any collective response that offends their best pal.
Hungary didn’t do anything that would make a big difference in the outcomes because the West does not have enough power to adequately sanction Russia. The real problem was that EU and USA failed to respond in the first year of war by mobilizing their economies for military production. Ukraine needed shells, tanks, air defense etc in much higher volume than allies could provide. Economic sanctions are face-saving measure for European politicians, because that war has never been seen as ours, yet some token response was necessary. Look at how much “solidarity” Ukrainian refugees receive now in Europe, where Poland started deporting people and Germany is cutting financial help. Europe isn’t cowed or poorly led. You just misunderstand its obscure priorities, which are trade, jobs for Ur-Europeans and climate change (which is a real problem here), while pretending that we care about the rest of the world, peace etc.
- Scaled up domestic military readiness especially in border nations
- Hurt destabilizing Russian expansionism via sanctions/secondhand arms almost for free
I would much prefer a principled, strongly voiced NO to neo-imperialism in the form of massive support and intervention. But would that be in the best interest of most voters? I'd argue no.
Only in the sense that they are not in the spotlight when EU officials talk about Ukraine. They don’t say “We have more important things to do”. But you are of course right, they dominate the agenda.
I think the correct response would be to immediately ban Facebook and Twitter, to make the worst oligarchs reconsider their support of Trump and show that Europe means it (one can always dream). I don't believe slow and silent are the correct stances to adopt when the global economy is held at the whims of this egotistical manchild.
Trump can make drastic course changes much faster than Europe can ever agree on any strategy. Trying to match Trump's approach of drastic responses is a losing strategy for Europe. All Trump has to do is put 200% tariffs on LNG exports right as winter starts or something similar. Democratic governments don't last long when their population literally starts to freeze to death.
Yes, my ban of Twitter and Facebook is pure wishful thinking, I know that. But ultimately, it's a war of attrition, and it's the US vs the World. The US economy is alreay starting to show cracks, I don't think de-escalation is the way.
I like how Europe's solution to Trump is to make itself a puppet of an even worse dictator. While expecting the worse dictator to not use that leverage to take over more of Europe. Who will charge 100% tariffs as well since a weak Europe is to their advantage as well.
This is not what will happen at all. I won’t go here into much detail, but the thing is, there’s a demand in Europe that cannot be fulfilled from other sources for the time being. Europe is not going to fix America or Russia, so it has to trade with them. It is a huge market for both, that cannot be ignored, and access to that market won’t be sold cheap. If they have to compete to sell us gas, great. The lesson has been learned anyway, emission targets will be hit, alternative energy sources will make us much less dependent within next 15-20 years.
You should google Cartel. Trump and Putin won't be competing. They'll be fleecing Europe for every cent they can while keeping Europe as weak as possible. Maybe manage to get a few more Russia aligned right wing governments if enough people freeze to death and Europe doesn't block the propaganda for fear of more freezing.
I understand very well what cartel is. “Cartel” formed by Trump and Putin to manipulate prices of gas for Europe is a fantasy for many reasons. Bad strategy for Russia (and I’m sure I know Russia better than you), technically hard to implement (sanctions don’t work well in both directions), will have consequences for global markets (Europe gets Russian oil via India now - are they going to be impacted?) etc etc.
I'm in EU and maybe my opinion is controversial, but I think there's something very positive for EU citizens about Trump using tarrifs to pressure the EU politically.
Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
I feel the US/Trump is our only hope of slowing this down as a guarantee of (future) true democracy at the EU level essentially doesn't exist for us any other way. The EU sees China as an example to follow and I feel Trump/US is the only thing trying to stop EU leadership of going there.
> Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
The countries already want to it themselves. See the UK for an example.
This is not a controversial take. If people can see what their future holds by seeing examples, they can take action regardless of their role in society.
Currently we're seeing a global version of a SaaS rugpull, and this should wake people up, if they're not awaken already.
You're right, I read their comment wrong. My mistake. But, from the eastern border of the EU, US looks way more authoritarian than EU at this point in time.
First, there are no EU citizens. Only citizens of countries that are EU members.
Second, no EU-wide regulation can come into being without support from Council, and Council is formed by member countries.
As always, people are complaining EU this, EU that, when EU in reality is their own country, among others. It will be your country that will do the censorship etc. If your country is small and weak it has low impact on the international state of affairs, regardless of its membership in the EU. Macron or Merz have much more to say than von der Leyen.
As Portuguese living in Germany for a few decades, I feel that first we need to sort out the local mess, otherwise the central EU is already lost anyway.
Both are true IMHO. EU has structural domestic problems it keeps ignoring for too long and now it also has external new ones on top: Russia, Trump, etc. Both need fixing.
The thing is, EU politicians have been more than asleep at the wheel for over 2 decades now coasting along, and it shows in the mess we are in today: energy polices, tech development, economic growth, unsustainable welfare state, lack of strong defense, etc.
All they do is flashy speeches and virtue signaling on the international stage while not actually fixing any problems, just cashing in their paycheques till they can reitre on their generous pensions and leve the mess for the next ones to fix or just keep kicking the can down the road.
Current elites are discredited, as is (neo)liberalism, but I don't think we will have any significant shift until a really serious crisis, because overall public still cannot face new reality, and politics is downstream of culture. So it will get worse until it can get better.
Sure, the issue is that whenever Europe "got worse" in a serious crisis, it never ended well. Usually millions died, and it was only better after that for a little while. So what do we do?
>It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
What specific actions has the EU done to ban free speech and control the political narrative?
I see the US deporting legal permanent residents when they peacefully protest against US policy[1]. and I see the US searching social media accounts and forbidding private accounts[2] for visa applicants. Both of those seem like Trump is attempting to control political speech more than anything the EU has done.
The capitol storming and freeing all that participated. Having major cities being taken over by the army. Stifling free press. You know all that good old dictatorship playbook stuff.
> The capitol storming and freeing all that participated.
I don't have an opinion on that. It is the president's prerogative to pardon whoever he wants, no justification necessary.
> Having major cities being taken over by the army.
That is the National Guard. Not the same thing as the Army. The Army would be a very bad option should that happen. The cities are not taken over. The mayor/police chief of those cities have no desire to reign in crime, the federal government has to step in. Depending on your political views, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line is that people much more safer now in DC than they were 2-3 weeks ago.
> The cities are not taken over. The mayor/police chief of those cities have no desire to reign in crime, the federal government has to step in. Depending on your political views, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line is that people much more safer now in DC than they were 2-3 weeks ago.
I find that the people who make statements like this don't actually live in cities. Its like you got your talking points from Stephen Miller.
How exactly is the US/Trump preventing the progress of this wave of authoritarianism? They're part of it, dummy. Using all their influence and power to prop up far right parties accross the continent, normalizing insane ideas about population control and ending democracy. There's no getting out of this without a genuine regain of interest in actual liberal values (not speaking of american democrats here), and Trump embodies their exact opposite.
Trump and free speech in one sentence?!
Did you see what they did against protestoors in university campuses or how many people they arrested or deported for just saying their opinion?
I'd rather go to the China model of authoritarianism with working infrastructure (trains, what have you) and a belief in science than to the US model of anti-science regressive authoritarianism where the one percent are the new feudal lords...
The big assumption here is that authoritarianism in Europe would get you better infrastructure.
My personal belief is that for good infrastructure you want capable local industry (to build it) AND a population that is not too wealthy (because this gives additional infrastructure more relative value, keeps the workforce for building it more affordable and thus citizens less likely to oppose the whole thing).
I don't think that having european dictators would really help either of those points, so my infrastructure expectations from neofascism are quite low.
The Koch brothers and there anti climate science propaganda network immediately come to mind, as does the Mercer family and their sponsoring of Breitbart.
If I had said "you can't even find 2 extreme outliers among the 3 million 1%ers in the US that are opposed to one particular type of science because of their financial interests" then this would be a reasonable argument. But I didn't say that. And even then, Koch industries is a terrible example. They employ thousands of scientists and engineers.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
I'll call another one: The US is only going to do this to the EU and maybe a few other countries whose populace has zero spine and will just submit. A great example of a country that in effect has regulated US big tech far, far more strongly than the EU, and to far more effect, is South Korea. But ironically, this is really never brought up in international spaces, it's always about EU regulation, when they're pretty mild.
I'm willing to bet money the US won't threaten Korea much at all, because its public would rightly tell them to fuck off and it would cost the ruling party significant votes. The politicians would have to be super discreet about somehow deregulating without the public noticing.
I say this spending my time between both Europe and Korea and being ingrained in both culturally.
Yeah me too. We have to stand up to the bully or it's only getting worse. It's bad enough that von der leyen basically gave away a free trillion for "not getting the worst tariffs imposed on us".
I used to play a lot of Coup in college. In that game, I can bluff about having a card that lets me steal 2 coins from you. Our group quickly learned that if you let someone get away with that bluff once, not only would they steal from you every turn, everyone else would also start stealing from you too, because they assume you wouldn't challenge them.
We do make staples. The ones I have here are made in Europe. We don't buy such things from the US (though from China, maybe). I think a lot of it is just not very visible because it's mainly for internal market use.
In fact I'm not buying much of anything from the US anymore. If anything to screw up Trump's "trade deficit" even more despite his tariffs.
But yeah, in the US seems like every consumer good is made in China. In the EU there's still a ton of shit made locally. Appliances from Poland, clothes from Portugal, etc. Brands that Americans would not recognise.
In an ideal world, other nations would have been in a position to impose sanctions on the US and/or declare US (this administration, rather) a pariah state. We are definitely not there, for a variety of reasons. Let this be a cautionary tale. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is now.
