[throwaw12]

> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy.

Imagine what these companies are doing in the US to their citizens, if ambassador is ready to defend them for violating rules/laws

[9dev]

As he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of.

Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.

[abc123abc123]

I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

[mrdevlar]

This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu.

It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech.

We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, so we're phasing you out. It'll take decades to repair the lost trust in US digital services among the governments of Europe.

[Shoue]

If it's the same woman I'm thinking of Office365 is underselling it a bit - she's fully sanctioned by the US. She can't use debit/credit cards, any Apple/Google device or service, Amazon/eBay, etc. She's completely digitally crippled by sanctions. And she's one of several people.

As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.

[mrdevlar]

Yes, I'm aware of the rest of it, I just didn't feel it particularly relevant to the discussion.

Yes, I'm with you. I'm grateful that most of the news I hear about this is relatively positive. I'm actually kind of in awe of how fast it's all moving. For all the talk about slow Europeans, that single ICC action seems to have launched a ton of initiatives.

[moogly]

I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).

[petcat]

> take a decade

More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.

[dylan604]

> More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay

And now you know where that $4.7B fine will be spent. Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?

[moogly]

I definitely started out typing out the plural, but thought I should temper my words a bit for some reason.

[bluGill]

They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.

[toyg]

Some are more exposed than others.

[moogly]

I don't doubt there are some, but GP made it sound like every European company and institution is working feverishly on it, which just cannot be true.

[Ravus]

> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation, private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest.

Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.

If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".

[rcxdude]

That kind of thing is very much a nuclear option, though. Firstly because the state that does it needs to be very confident it can operate the asset it seizes without overseas support, and secondly because doing so tends to be bad for business in your country in general, as people understandibly get nervous about having stuff in places that have shown a willingness to just take it.

[Ravus]

Completely agreed, it is rational to de-escalate by several steps (e.g. to have cloud providers "spontaneously" decide to split into different, actually autonomous but still privately owned, corps, which in turn is a threat to returns of the home corp so they would put pressure on the US government not to escalate this far politically, and so on).

It's just that the possibility of the "nuclear option" works as a deterrent.

[vrganj]

The nuclear option would be the US pulling cloud services over night. This would be the counterstrike, not the initial nuke launch.

[PurpleRamen]

EU can live fine without US cloud services, and it's not very dependent on AI at the moment. If access would be cut off, companies would just switch to other solutions, which BTW are already there. The question is more how much time they would have to switch and adapt. An unannounced zero-day cut off would be of course harmful for a while (days, weeks, maybe months), but on most parts could be probably solved in a short timeframe for the important parts.

Also, EU (and probably most parts of the world) are already switching away at this moment already.

[petcat]

The EU is doing the exact opposite of switching away from US tech. In fact they just announced that the new EU digital ID wallet is going to require Google or Apple device attestation.

That is two US companies in complete control of the fundamental digital ID system of the entire EU.

Everything they say about "digital sovereignty" is performative nonsense because they simply have no other options and no capacity to build replacements themselves.

[rcxdude]

This is bad largely due to the effect on individuals who may find themselves banned from such services with no due process. As a threat to the EU's sovreignty as a whole it's one of the easier things to move away from if it gets weaponised (in comparison to cloud services that are intertwined with a country's economy and bureaucracy)

[mqus]

they did not "just announce" that, it was a rather technical decision several layers down, made a while ago. Sure, some things are not easily created without US companies but the overall tendency is pretty clear and it is: reduce absolute dependencies.

[graemep]

The EU and most of the rest of the world.

The UK is talking about sovereign AI but doing much the same with pushing reliance on Apple and Google.

[utopiah]

I wish.

The EU could be fine but it's just not doing it. Companies in the EU and even EU institutions do keep on using US SaaS, from Microsoft to AWS to Oracle institutions and companies claim they want sovereignty but when it's time to deploy their IT plan, they just don't.

TL;DR: in theory yes, in practice it is just not happening at scale.

[9dev]

If they did that, their pension system (in huge parts built on stock) would collapse. The American tech market is largely saturated, and needs room to grow. The EU is a market of almost 500 million people with a lot of money. The US simply cannot ignore it.

[jackvalentine]

You can do that, once, if you want to trigger an avalanche of realignment away from the U.S.

