EU Parliament Calls For Detachment From US Tech Giants (heise.de) 102
The European Parliament is calling on the European Commission to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants by prioritizing EU-based cloud, AI, and open-source infrastructure. The report frames "European Tech First," public procurement reform, and Public Money, Public Code as necessary self-defense against growing U.S. control over critical digital infrastructure. Heise reports: In terms of content, the report focuses on a strategic reorientation of public procurement and infrastructure. The compromise line adopted stipulates that member states can favor European tech providers in strategic sectors to systematically strengthen the technological capacity of the Community. The Greens even called for a stricter regulation here, where the use of products "Made in EU" should become the rule and exceptions would have to be explicitly justified. They also pushed for a definition for cloud infrastructure that provides for full EU jurisdiction without dependencies on third countries.
With the decision, the MEPs want to lay the foundation for a European digital public infrastructure based on open standards and interoperability. The principle of Public Money, Public Code is anchored as a strategic foundation to reduce dependence on individual providers. Software specifically developed for administration with tax money should therefore be made available to everyone under free licenses. For financing, the Parliament relies on the expansion of public-private investments. A "European Sovereign Tech Fund" endowed with ten billion euros was discussed beforehand, for example, to specifically build strategic infrastructures that the market does not provide on its own. The shadow rapporteur for the Greens, Alexandra Geese, sees Europe ready to take control of its digital future with the vote. As long as European data is held by US providers subject to laws such as the Cloud Act, security in Europe is not guaranteed.
With the decision, the MEPs want to lay the foundation for a European digital public infrastructure based on open standards and interoperability. The principle of Public Money, Public Code is anchored as a strategic foundation to reduce dependence on individual providers. Software specifically developed for administration with tax money should therefore be made available to everyone under free licenses. For financing, the Parliament relies on the expansion of public-private investments. A "European Sovereign Tech Fund" endowed with ten billion euros was discussed beforehand, for example, to specifically build strategic infrastructures that the market does not provide on its own. The shadow rapporteur for the Greens, Alexandra Geese, sees Europe ready to take control of its digital future with the vote. As long as European data is held by US providers subject to laws such as the Cloud Act, security in Europe is not guaranteed.
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government has made its position clear. It's absolute folly for non-US organizations to rely on US tech products or services.
Re: Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Whilst I would normally dislike "both sides" arguments, here it is actually valid. Politicians are woefully clueless about tech, economics, open-source, security (the UK has this strange idea that you can make encryption easily breakable by only good guys, where of course they're they good guys even when they aren't), etc.
We've been through this many many times and we will have to go through this all again many more times - at least until politicians realise that there's a difference between governing (plac
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Trump wants to people to offer bri
Re: Duh (Score:1)
Because Concorde and ESA job programs were such a raging success.
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Is that before Miller and Rubio invade Greenland?
The damage to the USA's international reputation is humongous - you guys are now a rogue nation.
Saying sorry under President Jasmine would be a start.
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la Presidenta could get up tomorrow morning, see that he didn't get the promised prize in his box of cereal, and decide that he absolutely had to have Iceland after all. Okay, so he mixes up Iceland and Greenland (see his Davos speech....BEFORE you have lunch), is that any reason to take him seriously?
Re: Trump already TACOed on Greenland (Score:1)
And amidst all of that bellyaching, they're still buying Russian gas four years into the war, still promising that they'll stop very soon. They'd be buying even more if Nord Stream didn't go fuck itself.
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They go back largely because MS will give them deep discounts. MS has four decades of experience of undercutting potential competition with loss leaders and similar tactics. The motives then were largely that open source represented significant savings, but now it's about data and technology sovereignty.
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They go back largely because MS will give them deep discounts. MS has four decades of experience of undercutting potential competition with loss leaders and similar tactics.
Microsoft can't give a better deal than Free Software.
All of this depending on vendors for everything by outsourcing everything is insane on every level. People need tech talent in house so they can go to THEM to fix their problems, not just throw up their hands when Microsoft has a big fuckup and Outlook mails don't arrive, so people can't work because they can't do 2FA to get into services they need to access remotely. You know, the same Microsoft that doesn't have logs for the break-ins on Azure?