As a Brazilian, I'm a bit torn on this issue. On the one hand, our social media regulations are terrible, are being approved without due process, and will certainly be used for (political) censorship. On the other hand, it's annoying that the US has to interfere, and concerning that they even can interfere in the first place.
Give me one example of a social media regulation being approved without "due process" or whatever that means. It's annoying when I stub my toe on the couch or when I drop my slice of bread butter-first. It's a criminal attack on the sovereignty of another nation when the US tries to interfere.
> Brazil’s supreme court has ruled that social media platforms can be held legally responsible for users’ posts, in a decision that tightens regulation on technology giants in the country.
> Companies such as Facebook, TikTok and X will have to act immediately to remove material such as hate speech, incitement to violence or “anti-democratic acts”, even without a prior judicial takedown order
Twitter was blocked immediately, without a public hearing or appeal process.
> In early May 2023, when the bill was about to be approved, Google and Telegram used their own platforms to express their opposition to the bill to their Brazilian users, and soon after were forced to back down by government institutions.
>The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, temporarily banned Elon Musk’s social media platform X last year after the billionaire refused to obey court orders to suspend certain accounts.
>On May 11, the president of the Chamber of Deputies requested that the directors of Google and Telegram in the country be investigated for their actions against the bill, describing these actions as forceful and abusive of the companies' hegemonic positions in the market, motivated by economic interests, and cited possible crimes against democratic institutions.
I'm not even a supporter of the current Brazilian administration, or even the political system for that matter, but these companies MUST obey court orders and MUST refrain from using their positions to attack governmental institutions or to prevent legislation that goes against their economic-political gains. They may be above US law, but they will have to lobby harder if they want to go over some of them here.
Social media is over rated. Ask Assange and Snowden.
What happens on social media is of the herd, by the herd, for the herd. As Nietzsche would say like organized religion it produces nothing but a herd or slave morality.
> On the one hand, our social media regulations are terrible, are being approved without due process, and will certainly be used for (political) censorship
Luckily this isn't happening in the US and if it is definitely isn't getting rapidly worse.
This is happening in the US, but only in the case of US domestic politics. The relevant tech companies actually provide an incredibly free and politically uncensored service in most of the world simply because they don't give a damn about politics in country X and the politicians in those countries don't have the leverage over them to make them care like US politicians do. Censoring costs money, and these companies would rather not do it. Citizens of many other countries, like Brazil, are the beneficiaries of this situation.
As an American, it is absolutely astounding how stupid of a move that was (in addition to tariffs on Canada). This is going to have long lasting repercussions for US-Canada relations, and for what exactly?
In some areas - like US wine and alcohol sales to Canada - and tourism, according to ongoing news reports it is apparently devastating - they are begging Canadians to buy their products again.
In other areas - when the entire Canadian federal (and most provincial and territorial governments - many municipal governments, and of course the entire educational sector due to low-cost licensing) and large-scale industries are completely dependent on Microsoft 365 + Azure platforms (probably AWS as well) - information technology and management usage of US technologies is definitely not being boycotted...
It should be very easy to get away from Microsoft products, but management would need to be tough and put their foot down. Plus once the move succeeds the IT budget will probably have a lot of $ freed for other things.
I saw an attempt at a very large company to abandon M/S, it was working but there were a huge amount complaints. Then after a couple months, you can guess what happened. Certain people, usually 1st and 2nd level management, got exemptions, then some "important" finance people. Guess what, the move failed because you ended up with 2 tiers of employees, the revolts started happening. After 1 year, the relented and went back to M/S.
... well, the big problem I would see is not in the "basics" - storing documents on a web-enabled location is solved in the open-source world.
However - it is not just that when looking at Microsoft 365 + Azure - it is the inter-connected dependencies between SharePoint Online, Teams, Purview and the desktop OS/Office applications; Metadata/smart-documents, IRM/DLP/Records Management, etc.
My personal decision? Not very impactful now that I live in Europe, but it means I will not set foot on US soil, that I divest from US-based services, and that I don't buy American.
I don't care how effective it is, because there is no anger behind it. It's just a thing I stopped doing, like some people stop drinking or eating meat. Those habits stick.
I have convinced some of my clients to move to European-based cloud offerings. I can't say I've moved millions yet, but we're in the order of tens of thousands per month staying in Europe rather than going to US.
The European Union needs to immediately build its own sovereign ecosystem where its citizens will finally be able to enjoy the full protections of EU regulations, such as chat control, digital ID laws and censorship of vaguely defined "hate speech".
We need to fight the Washington fashists who want to deprive us of our "democracy with european characteristics".
This is aimed at the European Union, India and Brazil, who have all recently been mulling Big Tech regulations. It seems to be the reward for the massive support Trump has been given by the tech sector.
It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
May be a joke, but countries tend to put aside small issues until they create alliances to fend off bigger threats, and then they go back to their issues.
Disputed borders are not small issues. They are the issues that make all others look small. It took decades for Canada and Denmark to resolve their dispute over a completely worthless uninhabited arctic rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island. India and China aren't just going to drop their border dispute over some internet beef with the US.
The EU has no leverage. Its own institutions are all 100% Microsoft shops with zero interest in changing that. The US has sanctioned staff at the International Criminal Court meaning MS suspended their Outlook accounts, and the ICC seems to have done .... exactly nothing. The chief prosecutor there had to open up a new personal account at Protonmail instead, although Protonmail keeps talking about leaving Switzerland due to new surveillance laws also so it's unclear how long it'll remain European (and of course Switzerland isn't in the EU anyway).
Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No. Can the EU Commission do without extra tax revenues from US tech? Yes.
No, EU economy would collapse if all US tech was sanctioned tomorrow. Companies and governments have nowhere to migrate their Windows/Office/Outlook/Azure setups to.
Russia is running on Windows too and did not collapsed. It turns out that companies wants to make money and are willing to jump through hoops, sanctions or not.
Also you can just use cracked OS (illegal, but if Microsoft is out, it will become abandonware) and create alternative API for cloud services. How hard do you think it would be to create i.e. S3 compatible API? Wait that already exists - https://github.com/jchristn/S3Server
And you could continue with whatever Azure, AWS etc offers. In the end, it is just some variation of a REST server.
Russia has a homegrown Google competitor in the form of Yandex. It runs its own search engine, mail, cloud services, office suites etc. There isn't an EU equivalent AFAIK. And they had many years to prepare because Russia has been sanctioned in various forms for a long time going back to 2016.
Windows is not that important. It's more about Outlook, Office, all the enterprise apps running on US clouds, etc.
Which EU cloud providers can easily create knock offs and then let EU services migrate without changing anything on companies side, except just endpoints.
The opposite is also true, what Big Tech can do without the EU? It's their most profitable market and it's not like they are going to make up for the loss by selling in China.
The US tech industry doesn't have as much leverage as they think they do, the hardest part to replace is the hardware, which mostly isn't built in the US anyways
That reminds me of Mark Zukerberg which threatened to leave a while back... and denied it soon after realizing the bluff didn't work.
Where do you get that EU is their most profitable market?
When I worked for big tech the US was always the most profitable market, usually followed by the UK. Albeit that was a long time ago. But the EU has economically declined since so I doubt things changed much.
If they did it unilaterally yes. If they did it at the same time as other companies due to US law, then probably not. More to the point, how many people in the EU use Apple tech and would be furious if it stopped working for them?
> might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
"Might"?
Brazil already exports to China almost 3 times the amount it exports to the U.S.
And after the recent rise in tariffs against Brazil, China announced an huge increase in soybeans and coffee purchase from Brazil. Because of that the price of US soybeans dropped and American farmers sent an open letter to Trump asking him to not cause trouble.
Big tech serves exactly three purposes (real, not stated):
- The precarization of work by wage compression and anti-worker rights lobbying (Uber)
- The overexploitation of attention for financial (ads) and political gains (tolerance and reach for the ultraliberal, protofascist, neonazi groups and narratives) through American state-sponsored algorithmic manipulation (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
- Assimilationism, erasure of local culture, traditions, identities, to achieve cultural hegemony (Netflix)
Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want. In the case of Uber that's great because I will never even think about doing business with the cab cartel again. I don't owe them a damn thing. Nor do I owe my own local culture any loyalty over what I can watch on Netflix. You could argue that the algorithmic feed on social media is a negative, but the idea that there is some underlying agenda is ridiculous. At worst it's like a drug dealer saying "I have what you want... heroin!"
It's remarkable to me that even after all the scandals and whistleblowing going on in the last decades about intelligence agencies, the US government, and big tech collaborating to surveil and control their own citizens or other nations, the recent, full public alignment between the big tech billionaires and the executive branch, not to mention the whole history of US imperialism, which you can boil down to violent expansion of private markets and capital to the detriment of other peoples, there are still smart people like yourself that don't question it in the slightest. In fact, embrace it. Hopefully you're benefiting directly from it, otherwise, you're just a frog getting slowly boiled in a pot of crumbling social environment. Also, did you ever ask yourself where your "preferences" or "wants" come from or how they form?
And none of that is profitable. It's quite the opposite. They do it because the government forces them to do it. Big tech companies don't want to do this, and didn't do this before the spooks came knocking. This is why government regulation will only make matters worse. These things are done because of, not in spite of, the government.
The government is them! Can you not see it? They are intertwined so hard, it's difficult to distinguish who wants what, because they MERGED. The state is ruled by the economic elite, and that's done via the government.
If the government were controlled by billionaires, we would be a lot more competently governed than we are. Democracy works, and I know it because the government's competence resembles its average citizen.
I'll bite. North Kora is sovereign and has self determination. Is it good or bad for the people?
