[13415]

It's more than just internet technology, though. Europe has no digital sovereignty at all. Every operating system is in US hands, most office and business software, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, all social media commonly used, and so on. The list is endless.

[jakkos]

> Every operating system is in US hands

Desktop Linux is (becoming) usable for a normal person just in time, I was surprised how easily a non-technical friend switched over to Bazzite (immutable fedora with gaming extras).

> Visa, Mastercard, Paypal

The EU has already been working on a "Digital Euro" for a while

> all social media commonly used

I'm hoping more decentralized social media continues to pick up steam

[johanneskanybal]

This is pretty basic tech to replicate if it's needed though. It wasn't needed before so we just used what was there. But crazy to think the place you spawned from 2k years ago couldn't make another basic payment system if it was important lol.

[Sharlin]

It's not a technical problem (well, it is, but not primarily). It's a social problem. Replicating a technology is one thing. Getting thousands and thousands of organizations to migrate is in a whole different universe difficulty-wise. The costs would be astronomical.

[mrsssnake]

Libre software should be used regardless. And the switching cost with it is still not low but drastically lower.

[digiown]

Open source is basically sovereign (if Russia can use it), so there do exist functional alternatives for most of these things. It's mostly from inertia and network effects that the American ones are used.

[Nextgrid]

Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system and Android app store once they got kicked out of the US-based competitors?

[kgeist]

>Didn't Russia quickly spin up an alternative smartcard payment system

The MIR payment system started functioning in 2015, long before Visa/Mastercard pulled out of Russia

>Android app store

Initially there was some fragmentation because several companies raced to develop "Russia's #1 answer to Google Play Store" but everyone eventually settled on RuStore developed by VK (Russia's Facebook).

Generally, Russia already had replacements for most major American services long before 2022, and with better market penetration: Google => Yandex, Meta => VK, Uber => Yandex Taxi, Amazon/eBay/Craigslist => Ozon/Avito/Wildberries, etc. Lack of own app store was more like an oversight. Europe is at least 20 years late in the game.

[coredev_]

This is just ignorance. And I would say that it is likely that Microsoft ditches Windows for Linux within 20 years.

[13415]

Sorry but that reply is verging on the delusional and it's ironic, if not typical for social media, that you accuse me of ignorance. Linux vs Windows doesn't even matter. I'm a European who has been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 20 years and I know that the majority of popular Linux distros are mostly in US hands. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding and I wasn't clear enough about the scope of my comment. I meant it to apply to a situation in which the US is really no longer trustworthy and Europe needs some almost complete independence, not just about increasing digital sovereignty a little bit away from US products.

If there was a real conflict between the US and Europe, whether an open conflict or "cold war" type, you could be absolutely certain that every supply chain you're using is going to be mostly under US control. Open source is irrelevant for that issue, you're not compiling your own Linux distro and all software and your compiler toolchain and use your own repo hosting (and switch off all undocumented backdoors in your CPU's "management" engine). Funny enough, even if you did that, the hardware on which you run all this is almost certainly fully under US control. Guess where American Megatrends, Phoenix, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Intel are located. The same for every phone operating system. Binary blobs nowadays either come from China or from the US and their chip manufacturers (e.g. in Taiwan).