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by DiogenesKynikos 35 days ago
And it would mean the permanent end of American dominance over the international software and cloud compute market.

You can only ever play a card like that once. Afterwards, no one will trust you or use your services again.
2 comments
graemep 35 days ago
Maybe. People forget lessons very quickly.

The US has had long standing bans on exports of things like encryption. The US banned the export of software with greater than 40 bit key sizes for many years and most people just accepted the security risk (and the implication that the US and others could easily spy on them) including European governments.

There are still controls and notification requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

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mike_hearn 35 days ago
People said that about spying before the Snowden leaks. Nothing happened.

The difficulty of building an entirely home grown IT ecosystem from scratch is insurmountably huge. Especially as a lot of the people you'd need to do it currently work for US companies and are happy there - in any fight it's not at all clear that the people with the right skills would side with Brussels, which has a long history of treating the tech industry as a cash cow at best and outright antagonistically at worst.

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