My gripe is with the EU which feels the need to regulate everything. And my view is that it shouldn't. And if there is someone that can force them to rethink their approach, then I will support that.
And yes, other countries should follow the example of the US where everything is permitted unless explicitly denied, and not vice-versa.
It is very, very bad. But that is still their problem, not the U.S.'s problem.
That is the point of sovereignty.
And besides, an U.S.-supported "democracy" is quite often as bad (viz: Chile's Pinochet, Iran's Rheza Pahlevi, etc).
> force them
> other countries should
As a latin-american I say: please, Americans, keep thinking like that. Keep believing in "American exceptionalism". The more you do this kind of nationalist narcissism, the less relevant you'll become. And that's what I want.
It ended? Just seems a bit more "timeshared" than before. One lord for your labor, another for your land. The illusion of a choice buys a lot of compliance.
No. A trade war is exactly the affirmation of nation-states power over corporation's interests. Corporations want stable globalization, not trade wars.
You might think Trump wants to serve corporations. However, mostly by incompetence, he is doing the opposite.
The EU built an anti-coercion instrument that allows for all sorts of trade measures, including bans from public tenders and no longer recognizing intellectual property. It was built specifically for cases like this and only requires a qualified majority of member states in order to be used.
- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The way we think of it, is that government has no business shaping the speech of the people, because the speech of the people can shape the government. Government has to be able to flexibly change to meet the times and if governments decides it doesn't want to change, it can just silence people who would risk changing it without making it obvious they are being targeted. We all know that whenever government thinks it sees a threat to society or to the country, real or imagined, it will lash out in all directions to solve it. We just want to make sure speech control is not one of those directions.
Now, we have the internet and it is not escaping regulation. Companies can be free to decide what is and isn't on their platforms. They are not the government and the first amendment is not about all forms of censorship, just government influenced censorship in spirit.
Obviously, the big tech companies operate in many countries with many different languages and in cases where the local government requires censorship in some language most people in the US don't even speak, the negative impact is limited. A lot of people speak English, however and increasingly whenever some censorship law is applied in some new country its influence on English speaking content grows the more people from those countries use the same platforms as people in other countries do.
- "The Digital Services Act, a flagship EU law, requires large online platforms to take stronger action against illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. The law, according to EU officials, aims to make the digital environment safer while preserving freedom of expression."
- "U.S. critics, however, argue that the DSA imposes "undue" restrictions on free speech and disproportionately impacts American platforms. In an internal directive issued in early August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed U.S. diplomats across Europe to raise objections to the law and encourage EU governments and digital regulators to consider amending or repealing it."
That law came into effect in 2022 and in can be viewed as bad in multiple ways:
1. It is government regulating "speech" in a more broadly defined way at an also broader scale, not companies. This would be considered unconstitutional here in the US.
2. The technical complexity of it encourages applying a lowest common denominator censorship across all content, applying it to even countries where the laws aren't applicable (for example, inside the US). So, it is effectively being applied in the US already and would be unconstitutional.
3. Many of the forms of censored speech are more commonly applied to conservatives and this can decrease the conservative participation on these platforms, which then means increasingly people are exposed to much higher majority left-leaning content.
4. It would be good for the CCP. It wants to expand the censorship of speech so that other countries look more favorably at their internal approach to it. It also wants to expand the influence of left-leaning thought, because it wants communism to be seen more favorably. It's not impossible that the goal for global communism never actually died and China's rapid growth has emboldened them.
- "As the President of the United States, I will stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies. Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology. They also, outrageously, give a complete pass to China's largest Tech Companies. This must end, and end NOW! With this TRUTH, I put all Countries with Digital Taxes, Legislation, Rules, or Regulations, on notice that unless these discriminatory actions are removed, I, as President of the United States, will impose substantial additional Tariffs on that Country's Exports to the U.S.A., and institute Export restrictions on our Highly Protected Technology and Chips. America, and American Technology Companies, are neither the “piggy bank” nor the “doormat” of the World any longer. Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or, consider the consequences! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"
In a sense, if US companies don't censor at foreign government's demands, then they can be fined. If it is unreasonable or impossible and it simply becomes perpetual fines, it can also be seen as a basic tax to use big tech companies as another source of money to extract. The money is not necessarily the critical issue, though it will probably be seen in terms of the trade imbalance that Trump is trying to sort out.
Fundamentally it is probably about putting pressure on these laws to get them either amended or repealed.
Personally, if I reflect on it and history, this may very well be a national security issue. Not only for the US. At the same time with the rise of AI, there's a risk that unregulated digital speech can also become a national security issue in a much more dangerous way through automation. That line of thinking where, you might be a bot and bots aren't people, so it's ok to silence you! That's a very real dilemma.
For the moment at least, I have no sympathy for the EU on this argument and find their government censorship push unconvincing as a global good.
There may be others that know more about this, but this is just my understanding and perspective of it as a Texan.
It’s Russian state ideology: freedom doesn’t actually exist, the only way is a total subordination to a nation state, only certain nations states are allowed to be independent (Russia is one of them), others are to be vasals to us, because of our capacity to make war.
If you live in Russia, you need this kind of beliefs.
If the past few months have taught us anything, it's that Europe is so cowed and poorly-led that they'll knuckle-under and submit to whatever. In fact, if this is true, they probably won't even invest in local alternatives for fear of retaliation.
That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
Cory Doctorow at keynote in Pycon this year said pretty much the same thing - now that tariffs had imposed the cost that US always used as a threat to get their own way, what’s to lose now?
I tend to agree but
1. We risk Balkanisation of the internet
2. Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed - which will just end looking like a sped up version of the Matrix screen
3. If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities (which let’s face it is the destination of search and posting text or photos).
The power of social media is the power of a phone in every frigging pocket of every adult on the planet.
So we end up with normcore social media, partly because regulation will ramp down the extreme reactions of the algorithm, and partly because LLMs will replace a lot of queries, and they are mostly normcore because they are based on every written word ever, and that is a huge anti-extremism weighting
> We risk Balkanisation of the internet
Until nations actually implement serious cybersecurity enforcement, this is a good thing.
> Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed
A massive part of the modern-day propaganda machine. It's worse than awful and it's intended.
> If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities
Ultimately, this is a better direction. But the regulations need to be carefully curated for freedom instead of suppression. Unfortunately, current political climate and public sentiment isn't going well for public safety.
> Ultimately, this is a better direction
Strongly disagree on this one. Utilities and heavy regulation are a necessary evil that should be used sparingly, not as the norm.
> what’s to lose now?
The natural gas supply among other things. Europe has made itself first dependent on Russia and then on the US for the basic survival of its population.
Europe is hardly dependent on the US for gas. Russia still supplies more gas than the US does, and even when the current US and Russian supplies are combined they are less than the total Russian supply in 2021.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
I understand how economics function. If you drop supply 10% for a basic necessity then prices will go up by much more than 10%. You don't need to stop something, just reduce it enough to drive prices way up to the point where people can't afford them.
Gas is stored over many months and then mostly used in the winter. So you cannot quickly impact consumer prices in the way you suggest. Supplies in general are now more diversified and flexible, so any supplier can be replaced more easily - LNG by ship is far easier to replace than gas that relies on pipelines.
Man, if only humans could have invented splitting of the atom, it might have made a nice energy source, especially for countries with low oil and gas reserves.
You underestimate how fast Europe in crisis can reactivate direct imports from Russia. Trump pushing for peace doesn’t understand that it will also open the way for lifting sanctions on Russian energy sector. If he succeeds but alienates Europe, that will inevitably happen. We are back in the age of realpolitik.
Handing over a loaded gun pointed at your head from one dictator to another is hardly a wining strategy. You also underestimate how much Russia and the US are likely colluding.
And you think that Russia is a better option? I hope the EU isn't that dumb, but it's hard to underestimate them.
It is not a better option. It’s the way to have competition among suppliers.
One of those suppliers demanding you don't tax and censor their online services. The other is pointing weapons (that they buy with your money) at you. There is a time for market competition, but this ain't it. Now if you were suggesting developing domestic energy supplies, that would be a different story.
Please don’t expect me writing a full political program here elaborating all aspects of foreign and energy policy. It’s a forum. Domestic energy supplies won’t come faster than imports from existing sources. They are imperative but need time.
If you think Putin and Trump will compete versus simply colluding against Europe then you're really delusional.
I see US made weapons destroying Russian assets in Ukraine every day. I see US troops facing off against Russia in Poland and the Baltics. This is a nonsense conspiracy theory.
You don't understand. The situation in Europe is: the left has failed, and broken into pieces that are currently mostly still in a few parties, but those are ready to shatter into 100, at which point ... the extreme right has 35% of the vote, and the center parties has all but broken down.
That means the moderate right (think laissez-faire pro-immigration pro-business, the only remaining other voting bloc) and extreme right (hate based parties) control, easily, 50% of the vote. They are not currently allied but the problem is that a shattered left is not something the right (or anyone) can work with. If the left fully shatters, the right will be forced to join the extreme right.
So right now, it takes essentially EVERY small insignificant party cooperating not to hand EU countries to the extreme right (yes, in Germany there's more margin, in the Netherlands less, France is on the brink, ...)
That makes your "dumb" not dumb but a serious catch-22. Any compromise that makes ANY party that has 5% of the vote walk out is a total non-starter, because one vote of non-confidence and "hitler gets elected again" so to speak.
My "dumb" is what got you into this situation. I notice you left Denmark off that list. Wonder what's different there? Perhaps if your center-left / center-right parties realized, like anyone with a brain did well over a decade ago, that mass third world Muslim immigration into Europe is the stupidest political idea of the 21st century so far, you wouldn't be in this position. Perhaps if you realized your political foot gun is the real threat here, and not your own citizens who oppose it, you wouldn't be worrying about a "hitler gets elected again" scenario.
