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245 points CrankyBear | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.263s | source
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mentalgear ◴[] 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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graemep ◴[] No.45774835[source]
They do though, and they are happy to.

A very small number of government agencies in a few countries have moved away from reliance on the US, but very few businesses have. We still have governments and businesses encouraging the use of US tech by, for example, encouraging use of mobile apps. AWS, Azure and Google dominate cloud services in most of the world. Microsoft dominates the desktop. Businesses and individuals are increasingly reliant on cloud apps that are mostly American.

Here in the UK my daughter's school (a large sixth for college) relies in MS cloud versions of Office and on Teams, you need (at least in my area) to use an mobile app, or a web app hosted on AWS to make an appointment with a GP (and if you are prescribed medication the pharmacy are informed via an API running in AWS). Most SMEs that do run anything of their own use AWS. One of the biggest banks (Lloyds) had issues during the recent AWS outage, and I know they are not the only one to use AWS.

A lot of European governments are pushing ID and age verification mobile apps.

In general a lot of governments are regulating in ways that favour the incumbents.

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lazide ◴[] No.45775033[source]
Not to mention 95% of all mobile app installs are through App stores controlled by 2 US companies.
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AlecSchueler ◴[] No.45775379[source]
But to change these things within the past 7 or 8 months would have been impossible. I get what you guys are saying but there's so much of this stuff that is very entrenched and there's decades of inertia to push against, it can't just happen overnight. The story isn't that no one uses American services anymore, it's that fewer and fewer of us feel comfortable doing so and are open to or actively seeking alternatives in a way we never expected to be.
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1. graemep ◴[] No.45780561[source]
No one even plans to change that or has any idea how to.

As the GP said, almost all mobile apps are installed from stores run by two American companies (who also effectively control the devices) and the trend is very much to greater reliance on these devices, not less.

We may not like it, but its not going to change.