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Another European agency shifts off US Tech as digital sovereignty gains steam

(www.zdnet.com)
245 points CrankyBear | 4 comments | 31 Oct 25 16:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.619s | source
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mentalgear ◴[31 Oct 25 17:38 UTC] No.45774588[source]▶
Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president?

If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.

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mrtksn ◴[31 Oct 25 18:57 UTC] No.45775442[source]▶
> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech?

Because it's pretty refined since it was funded with resources so great that it was intended to serve global level audience?

I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU. Unfortunately, refined high quality software requires considerable resources and no one will invest those considerable resources when the US companies can just offer better software at lower price thanks to their lead and deep pockets until the EU companies go out of business. Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.

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kakacik ◴[31 Oct 25 19:20 UTC] No.45775688[source]▶
Who cares about fine details of quality if you are at permanent risk of on/off, and a very real one.

Not every company needs, wants or has room to become google scale. Stability long term is something we hold dearly in Europe, not everybody runs in 10 seconds attention span.

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1. mrtksn ◴[31 Oct 25 19:23 UTC] No.45775724[source]▶
> Who cares about fine details of quality

People who actually work with that to achieve things that may be just as important care a lot.

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2. kakacik ◴[31 Oct 25 19:30 UTC] No.45775785[source]▶
OK sure, some people care if you really need to play with the words. But only absolute fool would ignore those massive risks.

We have fools in many places, but not that much and that bad. Look at defense - every single country in Europe is ramping defense budget big time, most of those money goes to European companies. Doesn't matter much how good US tech currently is, if it has electronics that can be tweaked or switched off remotely its a massive risk. F16 case was really enough for whole world to wake up and reevaluate.

Why should any other industry including what we discuss react differently? Private companies can risk as much as they want, its up to governments to sweeten the deal for local stuff or let it be, sure there market forces can play as hard as wanted.

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3. SpicyLemonZest ◴[31 Oct 25 19:56 UTC] No.45776042[source]▶
Acknowledging a risk doesn't always mean eliminating it. We've seen a lot of this dynamic in the rare earths space recently - for most countries, the known and widely discussed risks of depending on China for critical military inputs haven't been worth the cost of establishing domestic production.
4. hdgvhicv ◴[31 Oct 25 20:19 UTC] No.45776260[source]▶
Can’t achieve things when the Us government decides to cut you off on a whim.