You're right, I guess, but ...
Mass immigration is the only thing currently saving Europe from demographic collapse in the working age population. It is the only thing keeping pension systems afloat for the moment. It is faltering, the working age population will still collapse (and immigration is not saving anything but the huge cities. In the south of Europe entire regions are essentially depopulated and those regions are growing despite mass immigration)
Yet another problem where there is no choice. Or there is a choice between "collapse now" and "collapse in 10 years".
We're seeing a repeating theme here.
And no worries: the EU governments are going to use spending cutbacks to get themselves out of this situation. Which again is the stupidest thing imaginable, because I can't even imageine a way to make that work ... but here we are.
Demographic collapse is a myth. Japan has been in it for a couple decades. Sure, their economy is stagnant, but their standard of living is still very high and it is nothing resembling a "collapse." Arguments that we must allow mass immigration or face dire consequences are nonsense.
I'd look up a few more stats and stories about the situation in Japan. Their economy has been stagnant ... well they call it a "lost decade". Despite the name, "decade", it's coming up on 36 years now. Outside of the major cities (and frankly inside, just to a lesser extent), everything has crashed - from education to grocery stores, to apartment sizes.
>Mass immigration is the only thing currently saving Europe from demographic collapse in the working age population.
Then why hasn't EU economy been boosted to the moon by the millions of mass immigrants who came to Europe since 2015 and has instead fallen behind the US and China even more? Show me Europe's AMD or Nvidia that an illegal migrant founded.
Maybe because mass illegal migration is a failure since in the 21st century western economies, people aren't identical cogs you can slot in and achieve proportional economic growth like you're playing Age of Empires on the PC, but they all have different history, norms, values, upbringing and education that makes some cultures more successful than others, and what made European continent and other historical settlements of Europeans from North America to Australia, wealthy and highly developed nations today.
There are reason some countries are successful even after getting ravaged by wars, and why other countries are perpetual failures, and that's due to the culture of the people inhabiting those lands and not to the landmasses themselves that define the borders of their countries. But if you want to perpetuate that successful culture then you need more of those same people, not more of other totally different people replacing them.
A German engineer or Portuguese doctor can't be replaced by uneducated illegals coming off boats even if the -2 + 2 = 0 Excel sheet math evens out, societies in developed economies just don't work like that, they need skilled labor sharing the same values and cultural norms to guarantee they'll integrate and work well together and not lead to ethnic conflicts due to the massive cultural and ethnic differences.
If you want to replace lost European doctors and engineers you need to optimize legal migration for importing trained doctors and engineers of similar cultures and values, not accepting all uneducated illegals from failed countries as that just leads to increases in crime, social unrest, ghettoization, welfare use and most importantly a collapse of societal trust, which in turn will cause social and racial conflicts and crime similar to what the US has to deal with, and we're already starting to see the same issues happen in Europe too except without the multi billion dollar tech companies that immigrants create in the US. Worst of both worlds.
To put it another way, if you need a plumber, what anyone sensible does is you call around, put some ads, and hire a plumber. But what Europe has done instead of looking for a plumber, is leave the front door open for anyone to come in off the street, hoping a plumber might walk in along with the rest of homeless and junkies who now squatted in their home but can't tell them to leave because they feel guilty for them, and now you have a messed up house that no skilled plumber wants to come into and your own family hates you too, so you failed on both fronts. That's the wrong way to hire a plumber.
> Then why hasn't EU economy been boosted to the moon by the millions of mass immigrants who came to Europe since 2015 and has instead fallen behind the US and China even more?
Because immigration at this level only managed to keep the workforce constant. It did not grow it.
> Show me Europe's AMD or Nvidia that an illegal migrant founded
You're probably right, immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan won't found microchip companies ... and we all know who does do that ... European immigrants.
Most EU countries are losing 1-2% of their young population to emigration (5% of their workforce) PER YEAR, almost exclusively to the US (and yes, Trump has not changed that despite either Trump's own promises or the left's depiction of the US as the new Nazi Germany).
> But what Europe has done is leave the front door open for anyone to come in off the street ...
No, not really. Europe is in total panic because of young people leaving Europe en-masse. Mass-immigration has actually been able to keep the economy stagnant, which is a major miracle given the numbers.
If you stop immigration, the emigration won't stop, so EU countries are going to forbid emigration while still allowing mass-immigration. (that's the next step people currently don't see coming. There are already a lot of measures in place in EU countries to stop anyone "worth it" from leaving. Google "exit tax")
I find your post funny in a very ironic way: you are acting as if being in power actually gives you a choice, actually gives you the power to change things. Yes you can choose whether to hire Bob or Barbara, Irena or Stefan as your secretary, but you can't change anything fundamental. I mean, I guess I'm not the US president, maybe he can, but a lot of positions are very disappointing on that front.
>Because immigration at this level only managed to keep the workforce constant. It did not grow it.
Why is the number of the imported workforce relevant and not their added value? What are you gonna do with millions of unskilled immigrants if the workers you're loosing are experienced doctors and engineers? 200 unskilled workers can't replace a retired doctor you need right now to care for your medical condition.
Unless Europe's economic goal is to compete with India and Bangladesh on being the sweatshop of the world, then this strategy makes sense.
>You're probably right, immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan won't found microchip companies ... and we all know who does do that ... European immigrants.
Actually Taiwanese immigrants in this case, but don't focus on microchip companies, that was just an example I was using to make the point that Europe needs more skilled immigrants that create high value industries like the US does, rather than more kebab shops.
>almost exclusively to the US
I don't think the EU emigration to the US is that big of an issue. The bigger issue is the collapsing healthcare and welfare system including state pensions that draws ever nearer to us like the Titanic to the iceberg, as the massive bottom of the population pyramid approaches old age sickness and will need A LOT of care. You can't just throw unlimited unskilled bodies at the problem and expect it to solve itself while ignoring the additional problems this also creates. Plus you now also need to care for the illegal immigrants you took in who are sick and can't work because you didn't vet them.
The core issue is that Europe's welfare state and asylum system without any caps, have been badly engineered from the get-go by the boomer generation, who wrote cheques their kids and grandkids now have to cash, which is unsustainable no matter how you try to jerry-rig and duct-tape it today with unskilled immigration, it's still gonna collapse eventually without a ground-up economic reform that the Eastern European countries went through after the fall of communism, as no country can support the infinite population growth required to support the healthcare and retirement lifestyle that boomers engineered for themselves of living till 85 but stop working at 65 resulting in a 20 year vacation funded by the next generations. Retirement was meant to care for you when you're too sick and old to work, not to be a 2 decade long jet-set holiday.
>you are acting as if being in power actually gives you a choice, actually gives you the power to change things
You definitely can change things for the better if you're willing to be tough. However nobody in EU politics has the balls to call a spade a spade, so we're just slowly heading towards that Iceberg in a managed decline.
>The situation in Europe is: the left has failed
And why is nobody asking "WHY has the left failed" and explain it? Winning over voters to your side isn't that hard. You just have to talk to them, see what they want, and give it to them, or at least negociate a compromise. That's it.
So, have politicians on the left bothered engaging in conversation with the voters to discuss their grievances and work with them on their issues to win their votes back? Or have they ignored their citizens' issues from their ivory towers and resorted to calling everyone who disagreed with their unpopular polices "Nazis", "fascists" and "alt-right supremacists"?
Because I only saw a lot of the latter and none of the former. Isn't it wild how if you diss your electorate, they won't vote for you and cause you to loose elections? It's almost as if that's a known self regulating feedback mechanism of democracy, that the left refuses to acknowledge and seeks to blames someone else for their self inflicted failures.
The problem with the left is that they've been ideologically captured and refuse to acknowledge or even discuss the pressing issues the population wants to discuss because of the optics of those issues (like illegal migration and asylum abuse) go against the ideological purity tests of the left whose policies often are the root cause of those issues. Isn't it obvious that if run a country on optics instead of Realpolitik and common sense, shit will hit the fan eventually when the bill is due and people will vote you out with both hands?
Realpolitik would be for Europe to exploit its shale gas reserves instead of banning doing so.
Yes, we need to move away from fossil fuels but the reality is that we are still dependent on them so we may as well look at strategic independence and economic gains and produce what we can ourselves.
Realpolitik would be for Europe to understand that geography isn't going to change. Russia will always be your next-door neighbour. USA will always be an ocean away. Also, Putin is not immortal.
So, your long game should be to forge amicable relations with your next-door neighbour, rather betting everything in your relationship with your manipulative friend on the other side of the pond. In the meantime, you should also become self-dependent.
Realpolitik would be to arm yourself and project your influence like your big brothers are doing next door and across the pond.
Russia would love to regain the European land the Soviet Union lost.
Your suggestions are far off from realpolitik. This is the recipe followed post-WW1, which brought us WW2. Europe itself is the proof that cooperation and good relationship among neighbours are the policies that bring peace and prosperity.
And Putin is not an idiot to attempt expansion to lands with no ethnic-russian population. Such thing is clearly not feasible without the power structures of the former USSR.
WW2 was brought by the humiliation and starvation of the German people by the European winners and by their own politicians, and Hitler easily capitalized on that making his rise to power a slam dunk.
People like to think that if they would have assassinated Hitler early on, WW2 wouldn't have happened, but that's wrong. That would have just left the power vacuum empty for someone else to capitalize on the German populations' grievances and start the war.
The history lesson is to make sure the masses of people are taken care of by their leaders, not to start censoring, imprisoning or assassinating political opponents who capitalize on the peoples' unhappiness.