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I've also been thinking lately about how similar Trump's behavior to EU and really any other person/entity is much like a husband who abuses his wife. First he smacks her around (phys
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Re: Duh (Score:2)
There is no reason to get off Microsoft just to get off cloud though. They really want to sell you the cloud, but if you don't give them another choice they will sell you local, with all the modern bells and whistles except copilot (who cares).
See Azure local offline and 365 local.
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The problem is that it is not actually the crazy one that is the problem. All he did was make the actual problem obvious. Without him, the problem stays and cannot easily be ignored again.
Re: Duh (Score:3)
Re: Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Added to that, it isn't that Europe cannot trust la Presidenta, it is that they now realize they cannot trust Americans. If Americans are stupid enough to put that oaf in the White House, how can Europe be confident Americans will not do something similarly stupid in the future. How can any country make an agreement with the U.S. and have any confidence the U.S. will uphold their part? What does an agreement even mean if it is only an agreement for America to hit them over the head with a smaller stick? Any interaction with the U.S. is now being treated by the U.S. as some sort of transaction. See la Presidenta's speech at Davos, he wants Iceland or Greenland (he gets confused, hint la Presidenta: volcanoes are not rare earth elements) because the U.S. single-handledly defeated Nazi Germany. Oh? And the Europeans and Russians had nothing to do with it?
More deeply, la Presidenta has shown just how brittle the American system of governance is. The Republicans drop their pants for him if he even hints at the notion. The Supreme Court has been taken over by Nazis. The judicial system is being corrupted by his judicial nominations and the R's in Congress are just potty with that. He nominated Emil Bove who has to be one of the most corrupted lawyers in the country. And that moron from Iowa, Charles Grassley, determined he was "honorable". Pathetic.
It is clear that Americans do not value democracy or freedom or human rights anymore. And it is now becoming clearer that a major segment of the pop. never did.
Re: Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Within the next few years most European countries are having elections, and in many of those alt.right, Putin-friendly populists are in pole position (Hungary, Italy and Slovakia are already lost; the UK, France and possibly Germany are on the way). So we'll soon prove we Europeans are just as stupid. In a worst case scenario Ukraine is toast, the EU dissolves, and there's war again.
Re: Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
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To be fair, the EU has its share of stupidity too. The UK and brexit, Poland, Hungary. At least it can control some of that stuff, and isn't likely to go to war over territory with any of them.
Re: Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
None of this is anywhere close to Trump stupidity. Pardoning war criminals and January 6ers in its first days in office, doing everything to deligitimize a free and fair election, threat to invade allied countries, stupid trade wars. Even his board of peace is a joke (lifetime Trump chairmanship, even after he leaves the white house, really?) This is doing long term permanent damage to the US reputation that will be much worse than any short term gain that may happen.
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True, the US has self destructed quite spectacularly. Hard to say exactly how much Putin helped, but who would have thought that Russia would win in the end?
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Added to that, it isn't that Europe cannot trust la Presidenta, it is that they now realize they cannot trust Americans. If Americans are stupid enough to put that oaf in the White House
More important than American stupidity is the weakness of our constitution. Clearly the alleged checks and balances which are supposed to make the system work do not exist. Therefore it would be insane to trust the USA unless we rewrite or amend it in some way with extremely clear metrics for when a president MUST be removed, even if we get a handle on our white supremacist problem (and GLWT.)
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In short you have a people problem, not a documentation problem.
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I don't think the presence or lack of a Constitution is a problem. I just think the US political system has a really terrible design compared to a Parliamentary system. Additionally, the fact that judges are partisan appointments rather than being recommended by a non-partisan committee of jurists is a huge problem.