Not only would you lose the 450 million odd EU customers, but the rest of the world will reconsider doing business with you as well.

[furyg3]

This is not a flip the switch tomorrow hypothetical. The fallout of such an action would be huge for everyone, including the US stock market.

Here in Europe, every government and major corporation have recently added their dependance on US platforms to their risk management taxonomy. For the (unlikely) scenario you mention, for the scenario that their company/government somehow runs afoul of the US goverment and this is used as leverage, for espionage reasons, and for other reasons that may have already been in their risk overview (data privacy, compliance, etc) but were seen as manageable but are no longer so.

For some anecdotes: My former employer just moved off of AWS to a EU provider and will likely also move away from Google Cloud for their internal needs, my current employer has started evaluating moving off of Azure at the request of our clients (though they dismissed the idea of moving off of Office 365 internally), and my partner's company (a large corporate) has started prioritizing a transition plan away from AWS.

[throwaw12]

> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

temporarily yes, then EU will be able to build them on its own.

But what would also collapse is trust in all US companies, whole world will start working on their own solutions, no more AWS/GCP/Azure hegemony in the world. Everyone would close their internet, just like China did and develop own solutions

[ezst]

What do you believe is so unique about US cloud providers? True, it's a de facto triopoly of American-incorporated businesses, but then what? It's not like computing is alien tech that only the US can own. The US doesn't even make the chips. It's commodity at scale with a bit of convenience sold at a steep premium.

[ben_w]

> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

Today, yes.

The possibility of this, combined with how seriously Greenland was taken, means the EU is collectively saying "as a matter of urgency, we need strategic independence from the US".

This will take a while. Ironically, access to AI will make the transition much faster.

However, this is currently mutual interdependence: if the US actually cut off non-AI cloud to the EU, the US would screw over one of their major suppliers thus preventing them from supplying stuff, and leave itself entirely at the mercy of China. If it cut off AI to the EU, there goes a big market for tokens and the current data centre supply looks even more sketchy than its effect on electricity prices has already made it look. (But one bit of good news is that US electricity prices would come down).

[rspoerri]

Yes, think about that and how the shares would drop in an instant.

Good thing european governments and industries start to work on real technological and financial independence. It is high time for cutting ties with a country that is acting as irrational and self centered as the usa.

[w3ll_w3ll_w3ll]

We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.

[f6v]

> We would build our own alternatives.

Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.

Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.

[ben_w]

> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.

We've repeatedly built things, they often get bought by US companies. This doesn't necessarily even involve them moving office, as for example Deep Mind was founded in the UK (while it was in the EU) and is still there (HQ: London; research offices in France & Germany so still in EU too) despite now being owned by Alphabet.

[piva00]

> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?

We have, they get bought by American companies as their exit strategy.

If American companies decide to shutdown access then there's no pressure from the behemoths to stamp out competition, it would just be natural that alternatives take over since the market clearly exists and without American tech companies filling that market it would be pretty easy for alternatives to grow.

[petesergeant]

> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?

The EU hasn't because European investors are shy about deploying capital. If you look at European weapons and aerospace, it's clear there's no particular technical or capability barrier.

[f6v]

There was a very real barrier to building tech companies. We couldn't listen to Spotify at work during the time people seriously called Berlin the "SV of Europe" (our office was in the neighborhood called "SV Backyard"). Why? We didn't have enough bandwidth, and the wait time for fiber was measured in years.

[maligenligen]

We hadn't because we didn't have to.

[hparadiz]

It's actually pretty sad for the EU that the biggest tech company names on the continent are all Russian.

[ben_w]

Not that "largest by market cap" says much, given that it corresponds to "oh look a monopoly" as much as it does "innovation and real growth" (and also "bubble"), but you're wrong.

Market caps of Russian examples from above:

Sber: $84 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/sberbank/marketcap/

Yandex: RUB 1327B (~= $17 bn) - https://tradingeconomics.com/yndx:rm:market-capitalization

VK: RUB 176.7B (~= $2.3 bn) - https://smart-lab.ru/q/VKCO/MSFO/market_cap/en/

Ozon: $8.9 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/ozon/marketcap/

Market caps of bigger EU tech firms:

  ASML: $533.84 B
  Siemens: $223.14 B
  SAP: $202.96 B
  Seagate Technology: $164.43 B

- https://civixplorer.com/post/most-valuable-eu-companies-mark...