Realpolitik would be to recognize that there is no such political actor as Europe.
That is not a viable option for us if we need full replacement. Strategic independence will remain a goal, but in the meantime we need whatever works. Let Trump and Putin compete for access to European energy market.
It is a viable option. It might not cover all our needs (I don't know) but that does not mean we should not minimise imports and maximise domestic production.
Normcore is fine. I'd rather have normcore than rage porn curated for profit.
What's not fine is US oligarchs using social media platforms to influence elections - something Musk and Zuckerberg have both done, on the record, with fines to match.
That's not fine anywhere.
The US seems to have persuaded itself it is, but the EU - rightly - has other priorities.
There used to be a very vibrant internet before "search and discovery", it was very balkanized and that was GLORIOUS. Social media is cancer anyway, if people stop using them altogether it will be a net benefit to humanity. So I see all this as a good thing.
But then why hasn't that happened already? The US tech sector didn't develop out of any centralized plan. It's purely a creature of chaos and self interest. What makes you think an equivalent can be formed by central planning? Even if it could, the actions of the EU in regards to censorship show that such a beast would be 1000x worse than the US tech companies it intends to replace.
Relying on well developed tech from a reliable long term ally makes sense, it's hard to deploy enough resources to compete when the resulting products will likely be worse. But that calculus has completely changed, the US is no longer a reliable long term ally. The EU's reliance on US tech is an utterly massive security and economic liability. Maybe their own products would be worse, but that'd still be better than alternatives that can get sabotaged or yanked away at a moment's notice.
A decade ago I would have expected EU alternatives to be much worse but I'm less sure these days. Most US tech companies have moved past the innovator stage and spend most of their efforts on rent seeking and marketing.
All that said, I don't actually expect the EU to handle this well. They've been fumbling long term threats with regularity, and I don't they'll suddenly start doing better. They'll probably muddle along with most of their US dependencies until a massive disaster hits them in the face.
There has been a much stronger capital supply than in a shattered group of countries.
The EU does not exist as a unit, it's 27 sovereign states cooperating. In the EU the single market is an achievement across countries, but can't compare with single large internal markets.
China as the second economy of the world managed to succeed with a centralised plan.
So I think market size and economic power is a bigger indicator than centralised vs not.
Tech companies are the least capital intensive of any industry (pre-LLM bubble). Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K. China has kept out foreign competition and applied heavy censorship across its tech companies, but they arose and competed as a free market amongst themselves, not by central planning.
That's why I can guarantee you that the EU will not block or eradicate US big-tech from Europe since such a massive trade war with the US will set it back technologically, economically and politically, but it will instead enter into a silent partnership with big-tech where "we'll let you monetize the EU userbase, and in return you'll spy on EU citizens for us through your datacenters here, turning in anyone who protests against us, censor anything we tell you to under "hate speech" laws, and push our propaganda to the top of the algorithm, this way we both win: you get to make money, and we get to keep our seats in power".
Basically it will be outsourcing the traditional government censorship, oppression and propaganda work to the tech private sector because it's 1000x more efficient that the government at this, and it also helps keep the image of those in power clean since if they get caught they can throw big-tech under the bus with some fines. It's literally the perfect setup.
How do I know this? Is it because I'm clairvoyant or have a tinfoil hat on? No, it's because US big-techs like Apple literally did the same deal for the CCP in China, so now that the can of worms has been opened, all the other countries want the same deal with big-tech.
And if you think the EU leadership is somehow morally above these types of practices, boy you couldn't be more wrong. Their unscrupulous use of Israeli Pegasus spy-ware and Palantir surveilance-ware proves they're not, they're cut from the same cloth as the rest. They'll gladly copy the CCP great firewall and give it a coat of blue paint with some gold stars on it and say it's for "protecting your democracy".
> That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
Europe at least has missed the last couple of trains on this. No one has trillions of dollars to spend and catch up with the US tech sector.
the best would be some kind of movement from the bottom that customers start to divest at least from some services. Help closest family and direct friends to:
- install Firefox/Zen as main browser
- install uBlock Origin
- switch to Brave Search / Qwant for search engine
- switch to signal for IM for communicating with your parents and loved one (still use WhatsApp elsewhere)
- help family setup passkeys using Bitwarden EU
- advocate that they don't need to buy the latest android but can get 2nd hand e.g. motorola edge+ (2023) and help setup your parents linageos
- when switching router pick one with openwrt support and setup AdGuard on the router (some asus routers already have such things build in)
So divest from American big tech to … new American startup tech? Remind me again of who came up with the phrase “don’t be evil”.
Most of those are open source. Even if not perfect this is still better than doing nothing and still better than perfect but not user friendly.
> Help closest family and direct friends to:
- buy european processors like ... (?)
- buy european motherboards like ... (?)
- buy european RAM like ... (?)
- buy european SSD/harddrives like ... (?)
- buy european graphics cards like ... (?)
Trully a road to independence. /s
So is better to do nothing because we cannot divest everything right now? You start by divesting partners that are getting complicated (this year US). Apple divest its supplies by using many different partners and stop using one if they having problem with one.
EU can for sure get a most of those you mentioned from South Korea and Japan who are also having issues with US. At least with those countries EU has stronger hands than with US.
Like any other country that relies on US, is doing so much better!
US sucks as an ally! Please do not cover it up under "big tech"!
If we would develop local alternatives, there is a good chance US will bomb them!
One thing I don't know is the extent to which this stuff goes on all the time but just doesn't typically get air on news. In the past I remember hearing about stories about things hitting (I think) WTO courts. That's much higher up the escalation chain. It seems like to some extent there is an interested audience for this right now so the threshold for what is reportable has shifted. That doesn't necessarily mean anything has actually changed.
Bingo. Same stuff was happening under previous administrations but it was quiet. There is no advantage to airing your laundry. Take the Indian case, by having the deal aired, Indian politicians have had to look tough. The US could have gotten a better deal by making the threat behind closed diplomatic channels.
Amateur hour at the white house. (Or shall I say Trump hour?)
From the outside it seems like there's no real "leadership" in Europe.
I fear that this slowly but surely sets up a sort of "we need our own strong man" vibe over time...
It's impossible to divest from US-based Big Tech as long as the average citizen is 100% addicted to Google and Meta products.
They're addicted to the content, not the apps themselves. If they no longer had access to Instagram tomorrow, and had to use another app which offered the same content, most users would switch without looking back.
> use another app which offered the same content
The content is not on other apps though. Maybe other apps have other content, but it's not the good content that people want.
A simple Chinese-style firewall level ban would make it quite simple, actually.
>If the past few months have taught us anything, it's that Europe is so cowed and poorly-led that they'll knuckle-under and submit to whatever.
Past few months? Just look at their response to security and Russian aggression. I lost hope years ago.
>it's that Europe is so cowed and poorly-led
If you have a 27 country bloc and are rationally limited to the actions of the most timid or compromised, it's pretty easy to manipulate the actions of the whole. We know Hungary is effectively a Russia proxy, for instance, and has massively influenced the response to Russia. Similarly a couple of EU leaders (Meloni, Orban) are Trump lickspittles/mini-mes so there again they'll deny any collective response that offends their best pal.
Hungary didn’t do anything that would make a big difference in the outcomes because the West does not have enough power to adequately sanction Russia. The real problem was that EU and USA failed to respond in the first year of war by mobilizing their economies for military production. Ukraine needed shells, tanks, air defense etc in much higher volume than allies could provide. Economic sanctions are face-saving measure for European politicians, because that war has never been seen as ours, yet some token response was necessary. Look at how much “solidarity” Ukrainian refugees receive now in Europe, where Poland started deporting people and Germany is cutting financial help. Europe isn’t cowed or poorly led. You just misunderstand its obscure priorities, which are trade, jobs for Ur-Europeans and climate change (which is a real problem here), while pretending that we care about the rest of the world, peace etc.
> You just misunderstand its obscure priorities, which are trade, jobs for Ur-Europeans and climate change
Are those obscure priorities though? Putting local employment/wellfare/environment first seems justifiable to me, no?
I would argue that EU action has been pretty aligned with their actual citizens interests during this whole conflict:
- Kept domestic consequences contained (energy price)
- Prevented escalation
- Scaled up domestic military readiness especially in border nations
- Hurt destabilizing Russian expansionism via sanctions/secondhand arms almost for free
I would much prefer a principled, strongly voiced NO to neo-imperialism in the form of massive support and intervention. But would that be in the best interest of most voters? I'd argue no.
> Are those obscure priorities though
Only in the sense that they are not in the spotlight when EU officials talk about Ukraine. They don’t say “We have more important things to do”. But you are of course right, they dominate the agenda.
I think the correct response would be to immediately ban Facebook and Twitter, to make the worst oligarchs reconsider their support of Trump and show that Europe means it (one can always dream). I don't believe slow and silent are the correct stances to adopt when the global economy is held at the whims of this egotistical manchild.
Trump can make drastic course changes much faster than Europe can ever agree on any strategy. Trying to match Trump's approach of drastic responses is a losing strategy for Europe. All Trump has to do is put 200% tariffs on LNG exports right as winter starts or something similar. Democratic governments don't last long when their population literally starts to freeze to death.
Yes, my ban of Twitter and Facebook is pure wishful thinking, I know that. But ultimately, it's a war of attrition, and it's the US vs the World. The US economy is alreay starting to show cracks, I don't think de-escalation is the way.
Nah. If Trump does that you will see how fast the Nord Stream 1/2 can be fixed.
