US can probably use their soft power to influence them not to do that. Also would imagine the US gov could also set up some more censorship resistant access methods.
Trade and tarriff relief are an option still. Despite how shitty the US has been and the distrust that will cause in the future access to US markets will be very attractive until the economy collapses. Soft power isn't just from countries liking you after all.
Access to US market? Is that a joke you are trying to crack? An “access” that literally depends upon how loud the orange fool farted on the commode that morning — that access and that market? I mean do you really not see what’s happening or you are just being a nice contrarian? Because this baffles me.
It's still a very rich market and I'm mostly looking to a post Trump world. I completely understand other countries are going to be much more dubious about giving things up permanently for long term promises but things like not blocking sites or allowing US access to the markets both of which can be easily in response to another Trump-esque flailing is a much easier ask and negotiation.
I'm not saying things will return to the pre-Trump semi-hegemony but I do think it's over the top to think the US economy will have zero soft power in the years after Trump too.
That surely is running out of steam. Everyone's got whiplash from trying to watch America and it's tariffs. How do you know it won't be applied anyway, or forgiven for whatever flavour of the day policy it changes to.
There is very little point in conceding to it when you'll have another opportunity for something else that might be more amicable before the inks dry on that tariff.
How would this work? Wouldn't a reciprocal tariff with identical parameters by the US against EU tech companies completely obliterate EU tech landscape?
Most EU tech companies probably have primarily European customers (given that services export from the US to the EU is much larger than the other way around). Second, all those EU customers are looking for EU alternatives that do not have a huge tariff.
Reciprocal tariffs would (for the EU) hurt export of goods much more, since that is where the EU has a large surplus.
The number of tech companies matters less than their scale. SAP, Spotify, and Dassault Systèmes likely have more economic impact than ten thousand tiny software shops combined. And notably, all three derive a huge portion of their revenue from the US market.
Are they though? Trump tried to use them to get ownership of Greenland a few weeks ago and just gave up. Then he tried to bully Canada again, and also gave up again. I think at this point nobody takes his offers of relief or threats seriously anymore, since any deal you make can be invalidated a couple weeks later.
There's a huge range of stuff way below trying to annex Greenland or the strong arming he tried to use against Greenland. This thread was talking about how the US could get countries to not block their free anti-censorship VPN not territory annexation. It's a way smaller ask, comparing them borders on absurd.
There are still loads of completely legally valid tariff and other trade barriers ripe for negotiation that existed long before the ill named 2025 "Freedom Day".
I think we're all aware that EU is trying to become more independent, but as of right now basically everything they do online, or really anything with technology at all, is American in some way. That's a lot of "soft power" and it will take decades, maybe a century, for EU or UK to replace it.
There are no tarriffs being applied on digital services. That's obviously intentional considering how much soft power those services exert on countries the USA wants to maintain an outsized influence over.
Tarriffs are a tax on imports to the US applied by the US government.
You can't tarriff selling a service overseas, in fact since AWS in other countries is a locally incorporated entity you can't even meaningfully demand they charge more AWS in the UK is a separate corporation incorporated and taxed under UK law, for example.
Right, I'm aware of that. Which is why I don't know why you brought up tarriffs in a discussion about the "soft power" that US technology services impose.
Sure, it's decreasing under Trump, but to pretend the richest, most militarily powerful, most culturally influential nation on the planet somehow doesn't have any soft power is... certainly a choice.
We already don't. We want the Americans to pack up their bases and fuck off. Ami, go home! They've done enough work to stir up chaos and war all over the planet in the last 7 decades.
It really doesn’t matter, the leaders who need to overlook personal grudges are the ones who do the wheeling and dealing here.
Probably worth noting that if the US isn’t at the head of the table, it’s moved to China by default, not Europe. Though their propaganda seems to be quite successful lately.
You've misread my comment pretty aggressively. Then again, this is about the level of discourse I typically get from "amerikkka bad" commenters, so I guess I'm not surprised. Anyways, China is trying to invade other nations, so that's a super moot point.
To be honest, only the last few holdouts in Europe still believe in the US nuclear shield. The fact that Germany is trying to make a deal with France should tell you everything.
Netflix, YouTube and OpenAI are completely meaningless and we could drop it tomorrow. NVIDIA and AWS are a different story. The only problem is that once things become transactional (as opposed to mutually trusting allies), Europe can leverage ASML and possibly ARM. So it doesn’t bring much soft power anymore, only mutually assured economic destruction.
In the same way they used their soft power to influence them not to block twitter and facebook? Because that power is slowly going from soft to limp...
This comment generated a lot of activity. It's very interesting watching the vote count of it move with the daylight (it went down during night in US/day in EU, and went back up when the US woke back up)