[zurfer]

ASML, SAP, ARM, Spotify, ...

How do you define biggest? Can't be by market cap.

[antonvs]

Don’t believe everything you read in Pravda.

[bluecalm]

It's a culture thing. There are even smaller markets like Taiwan that developed industries EU didn't. Western EU countries are very risk averse, anti-business and has too conservative hierarchy to develop this kind of culture. You can see it as early as in school system where the focus is on rising the floor while forgetting about the ceiling.

[petcat]

They'll blame it on WWII but both South Korea and Japan were similarly devastated and both managed to develop world-class technology industries in the ensuing decades.

Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.

[9dev]

You're just blinded by propaganda. Europe has produced thousands upon thousands of interesting technology companies - it's just that very few of them are information technology companies.

Claiming that something is wrong with Europe in general because it didn't produce interesting technology is an utterly ridiculous and uninformed take.

[istoleabread]

And achieve what exactly? EU being dependent on US cloud services also mean EU being a big part of their revenue. Parts of EU public and private sector may collapse but they will also switch to their own alternatives, the broken trust and lost revenue on the other hand will definitely not be recovered by US companies.

[latexr]

Humanity has lived for thousands of years without cloud and AI services. We can definitely live without those. In fact, considering the damage that is being done to the environment (and thus ourselves) in name of those services, we’d very likely be better off without them in the first place.

A large reason US services have such a presence in Europe is that their flagrant disregard for rules and the pursuit of profit at all costs gives them an unfair advantage. If those US companies cut off their services, in the long run the ones in the EU would have the room to expand within the rules. That’s the opposite of the doomsday scenario you’re describing. Though of course an abrupt cut would be momentarily disruptive, countries in the EU are already taking steps to reduce reliance on US services (for example: LaSuite).

[InsideOutSanta]

> Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services

That would be the single best thing that could happen to the EU.

I think people would be surprised by how quickly European and international companies and governments can rid themselves of the American tech stack. They use this stuff because it's convenient, solid, and cheap, not because it's the only option.

> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

Yes, both in the EU and the US, initially. It would also force the EU to finally invest in its own tech stack and end the US's ability to sell software globally.

People seem to believe that America's global economic dominance is a law of nature that will never change, regardless of what the US does. But it's not. There is no American exceptionalism, other than what America worked for.

If you continually kick your customers in the face, they'll eventually stop being your customers.

[sveme]

Which is when we'd enter economic warfare between the EU and US, something which no one wants to experience. If that were realistically threatened, and we've seen motions in that direction, it's about political and economical survival and we'd see a massive loss of market for US tech.

[hparadiz]

It would hurt the EU more than it would hurt us and they're in denial about it.

[throwaw12]

> It would hurt the EU more than it would hurt us

So what? It will hurt everyone, but end result will be that US companies won't be able to sell in other parts of the world, because everyone will have own standards, own solutions, new regulations will come up about data residency, which will require using unknown AWS alternative in a small country and even if you are willing to maintain 150 Datacenter across different countries, companies will be afraid of using US tech, to one day lose access to their data

[cryptonym]

Let's say you are right on this. What's the point of hurting yourself? There would be no meaningful benefit.

[hparadiz]

Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift. Sure it's created a situation where we sell the tech both as software and hardware and that has allowed us to redirect wealth from the world to the US however in hindsight it's making our enemies stronger and allowing technology like drones to proliferate. An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s. We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.

[9dev]

If there's one thing all historians agree on, it's that collaboration has always been the winning strategy in human history.

If the US had never opened up their innovations to the world, they wouldn't have been able to extract the gargantuan amount of money from it they did. If the US had not instated the Marshall plan after WW2, there would never have been as close ties between Europe and the US. If American companies hadn't outsourced much of the manufacturing to poorer countries, the standard of living would be a lot lower than it is today. If USAID hadn't improved and saved the life of millions of humans, American companies wouldn't be met with such universal acceptance and opportunities to sell their goods as they have.

It's not like the US isn't massively benefitting of their investments in the rest of the world. But it sure looks like you're pretty aligned with the current administration there, so we'll both see how this plays out in real time.

[ben_w]

> Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift.

You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying.