I like how Europe's solution to Trump is to make itself a puppet of an even worse dictator. While expecting the worse dictator to not use that leverage to take over more of Europe. Who will charge 100% tariffs as well since a weak Europe is to their advantage as well.
This is not what will happen at all. I won’t go here into much detail, but the thing is, there’s a demand in Europe that cannot be fulfilled from other sources for the time being. Europe is not going to fix America or Russia, so it has to trade with them. It is a huge market for both, that cannot be ignored, and access to that market won’t be sold cheap. If they have to compete to sell us gas, great. The lesson has been learned anyway, emission targets will be hit, alternative energy sources will make us much less dependent within next 15-20 years.
You should google Cartel. Trump and Putin won't be competing. They'll be fleecing Europe for every cent they can while keeping Europe as weak as possible. Maybe manage to get a few more Russia aligned right wing governments if enough people freeze to death and Europe doesn't block the propaganda for fear of more freezing.
I understand very well what cartel is. “Cartel” formed by Trump and Putin to manipulate prices of gas for Europe is a fantasy for many reasons. Bad strategy for Russia (and I’m sure I know Russia better than you), technically hard to implement (sanctions don’t work well in both directions), will have consequences for global markets (Europe gets Russian oil via India now - are they going to be impacted?) etc etc.
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> If the past few months have taught us anything, it's that Europe is so cowed and poorly-led that they'll knuckle-under and submit to whatever.
This is a good thing, because a lot of European led regulation has been pretty terrible.
I'm in EU and maybe my opinion is controversial, but I think there's something very positive for EU citizens about Trump using tarrifs to pressure the EU politically.
Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
I feel the US/Trump is our only hope of slowing this down as a guarantee of (future) true democracy at the EU level essentially doesn't exist for us any other way. The EU sees China as an example to follow and I feel Trump/US is the only thing trying to stop EU leadership of going there.
> Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
The countries already want to it themselves. See the UK for an example.
This is not a controversial take. If people can see what their future holds by seeing examples, they can take action regardless of their role in society.
Currently we're seeing a global version of a SaaS rugpull, and this should wake people up, if they're not awaken already.
I think you see the US as a warning for how the EU could develop in an authoritarian way, and so inoculate it from making the same mistakes.
I think the person you replied to thinks that the US is a shining beacon of liberty that is going to force the EU to be less authoritarian.
You're right, I read their comment wrong. My mistake. But, from the eastern border of the EU, US looks way more authoritarian than EU at this point in time.
I like to watch this small excerpt from Frank Zappa interview time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fam5wRXcoQE
Shining beacon of liberty, no that's ridiculous, but in this case it is forcing the EU to be less authoritarian.
First, there are no EU citizens. Only citizens of countries that are EU members.
Second, no EU-wide regulation can come into being without support from Council, and Council is formed by member countries.
As always, people are complaining EU this, EU that, when EU in reality is their own country, among others. It will be your country that will do the censorship etc. If your country is small and weak it has low impact on the international state of affairs, regardless of its membership in the EU. Macron or Merz have much more to say than von der Leyen.
As Portuguese living in Germany for a few decades, I feel that first we need to sort out the local mess, otherwise the central EU is already lost anyway.
Both are true IMHO. EU has structural domestic problems it keeps ignoring for too long and now it also has external new ones on top: Russia, Trump, etc. Both need fixing.
The thing is, EU politicians have been more than asleep at the wheel for over 2 decades now coasting along, and it shows in the mess we are in today: energy polices, tech development, economic growth, unsustainable welfare state, lack of strong defense, etc.
All they do is flashy speeches and virtue signaling on the international stage while not actually fixing any problems, just cashing in their paycheques till they can reitre on their generous pensions and leve the mess for the next ones to fix or just keep kicking the can down the road.
Current elites are discredited, as is (neo)liberalism, but I don't think we will have any significant shift until a really serious crisis, because overall public still cannot face new reality, and politics is downstream of culture. So it will get worse until it can get better.
>So it will get worse until it can get better.
Sure, the issue is that whenever Europe "got worse" in a serious crisis, it never ended well. Usually millions died, and it was only better after that for a little while. So what do we do?
>It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
What specific actions has the EU done to ban free speech and control the political narrative?
I see the US deporting legal permanent residents when they peacefully protest against US policy[1]. and I see the US searching social media accounts and forbidding private accounts[2] for visa applicants. Both of those seem like Trump is attempting to control political speech more than anything the EU has done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
[2] To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.” https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
> evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government
Replacing it with a centralized totalitarian US government that we don't even get to vote on.
Trump's approach to free speech: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Given where Trump seems to be going, depending on him as a saviour of anything suggests fellow traveler status. Or, perhaps, staggering naivety.
Except Trump is just as authoritarian as China so what difference does it make who they adore?
> Except Trump is just as authoritarian as China so what difference does it make who they adore?
How do you figure?
Oh maybe you haven't seen the news, sorry.
The capitol storming and freeing all that participated. Having major cities being taken over by the army. Stifling free press. You know all that good old dictatorship playbook stuff.
> The capitol storming and freeing all that participated.
I don't have an opinion on that. It is the president's prerogative to pardon whoever he wants, no justification necessary.
> Having major cities being taken over by the army.
That is the National Guard. Not the same thing as the Army. The Army would be a very bad option should that happen. The cities are not taken over. The mayor/police chief of those cities have no desire to reign in crime, the federal government has to step in. Depending on your political views, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line is that people much more safer now in DC than they were 2-3 weeks ago.
> Stifling free press.
For this I have zero information. Link(s)?
> The cities are not taken over. The mayor/police chief of those cities have no desire to reign in crime, the federal government has to step in. Depending on your political views, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line is that people much more safer now in DC than they were 2-3 weeks ago.
I find that the people who make statements like this don't actually live in cities. Its like you got your talking points from Stephen Miller.
How exactly is the US/Trump preventing the progress of this wave of authoritarianism? They're part of it, dummy. Using all their influence and power to prop up far right parties accross the continent, normalizing insane ideas about population control and ending democracy. There's no getting out of this without a genuine regain of interest in actual liberal values (not speaking of american democrats here), and Trump embodies their exact opposite.
Trump and free speech in one sentence?! Did you see what they did against protestoors in university campuses or how many people they arrested or deported for just saying their opinion?
I want whatever you're on mate.
I'd rather go to the China model of authoritarianism with working infrastructure (trains, what have you) and a belief in science than to the US model of anti-science regressive authoritarianism where the one percent are the new feudal lords...
The big assumption here is that authoritarianism in Europe would get you better infrastructure.
My personal belief is that for good infrastructure you want capable local industry (to build it) AND a population that is not too wealthy (because this gives additional infrastructure more relative value, keeps the workforce for building it more affordable and thus citizens less likely to oppose the whole thing).
I don't think that having european dictators would really help either of those points, so my infrastructure expectations from neofascism are quite low.
You think the "one percent" are anti-science authoritarians? Have you met them?
The Koch brothers and there anti climate science propaganda network immediately come to mind, as does the Mercer family and their sponsoring of Breitbart.
If I had said "you can't even find 2 extreme outliers among the 3 million 1%ers in the US that are opposed to one particular type of science because of their financial interests" then this would be a reasonable argument. But I didn't say that. And even then, Koch industries is a terrible example. They employ thousands of scientists and engineers.
Called this a while ago[0].
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
I'll call another one: The US is only going to do this to the EU and maybe a few other countries whose populace has zero spine and will just submit. A great example of a country that in effect has regulated US big tech far, far more strongly than the EU, and to far more effect, is South Korea. But ironically, this is really never brought up in international spaces, it's always about EU regulation, when they're pretty mild.
I'm willing to bet money the US won't threaten Korea much at all, because its public would rightly tell them to fuck off and it would cost the ruling party significant votes. The politicians would have to be super discreet about somehow deregulating without the public noticing.
I say this spending my time between both Europe and Korea and being ingrained in both culturally.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432419.
I wish our governments in Europe just ate the tariffs.
It's time to diversify our ridiculous export-based economies and invest into creating a strong internal market.
Yeah me too. We have to stand up to the bully or it's only getting worse. It's bad enough that von der leyen basically gave away a free trillion for "not getting the worst tariffs imposed on us".
I used to play a lot of Coup in college. In that game, I can bluff about having a card that lets me steal 2 coins from you. Our group quickly learned that if you let someone get away with that bluff once, not only would they steal from you every turn, everyone else would also start stealing from you too, because they assume you wouldn't challenge them.
As a non-European, I associate your exports with fine and luxury goods, from French wine to Swiss watches to German cars.
I don’t see staples coming out of Europe. So I’m wondering what a strong internal market would be?
We do make staples. The ones I have here are made in Europe. We don't buy such things from the US (though from China, maybe). I think a lot of it is just not very visible because it's mainly for internal market use.
In fact I'm not buying much of anything from the US anymore. If anything to screw up Trump's "trade deficit" even more despite his tariffs.
These? ;) https://www.stapleheadquarters.com/Fasco_Staples
But yeah, in the US seems like every consumer good is made in China. In the EU there's still a ton of shit made locally. Appliances from Poland, clothes from Portugal, etc. Brands that Americans would not recognise.
I guess I wasn’t clear: I meant staple goods not staples as in paper fastening clips.
I really like how the USA has collapsed in Cyperpunk lore.
I take it you are you a fan of the NUSA lore then? Arasaka ftw.
In an ideal world, other nations would have been in a position to impose sanctions on the US and/or declare US (this administration, rather) a pariah state. We are definitely not there, for a variety of reasons. Let this be a cautionary tale. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is now.
As a Brazilian, I'm a bit torn on this issue. On the one hand, our social media regulations are terrible, are being approved without due process, and will certainly be used for (political) censorship. On the other hand, it's annoying that the US has to interfere, and concerning that they even can interfere in the first place.