In the US, there's an election every two years (for the House) which makes representatives in perpetual campaign mode. And because election dates are fixed, campaigns for President also last
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It is clear that Americans do not value democracy or freedom or human rights anymore. And it is now becoming clearer that a major segment of the pop. never did.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
"Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Footnotes
Hermann Goering (1
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I see some people saying it'll calm down after trumps out of office they don't seem to realise once the effort has been put into moving off US tech it's unlikely they'll ever come back. Not only the loss of EU customers it's creating competitors funded by government.
I keep getting told I'm an idiot for saying that once the world figures out how to cut the US out of its transactions, whether it's digital or financial, it's not going to rush to hook back in once it seems we've reinstated some form of reasonably sane government. We're setting a precedent that every four years there's a possibility we'll go completely insane again, and nobody likes dealing with an unstable individual with some form of bipolar disorder. When it comes to planning for the future, you can't tr
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Indeed. But many people struggle to move away from something they think they know.
Re: Duh (Score:2)
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
It's way past time. It never made sense. And I say that as someone who has always lived in the US, and now probably always will given how the world (rationally) views the US today. In a world with OSS Unix[likes] it makes no sense for the world to be dependent on Microsoft. Even if there weren't a sovereignty issue, it's also shit [cnet.com] and the security is shit [cybersecuritydive.com]. It's just insane to depend on it. Though neither headline, summary, nor story calls them out in particular, that is by far the single greatest dependency on foreign software facing the EU.
About Time (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
This is a spectacular idea. Europe needs to go its own way into oblivion without any further US support.
Did you get your Trump phone yet?
Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly Obama's fault.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Raspberry Pi .... the most sold computer in history. .... around 70 million computers. An UK product following the steps of BBC Micro. And the last 500+ model is a really capable desktop machine, just it is not full of bloated software and/or services not needed.
And RiscV CPUs are becoming very capable also. ARM is from England also, and there is a lot of capable people around all Europe that can design what it is needed. In fact, the machines TSMC uses to create their magical chips are made in the Netherlands. Neither China nor the US have that level of capacity.
Maybe each set of related countries must have enough capacity for not to be anchored in other set of countries. They can interchange things, but not to use their products to force others to follow their political points of view.
We here in Latin America lack such level of technology, but we are delighted to see that we have "alternatives" in other parts of the planet. Not every good mind lives in the US, Europe, Orient ... they are around all the planet. And why not to le them grow? Why to starve the development capability of any country just because there are de-facto standard that are property of very few companies or countries?
>p>
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Also, ASML could just stop selling to US chipmakers... that'd get some attention.
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Intel, Texas Instruments, GlobalFoundries, Analog Devices - just to name a few.
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Intel, Texas Instruments, GlobalFoundries, Analog Devices - just to name a few.
Intel. Just Intel. Texas / Analogue do not buy from ASML (they do not have products with those requirements), Global Foundries is an Saudi company incorporated in the Caymans with Mubadala Investment Company as the 82% stock holder.
ASML's biggest customers aren't American, they are Korean and Taiwanese.
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ASML's biggest customers aren't American, they are Korean and Taiwanese
Which makes it all the more easy to cut off the Americans.
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The EU might as well try it while they still have high marketshare and influence in the world.
If they can make a foundation that's affordable, stable and enduring to run Government and Corporation stuff on, I think many Corporations will shift.
Their market should be those who would like the backward compatibility of mainframes (which can be for decades) but not the lock-in and cost. Many orgs and governments don't need that much change - the processes are the sa
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It will. In a few 100 years. Maybe.
Re: Good (Score:2)
In fact, after a bit of struggling, the opposite happens. Bye bye.
Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
"Avoid OrangeWare!"
We are now a fucking pariah. The Iraq war also made us a pariah, but not in the commercial sense. Donnie just had to be the strongly top-most pariah ever seen in USA history, believe me!
Our Constitution strongly needs to shore up checks & balances on the Prez. Amendments could pass if GOP is embarrassed enough after Don's reign to try to patch relations with the world & voters; then Congress could get the 2/3 votes needed. Fairly unlikely, but not unrealistic.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Informative)
Our Constitution strongly needs to shore up checks & balances on the Prez.