Also, the rest of the world had other networks, the US version (TCP/IP) just happened to win enough mindshare to replace e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols

The UK alternative was only phased out in favour of TCP/IP after the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at the famously-not-American CERN. The American attempt at the web was Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

> An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s.

Only thing we might care to smuggle (if anything) would be the software, and it's not like a DVD is hard to hide. Nobody would be smuggling out hardware, we would not need to, we would not care to. And even that's a stretch, we're also quite capable of writing our own software, sometimes you buy our companies because they're better at it than yours.

> We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.

You say that like other countries don't make stuff. It's often the other way around, because we're as smart and capable as you, despite what you may think, and even when things have been invented "in" the US, it has often been by an immigrant who in your alternate timeline would not have gone to the US.

The chips are made by machines sold by EU companies; batteries and brushless motors? China; IMU? Japan, Germany, Taiwan; even GPS, despite the US one being the famous one, has alternatives of GLONASS (Soviet), BeiDou, and Galileo.

TBH, the only thing that America genuinely brought to the table was the interaction of the first amendment and cryptography. Insufficient cryptography, insufficient security, e-commerce remains limited.

[InsideOutSanta]

> where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world

Much of America's technological progress is a direct result of them selling tech to the rest of the world and becoming the world's tech hub. Do you think that not selling anything to anyone outside the US would have had zero impact on tech progress across the world?

[PurpleRamen]

> I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world.

Then European countries would have continued using their own networks.

> It's basically been one giant gift.

And Europa gifted their own part to it. Remember, World Wide Web originates from CERN in Switzerland, made by a brit.

[Starman_Jones]

You’re dodging their question.

[greenleafone7]

That's why our relationship is ending.

[surgical_fire]

Cloud services would hurt because of the data stored there. Suddenly being cut off your own data is obviously an upheaval.

It also shows how untrustworthy a partner is when this threat is thrown around casually. Also why talks of tech sovereignty are a lot more prevalent now.

If you brought that up 10 years ago, people looked at you as if you were a crank conspiracy theorist. Now everyone takes it seriously. Maybe a decade from now this will have been addressed.

AI services are a lot less important than you presume. Cut access to it and the workd keeps moving as usual.

[wvh]

It would hurt, for a while. Then people would wake up and slowly better solutions would appear. Not unlike post-Trump NATO. But the US would have lost its leader position and a large market.

I think the EU needs a kick under the ass to stop its comfortable inertia.

[myko]

Not anymore :)

[tjpnz]

The EU would counter that threat with the anti-coercion instrument. Shut Trump up really fast when he was last talking about annexing Greenland.

[petesergeant]

> Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

I think the EU member states would declare it a matter of national emergency and nationalize the relevant assets, with every other country these American companies sell to taking notes and considering doing the same pre-emptively, providing a huge investment boost to EU tech companies (and almost certainly China) while tanking the US economy, and poisoning the ability of the Americans to sell to Europe for the next hundred years.

You don't win the opium wars by threatening to cut off the supply of opium.

[glimshe]

The EU can certainly do a lot, with the exception of producing their own major tech companies.

[input_sh]

The end goal shouldn't be "monopolies, but European", the end goal should be no monopolies.

[InsideOutSanta]

It's funny how people complain that the EU has no Google, when Google should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. The current tech dystopia is a direct result of the US failing to enforce its antitrust laws.

Major tech companies are a bug, not a feature.

[glimshe]

Is ASML "European" or a "monopoly" under your definition as one can't be both?

[Kbelicius]

Why can't it be both? After all GP did not give any definitions. He simply and clearly stated:

> The end goal shouldn't be "monopolies, but European", the end goal should be no monopolies.

[bildung]

*ad companies

[cryo32]

Perhaps we don't want to participate in the US's AI economy?

[surgical_fire]

To small a fine.

EU should crank that up tenfold for it to not become "the cost of doing business"

[greenleafone7]

Unbelievable. Heading towards a dystopia at full speed.

[shevy-java]

Well, he is a corporate tool, aka a lobbyist, so unsurprisingly he acts in favour of companies. The question is why other countries should be subject to that. The EU may succumb to blackmail though, as Ursula showed before when she submitted to Trump.

[sensanaty]

> ...if it is going to participate in the AI economy.

The US is so thoroughly bought out that your ambassadors are saying embarrassing shit like this, how pathetic