Give me one example of a social media regulation being approved without "due process" or whatever that means. It's annoying when I stub my toe on the couch or when I drop my slice of bread butter-first. It's a criminal attack on the sovereignty of another nation when the US tries to interfere.
> Brazil’s supreme court has ruled that social media platforms can be held legally responsible for users’ posts, in a decision that tightens regulation on technology giants in the country.
> Companies such as Facebook, TikTok and X will have to act immediately to remove material such as hate speech, incitement to violence or “anti-democratic acts”, even without a prior judicial takedown order
https://www.ft.com/content/4a5235c5-acd0-4e81-9d44-2362a25c8...
Twitter was blocked immediately, without a public hearing or appeal process.
> In early May 2023, when the bill was about to be approved, Google and Telegram used their own platforms to express their opposition to the bill to their Brazilian users, and soon after were forced to back down by government institutions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Congressional_Bill...
Brazil has a low "Freedom on the Net" rating, "partly free": https://freedomhouse.org/country/brazil/freedom-net/2024# .
>The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, temporarily banned Elon Musk’s social media platform X last year after the billionaire refused to obey court orders to suspend certain accounts.
>On May 11, the president of the Chamber of Deputies requested that the directors of Google and Telegram in the country be investigated for their actions against the bill, describing these actions as forceful and abusive of the companies' hegemonic positions in the market, motivated by economic interests, and cited possible crimes against democratic institutions.
I'm not even a supporter of the current Brazilian administration, or even the political system for that matter, but these companies MUST obey court orders and MUST refrain from using their positions to attack governmental institutions or to prevent legislation that goes against their economic-political gains. They may be above US law, but they will have to lobby harder if they want to go over some of them here.
Social media is over rated. Ask Assange and Snowden.
What happens on social media is of the herd, by the herd, for the herd. As Nietzsche would say like organized religion it produces nothing but a herd or slave morality.
It will loose steam just like organized religion.
> On the one hand, our social media regulations are terrible, are being approved without due process, and will certainly be used for (political) censorship
Luckily this isn't happening in the US and if it is definitely isn't getting rapidly worse.
This is happening in the US, but only in the case of US domestic politics. The relevant tech companies actually provide an incredibly free and politically uncensored service in most of the world simply because they don't give a damn about politics in country X and the politicians in those countries don't have the leverage over them to make them care like US politicians do. Censoring costs money, and these companies would rather not do it. Citizens of many other countries, like Brazil, are the beneficiaries of this situation.
Huh, Brazil is the poster child proving the opposite.
Censoring of e.g. Twitter in Brazil (and afaik India) has famously increased a lot after its takeover by US vice-president Musk.
Citizen boycott is then needed.
As a Canadian it started the moment they threatened to invade their long-term ally.
As an American, it is absolutely astounding how stupid of a move that was (in addition to tariffs on Canada). This is going to have long lasting repercussions for US-Canada relations, and for what exactly?
How effective is that?
In some areas - like US wine and alcohol sales to Canada - and tourism, according to ongoing news reports it is apparently devastating - they are begging Canadians to buy their products again.
In other areas - when the entire Canadian federal (and most provincial and territorial governments - many municipal governments, and of course the entire educational sector due to low-cost licensing) and large-scale industries are completely dependent on Microsoft 365 + Azure platforms (probably AWS as well) - information technology and management usage of US technologies is definitely not being boycotted...
It should be very easy to get away from Microsoft products, but management would need to be tough and put their foot down. Plus once the move succeeds the IT budget will probably have a lot of $ freed for other things.
I saw an attempt at a very large company to abandon M/S, it was working but there were a huge amount complaints. Then after a couple months, you can guess what happened. Certain people, usually 1st and 2nd level management, got exemptions, then some "important" finance people. Guess what, the move failed because you ended up with 2 tiers of employees, the revolts started happening. After 1 year, the relented and went back to M/S.
... well, the big problem I would see is not in the "basics" - storing documents on a web-enabled location is solved in the open-source world.
However - it is not just that when looking at Microsoft 365 + Azure - it is the inter-connected dependencies between SharePoint Online, Teams, Purview and the desktop OS/Office applications; Metadata/smart-documents, IRM/DLP/Records Management, etc.
My personal decision? Not very impactful now that I live in Europe, but it means I will not set foot on US soil, that I divest from US-based services, and that I don't buy American.
I don't care how effective it is, because there is no anger behind it. It's just a thing I stopped doing, like some people stop drinking or eating meat. Those habits stick.
It seems to be having a pretty damaging impact to the US alcohol industry. Not sure if that counts as effective to you but it is having impacts.
https://www.wsj.com/business/us-alcohol-industry-canada-boyc... (Not paywalled) https://archive.is/r8Cxr
I have convinced some of my clients to move to European-based cloud offerings. I can't say I've moved millions yet, but we're in the order of tens of thousands per month staying in Europe rather than going to US.
Does Big Tech actually want this? Seems like a huge risk for them.
The European Union needs to immediately build its own sovereign ecosystem where its citizens will finally be able to enjoy the full protections of EU regulations, such as chat control, digital ID laws and censorship of vaguely defined "hate speech".
We need to fight the Washington fashists who want to deprive us of our "democracy with european characteristics".
This is aimed at the European Union, India and Brazil, who have all recently been mulling Big Tech regulations. It seems to be the reward for the massive support Trump has been given by the tech sector.
It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
> It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
Win some, lose some. Living in the EU, I really hope the EU bends the knee on this.
India and Brazil are part of BRICS, so they don't really need that much of a push to be fully aligned with China on most things.
Here's a video from the India / China border https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJEiGiGc1I
BRICS is a joke.
May be a joke, but countries tend to put aside small issues until they create alliances to fend off bigger threats, and then they go back to their issues.
Disputed borders are not small issues. They are the issues that make all others look small. It took decades for Canada and Denmark to resolve their dispute over a completely worthless uninhabited arctic rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island. India and China aren't just going to drop their border dispute over some internet beef with the US.
They can put it on ice, pun intended, until they fix their beef with the US.
I don't see why the EU would cave in, Big Tech is more profitable than anything the EU sells to the US and they are paying close to nothing right now.
But the EU leadership is so weak now that we never know, even if it doesn't make sense.
The EU has no leverage. Its own institutions are all 100% Microsoft shops with zero interest in changing that. The US has sanctioned staff at the International Criminal Court meaning MS suspended their Outlook accounts, and the ICC seems to have done .... exactly nothing. The chief prosecutor there had to open up a new personal account at Protonmail instead, although Protonmail keeps talking about leaving Switzerland due to new surveillance laws also so it's unclear how long it'll remain European (and of course Switzerland isn't in the EU anyway).
Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No. Can the EU Commission do without extra tax revenues from US tech? Yes.
>Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No.
Wrong. The answer is yes, they very much can. Do they want to? No.
No, EU economy would collapse if all US tech was sanctioned tomorrow. Companies and governments have nowhere to migrate their Windows/Office/Outlook/Azure setups to.
Russia is running on Windows too and did not collapsed. It turns out that companies wants to make money and are willing to jump through hoops, sanctions or not.
Also you can just use cracked OS (illegal, but if Microsoft is out, it will become abandonware) and create alternative API for cloud services. How hard do you think it would be to create i.e. S3 compatible API? Wait that already exists - https://github.com/jchristn/S3Server
And you could continue with whatever Azure, AWS etc offers. In the end, it is just some variation of a REST server.
Russia has a homegrown Google competitor in the form of Yandex. It runs its own search engine, mail, cloud services, office suites etc. There isn't an EU equivalent AFAIK. And they had many years to prepare because Russia has been sanctioned in various forms for a long time going back to 2016.
Windows is not that important. It's more about Outlook, Office, all the enterprise apps running on US clouds, etc.
Which EU cloud providers can easily create knock offs and then let EU services migrate without changing anything on companies side, except just endpoints.
Furthermore EU equivalents of Yandex do exist - https://www.seznam.cz/ (Do you see the Yahoo in it?) or French Google: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en or equivalent of Google Maps https://mapy.com/en/ just have a look here: https://european-alternatives.eu/
They are small, sure, but the moment competition is gone, there is no reason for them not to scale
It doesn't take years to set up a local equivalent of Yandex, or indeed what Russia has set up. It's very feasible to do the same as Russia.
Yandex is older than Google itself is.
The building you in being 30 years old doesn't mean it takes 30 years old to build a new building.
As the other commenter pointed out, Russia's still live and kicking.
The opposite is also true, what Big Tech can do without the EU? It's their most profitable market and it's not like they are going to make up for the loss by selling in China.
The US tech industry doesn't have as much leverage as they think they do, the hardest part to replace is the hardware, which mostly isn't built in the US anyways
That reminds me of Mark Zukerberg which threatened to leave a while back... and denied it soon after realizing the bluff didn't work.
Where do you get that EU is their most profitable market?
When I worked for big tech the US was always the most profitable market, usually followed by the UK. Albeit that was a long time ago. But the EU has economically declined since so I doubt things changed much.
I.e. for Apple EU is 25% of revenue. Try to pull out from there, and shareholders will crucify whole Apple leadership.
If they did it unilaterally yes. If they did it at the same time as other companies due to US law, then probably not. More to the point, how many people in the EU use Apple tech and would be furious if it stopped working for them?
If it stops working because unilateral action from USA, it will likely create a rally around the flag effect.
Apple went as far as giving the keys to their servers to the Chinese government, that gives a clue on how valuable those top markets are.
Big tech is already under regulations in India, and it’s been growing tougher year on year.