Our Constitution already has checks and balances on Presidential overreach. What we have is the perfect storm of both houses of Congress with a majority that refuses to do anything against the Orange Idiot, a DoJ that has a sycophant that also refuses to prosecute obvious violations and instead is seeking to punish past foes, and a Supreme Court that is predisposed to lean conservative or look away at obvious violations.
However, even MAGA is getting tired of broken promises, flagrant violations of the rule of law, and increased prices for everything. The promise of "a little pain for long term gain" was about months in their minds, not decades.
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Our Constitution already has checks and balances on Presidential overreach.
It effectively does not, because as you can plainly see, they don't work.
a DoJ that has a sycophant that also refuses to prosecute obvious violations
Gee, which branch of the government is that in? The AG reports directly to the president. Looks like that was a bad idea.
However, even MAGA is getting tired of broken promises, flagrant violations of the rule of law, and increased prices for everything.
Not tired enough of it to say so. Until they are out there opposing the maggots still supporting Cheeto Benito with the rest of us, they are still enablers.
We need a 4th Branch (Score:2)
But that should be expected to happen every couple of hundreds years out of sheer probability.
Because the DOJ is under the Executive branch, the Prez has too much influence over it. We need a 4th branch for various committees such as DOJ, department oversite committees, and Federal Reserve. Make it hard to change the board
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Re: Go for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lol, when some ruzzkies try to justify bombing Ukraine, they say "hey, Ukraine, you said you wanted to get rid of Soviet inheritance, now we're doing it for you", confusing on purpose the "Soviet inheritance" of the NKVD, Golodomor, totalitarian oppression and the persecution of the 50s and the zastoy era to mean the things Ukrainians built there themselves.
Just like them, you yap about "returning" shit to the us without considering even for a moment that the android is to a considerable extent Linux, a "product" of Finland, that most of the hardware is manufactured in Asia on machinery made in Holland, etc. and that your attempt to show the supposed untenability of the EP actually shows how dumb your government is.
Not very smart, your maga lot, but so very Soviet.
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Spasiba for your bullshit, tavarisch, we were missing the putin propaganda department. 15 rubbles sent to your account.
Re:Go for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds great, mate.
If Europe wants to release a decent Linux phone free from the colonial oppression of US tech giants then sign me up and ship to Australia. :)
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When EU build domestic CPU for server/personal/mobile comparable to AMD/Intel/Apple/Google, etc.
Huh? Domestic? Not even American companies are capable of building domestic CPUs with precise zero of them made by AMD/Intel/Apple/Google in America.
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Re:Go for it. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't use anything from Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram or Apple. No Amazon, Netflix, Paypal or eBay accounts. I do have an Android phone, alas, but I'm not really dependent on Google for anything. I have a few offline games and other than that, it's just texting and calls. My next phone will be an open-source one.
As for email and calendar, I am de-Googled [skoll.ca]. Basically, all the big American tech firms could disappear tomorrow and my personal computing environment wouldn't notice. (There'd be worldwide chaos, of course... but my little corner of the Internet would be just fine.)
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Amen, sister.
Cloud Sovereignty (Score:5, Informative)
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Ok, maybe if they do high end encryption locally before sending ANY data to the cloud, perfectly padded changes (every hour the exact same amount of data changes in the cloud, if no content change, that amount of data is re-encrypted so that it looks to the cloud like new data), and perhaps few other measures such as backup in different countries which don't cooperate with each other, to
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The problem is that the big companies have datacenters that are 100% European, so no data is stored abroad. But... the master keys are still stored in the US, which means any promise - even if it 100% validated to be the case - of locality of storage is useless.
Previously there was trust in the US government that this power wouldn't be abused. What has changed is that trust has gone away.
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There was the moment when a Microsoft representative was asked in court to testify under oath that Microsoft cannot be forced to give US agencies access to data stored on their EU servers. He did not.
Not to mention... (Score:3)
Re:Not to mention... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most US tech CEOs have strong antipathy to anything like the EU. Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Ellison, Zuckerberg... they all hate the idea of voters and government actually having a say in anything that doesn't align with their financial interests.
