this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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The real problem is not this regulation, the problem is that while Europe has a tech market it functionally doesn't have its own tech sector. Europe is entirely dependent on American tech especially in digital platforms. We don't have our own social media platforms, we don't have our own version of Google or Amazon... ~~Europe doesn't even have its own version of GPS which makes it dependent on tech that essentially belongs to the US military~~. This is so stupid that it boggles the mind, it means giving up your digital sovereignty to another country. If Europe had its own tech sector then it could force that sector to change the way they do things to abide by European regulations, but as is US tech can just choose to no longer do business in Europe if they don't feel like following the regulations. Europe can't shut them down or nationalize them because all of these companies are American. Europe has been digitally colonized by the US, and we saw with that ridiculous crash a week ago where that gets you.
The other side of that is if you don't have one, then there's nothing competing with you.
Start something like EULedger.com and replace Facebook with it.
It would actually be pretty simple as you could use one of the dozens of pre-rolled social media platforms available on GitHub, throw enough development work into it to make it compliant with whatever requirements you need and then get the government to say hey here's one that specific for us.
Europe is a vassal of America. Of course they wouldn't be allowed to develop independent tech sector.
Europe does have Galileo actually.
And who even uses it?
Pretty much everyone with a smartphone I believe. They say that in 2019 there were 1 billion compatible smartphone.
The navigation system used by the phone is transparent to the user, so of course we dont notice it, but it's up there and we're using it.
I see. Thank you for pointing this out, i was under the impression that Europe still mostly relied on GPS. Shows my age i guess.
You, when you’re looking at Google Maps or whatever other mapping software you use. They’ve all been compatible with Galileo, Glossnas, Beidou, and GPS for many years. But a mapping app tends to not tell the user which brand of satellite they’re using at any given time.
Alright, i stand corrected.
But just as a thought experiment: say the US decides tomorrow to cut Europe off from American GPS satellites. Could Europe still function only relying on their own satellite network? I'm not just talking about individual navigation apps, i'm talking about European airlines, European militaries (in this scenario let's say NATO doesn't exist and Europeans actually have armies and aren't just isn't glorified hosts for American bases), etc.
lol what are you talking about ?
a tech sector is not made by having a large social media company.
There are at least 5 millions tech workers in Europe, working at the like of SAP, ARM, Spotify, Nokia, Siemens, Skype, sound cloud , sage, canonical, dasssult , capgemini, Ubisoft, codemasters, cd projekt……. The list goes on an on.
Skype is owned by Microsoft (American) and Codemasters is owned by EA (American) just so you're aware.
And how many of those companies rely on US digital infrastructure and US platforms?
I’m not sure what point you’re making ?
I would expect them have multiple infrastructure dependencies, locally and in the US. I would also expect the reverse to be true : the US companies will have in country dependencies wherever they operate. They do not own the internet. The internet is not reliant on them to function - it was specifically design not too.
I'm not talking about physical infrastructure, and the handful of European companies/brands you mentioned are small fish compared with the US giants. Yes a lot of Europeans work in tech, but the vast majority of them rely on US products to do so, and a good chunk of them work in European subsidiaries of US companies.
The point i'm making is that Europeans for the most part rely on digital monopolies controlled by the US which are subject to the whims of the US government and which co-operate with and are also to varying degrees infiltrated by the US intelligence agencies and the national security state. This gives the US government a lot of control over an important sector of your economy, not to mention a direct pipeline to the minds of your citizens.
A sovereign state would see this digital colonization by another country's monopolies as a serious national security threat. China for example made sure that Chinese citizens predominantly use Chinese social media platforms instead of allowing them to become dependent on the US's. But as another commenter pointed out, Europe is not sovereign, it is a collection of US vassals.
I haven't read it yet, but isn't this the central problem behind Yanis Varoufakis's book Technofeudalism?
Maybe. I haven't read that book either.
I wonder how the average liberal technocrat Western European thinks about how Apple treats their precious Union vs. how they treat China.