Trump has already stuck 50% import duties on Indian products, conveniently exempting pharmaceuticals, of course. The pretext being “Russian oil.”
Since the government didn’t budge on oil, they’re hardly likely to budge on tech regulations.
> might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
"Might"?
Brazil already exports to China almost 3 times the amount it exports to the U.S.
And after the recent rise in tariffs against Brazil, China announced an huge increase in soybeans and coffee purchase from Brazil. Because of that the price of US soybeans dropped and American farmers sent an open letter to Trump asking him to not cause trouble.
Big tech regulations serve exactly two purposes (real, not stated):
1. Information control for political censorship
2. A source of cash from fines
The issue will not drive anyone into anyone else's orbit.
Big tech serves exactly three purposes (real, not stated):
- The precarization of work by wage compression and anti-worker rights lobbying (Uber)
- The overexploitation of attention for financial (ads) and political gains (tolerance and reach for the ultraliberal, protofascist, neonazi groups and narratives) through American state-sponsored algorithmic manipulation (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
- Assimilationism, erasure of local culture, traditions, identities, to achieve cultural hegemony (Netflix)
Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want. In the case of Uber that's great because I will never even think about doing business with the cab cartel again. I don't owe them a damn thing. Nor do I owe my own local culture any loyalty over what I can watch on Netflix. You could argue that the algorithmic feed on social media is a negative, but the idea that there is some underlying agenda is ridiculous. At worst it's like a drug dealer saying "I have what you want... heroin!"
> Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want
Oh, this is not true for a long time. Much better money can be made by making people want.
"Look what you made me do." It's no one's fault that you want things that are bad for you. Don't blame the pastry chef for making you want dessert.
It's remarkable to me that even after all the scandals and whistleblowing going on in the last decades about intelligence agencies, the US government, and big tech collaborating to surveil and control their own citizens or other nations, the recent, full public alignment between the big tech billionaires and the executive branch, not to mention the whole history of US imperialism, which you can boil down to violent expansion of private markets and capital to the detriment of other peoples, there are still smart people like yourself that don't question it in the slightest. In fact, embrace it. Hopefully you're benefiting directly from it, otherwise, you're just a frog getting slowly boiled in a pot of crumbling social environment. Also, did you ever ask yourself where your "preferences" or "wants" come from or how they form?
And none of that is profitable. It's quite the opposite. They do it because the government forces them to do it. Big tech companies don't want to do this, and didn't do this before the spooks came knocking. This is why government regulation will only make matters worse. These things are done because of, not in spite of, the government.
The government is them! Can you not see it? They are intertwined so hard, it's difficult to distinguish who wants what, because they MERGED. The state is ruled by the economic elite, and that's done via the government.
If the government were controlled by billionaires, we would be a lot more competently governed than we are. Democracy works, and I know it because the government's competence resembles its average citizen.
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Finally! Other countries should create conditions where worthwhile competitors can be founded and thrive, not regulate the crap out of everything.
That is precisely what the Digital Markets Act is there to do.
Turns out the Americans don't like the idea of worthwhile competitors.
> Other countries should
The most favorite 3 words of every imperialist gringo.
Their least favorite words are probably "sovereignty" and "self determination".
I'll bite. North Kora is sovereign and has self determination. Is it good or bad for the people?
My gripe is with the EU which feels the need to regulate everything. And my view is that it shouldn't. And if there is someone that can force them to rethink their approach, then I will support that.
And yes, other countries should follow the example of the US where everything is permitted unless explicitly denied, and not vice-versa.
I wish they banned big tech products in Europe as retaliation for tariffs. All that money being wasted on what? No value.
Keep Microsoft Office and Cloud for a couple of years. Obliterate the rest. S&P would collapse.
> Is it good or bad for the people?
It is very, very bad. But that is still their problem, not the U.S.'s problem.
That is the point of sovereignty.
And besides, an U.S.-supported "democracy" is quite often as bad (viz: Chile's Pinochet, Iran's Rheza Pahlevi, etc).
> force them
> other countries should
As a latin-american I say: please, Americans, keep thinking like that. Keep believing in "American exceptionalism". The more you do this kind of nationalist narcissism, the less relevant you'll become. And that's what I want.
The time of the nation-state is ending and the time of corpo-feudalism is beginning.
Have you checked why feudalism ended?
depends where you are looking.
In england? started to break due to the black death
In russia? Lenin.
It ended? Just seems a bit more "timeshared" than before. One lord for your labor, another for your land. The illusion of a choice buys a lot of compliance.
No. A trade war is exactly the affirmation of nation-states power over corporation's interests. Corporations want stable globalization, not trade wars.
You might think Trump wants to serve corporations. However, mostly by incompetence, he is doing the opposite.
The EU built an anti-coercion instrument that allows for all sorts of trade measures, including bans from public tenders and no longer recognizing intellectual property. It was built specifically for cases like this and only requires a qualified majority of member states in order to be used.
I say it's high time we threaten its use.
Oh god. A friend of mine quotes a writer: "The old world is dying. The new is slow to be born: now is the time of monsters."
And this is the only framework I can look to this news with. Either that or mercantilism, I'm told.
The original quote from Gramsci opens this essay:
https://www.lacittafutura.it/cultura/il-vecchio-muore-e-il-n...
In the end it will be TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).
But each country/place will react differently. Europe, Canada, Japan, Mexico and UK will get scared and just obey, as they've doing all along.
India, Brazil and China will mostly just ignore this.
Can the EU finally grow a pair and fight back? Jfc
Since the article is very low quality, let me try to fill in some context.
In the US, our constitution's first amendment is taken fairly seriously (by many, not all):
- https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The way we think of it, is that government has no business shaping the speech of the people, because the speech of the people can shape the government. Government has to be able to flexibly change to meet the times and if governments decides it doesn't want to change, it can just silence people who would risk changing it without making it obvious they are being targeted. We all know that whenever government thinks it sees a threat to society or to the country, real or imagined, it will lash out in all directions to solve it. We just want to make sure speech control is not one of those directions.
Now, we have the internet and it is not escaping regulation. Companies can be free to decide what is and isn't on their platforms. They are not the government and the first amendment is not about all forms of censorship, just government influenced censorship in spirit.
Obviously, the big tech companies operate in many countries with many different languages and in cases where the local government requires censorship in some language most people in the US don't even speak, the negative impact is limited. A lot of people speak English, however and increasingly whenever some censorship law is applied in some new country its influence on English speaking content grows the more people from those countries use the same platforms as people in other countries do.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-admin-weighs-sanc...
- "The Digital Services Act, a flagship EU law, requires large online platforms to take stronger action against illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. The law, according to EU officials, aims to make the digital environment safer while preserving freedom of expression."
- "U.S. critics, however, argue that the DSA imposes "undue" restrictions on free speech and disproportionately impacts American platforms. In an internal directive issued in early August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed U.S. diplomats across Europe to raise objections to the law and encourage EU governments and digital regulators to consider amending or repealing it."
That law came into effect in 2022 and in can be viewed as bad in multiple ways:
1. It is government regulating "speech" in a more broadly defined way at an also broader scale, not companies. This would be considered unconstitutional here in the US.
2. The technical complexity of it encourages applying a lowest common denominator censorship across all content, applying it to even countries where the laws aren't applicable (for example, inside the US). So, it is effectively being applied in the US already and would be unconstitutional.
3. Many of the forms of censored speech are more commonly applied to conservatives and this can decrease the conservative participation on these platforms, which then means increasingly people are exposed to much higher majority left-leaning content.
4. It would be good for the CCP. It wants to expand the censorship of speech so that other countries look more favorably at their internal approach to it. It also wants to expand the influence of left-leaning thought, because it wants communism to be seen more favorably. It's not impossible that the goal for global communism never actually died and China's rapid growth has emboldened them.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1150922432599...
- "As the President of the United States, I will stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies. Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology. They also, outrageously, give a complete pass to China's largest Tech Companies. This must end, and end NOW! With this TRUTH, I put all Countries with Digital Taxes, Legislation, Rules, or Regulations, on notice that unless these discriminatory actions are removed, I, as President of the United States, will impose substantial additional Tariffs on that Country's Exports to the U.S.A., and institute Export restrictions on our Highly Protected Technology and Chips. America, and American Technology Companies, are neither the “piggy bank” nor the “doormat” of the World any longer. Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or, consider the consequences! Thank you for your attention to this matter. DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"
In a sense, if US companies don't censor at foreign government's demands, then they can be fined. If it is unreasonable or impossible and it simply becomes perpetual fines, it can also be seen as a basic tax to use big tech companies as another source of money to extract. The money is not necessarily the critical issue, though it will probably be seen in terms of the trade imbalance that Trump is trying to sort out.
Fundamentally it is probably about putting pressure on these laws to get them either amended or repealed.
Personally, if I reflect on it and history, this may very well be a national security issue. Not only for the US. At the same time with the rise of AI, there's a risk that unregulated digital speech can also become a national security issue in a much more dangerous way through automation. That line of thinking where, you might be a bot and bots aren't people, so it's ok to silence you! That's a very real dilemma.
For the moment at least, I have no sympathy for the EU on this argument and find their government censorship push unconvincing as a global good.
There may be others that know more about this, but this is just my understanding and perspective of it as a Texan.
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Whats the alternative?
It’s Russian state ideology: freedom doesn’t actually exist, the only way is a total subordination to a nation state, only certain nations states are allowed to be independent (Russia is one of them), others are to be vasals to us, because of our capacity to make war.
If you live in Russia, you need this kind of beliefs.
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This is a long time coming. Europe deserves to feel the hurt for all the pointless cookie permission popups they've subjected the world to.