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Out of the frying pan and into the fire . . .
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Lack of digital culture (Score:2)
What makes these headlines so frustrating is that becoming independent would be trivial if deciders had some basic knowledge about computers and digital networks, what exactly those do and how they work. We're taking 5th grade level of knowledge here.
Because that isn't the case, we have huge portions of society and politicians who think this computer thing only works if you spend astronomical amounts of taxpayer money on completely superfluous licenses for trashy software.
If it weren't for the utter lack of
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Yes that is my opinion and why I'm not hopeful on an EU Linux replacing US software stacks. Or at least it happening in the UK where I am from.
You get the usual directors/managers put in at the higher levels of government who know absolutely nothing about software/computers. Instead of actually being worth their high salaries and putting together (hence managing) a team of experienced open source developers/sysadmins - to create a stack that meets public sector requirements (e.g. a way to manage look+feel
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While I love that Europeans in their altruistic pursuit of socialist ideals make extensive contributions to open source projects, it's also my observation over the decades that as these projects transition from primarily American to primarily European, they become much messier with worse UIs. Of course, Japanese and Chinese UIs are even worse.
Europe needs to make the whole stack... (Score:2)
What the EU needs to think about isn't the components. They need to think about the entire ecosystem. You can make new hardware, new apps, but that is going to go nowhere without an entire ecosystem to go with it.
Starting out, lets look at an ISA like RISC-V. ARM maybe another good one, but we need to start with an architecture that is decent. Maybe something with more registers like the Itanium if possible. Now, Europe needs to make multiple fabs. I'd say a 2-3nm process node to get the ball rolling.
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Europe dislikes the US,
By and large: no.
My personal take (that is, my 0.05€) is that European sentiment towards the US covers the entire range from admiration over friendliness via exasperation to slight weariness. But animosity is by no means the dominant sentiment. Europans, too, understand that there is a common base here, and that a few years of a slightly runaway administration won't necessarily shift all paradigms.
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What else do you want the Euros to reinvent? The OSI model? Particularly the physical layers? I get it - you'd like home grown CPUs - ARM looks like the closest, if not the only option. And let's say you get your homegrown Linux, just like North Korea did for Red Star Linux. Oh, and the apps as well - maybe European forks of LibreOffice,.... Heck, I'd even suggest OnlyOffice, except that it seems to be Russian, which I guess is as bad as American?
Also, if you don't like US tech hegemony, why do you
SAP are working on the sovereign cloud (Score:2)
I know that SAP (probably Europes biggest software developer) are working on sovereign cloud for their services https://www.sap.com/products/s... [sap.com]. But if you look at all of the things that we take for granted today IT service wise from the US, really Europe are currently barely scratching the surface. For sure we need to be independent, but we are really only just starting on that journey.
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Don't make the obvious mistake (Score:1)
If EU member nations want regional "digital sovereignty" then they ought to resist the urge to sell out to someone else. China is more than happy to offer its (admittedly quite janky) hardware and software solutions.
Absolutely (Score:2)
It's not Trump's fault... (Score:2)
It's not Trump's fault. Really.
The US has long claimed the right to force US companies to divulge data - even data outside the US, and fsck the actual laws that apply in that actual country.
The US has long used it's financial sector to interfere with international transactions - even transactions having nothing to do with the US. Example: There was a semi-famous case where the impounded money that a Danish business was sending to a Cuban business to buy cigars, because this somehow violated the US embar
Complete fantasy (Score:2)
Every department in my country only hires employees/contractors who couldn't implement anything without 365 and AWS.
Unless they start shooting people for using them, nothing will change.
Why is the DEC logo (Score:2)
haha how? (Score:2)
Haha. European electricity production has been declining since 2021, and has been plateaued since 2008. Where do they think they are going to get the power to run all their own sovereign data centers that are being provided now by the Americans?
Weak EU parliament (Score:2)
The European Parliament is calling on the European Commission to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants
Remember the EU parliament has no way to initiate an EU directive. It can only beg the EU commission to do so, and the EU commission will do whatever it wants.