It might not be a coincidence that POTUS wrote yesterday on Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed on any country proceeding with taxing US' digital services.
Empty threat conditional on something that will never happen.
Most of the rest of the world is too heavily dependent on US digital services to tax them more heavily. From social media to hyperscaler's clouds the US is dominant and stuff will just stop working if they get taxed. There would be a huge pushback from businesses if their government increased the cost of things like AWS.
…and the US is depending on other markets - mostly the EU and China - to keep growing their economy, because the domestic market is pretty saturated with tech already. This has ripple effects too, because 401k pensions depend on big tech to keep growing, so no administration can risk loosing big parts of the European market.
codex sub 200usd. in eu it magically becomes 200eur(hello beuracrates) plus vat. You already taxing 30%. That on top that I pay via mine already heavily taxes money.
Mistral experience was as miserable as running local models btw.
> so now we'll be moving to build our own alternatives
We are taking our time about it and not being consistent. For example some European governments are moving away from US cloud systems, but they are also pushing apps that require American devices to work. There is very little movement of the private sector away from the US so much of the economy economy remains dependent on the US. The end result will be government clouds not dependent on the US, but that can only be used using US controlled devices, and a private sector still just as dependent.
Nothing. It doesn't matter though. If we can't trust the US administration won't just apply 50% taxes tomorrow because some EU representative said something mean to the president, then we can't rely on goods or services exported by the USA anymore.
It's just chaotic. Chaos isn't good for business. What if Microsoft were instructed, on short notice, to block EU customers from using Entra over a trade dispute? If the identity provider of millions of European customers is suddenly unavailable, work grinds to halt. That's unacceptable.
Now you might say that sounds unrealistic - but would you have expected the American president to threaten an invasion of Danish territory? Or freaking Canada?
And even if the next administration turns out to be more "normal", we won't forget that American voters don't care about anyone but themselves - they wanted this. Twice. There is virtually no guarantee the same thing won't happen again in the future, and we all have seen how quickly fruitful business relations turned to shit over a pathetic narcissistic a-hole at the helm throwing temper tantrums.
Trusting the USA has proven to be a bad strategy, even for its closest allies. That won't change all too soon.
Didn't all other countries get used to the 10% extra tariffs currently applied, though? It's pretty clear that 100% is a threat, but the previous threats didn't end up with 0% so it "worked".
Most of the rest of the world is too heavily dependent on US digital services to tax them more heavily. From social media to hyperscaler's clouds the US is dominant and stuff will just stop working if they get taxed. There would be a huge pushback from businesses if their government increased the cost of things like AWS.
Edit: edit to say tax more heavily