As a US citizen I can only hope that this kickstarts alternatives and paid for options in the spaces big (ad)tech dominates here. These bloated monopolies with short lived products or soon to be acquired competitors are getting old. (And these constant layoffs and shareholder/promo driven development to a smaller degree)
Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
111–120 of 318 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#112For what it counts, I deleted my Amazon account today (and lost all my Kindle books in the process), I'll never buy anything from them again. I'll close my S3 storage account with a US company in the coming months : I'll switch to a German service. In the coming weeks, I'll also delete my GMail account (my devices are already deGoogled since many years). There a lot of European alternatives that respect our privacy,…
I'm in the U.S. and doing the same. While EU laws don't protect me as well as they would someone on the correct side of the pond, I do still benefit from better integrity and transparency. Would you be up for making recommendations?
Sure !
Here you can find a list of alternatives :
https://european-alternatives.eu/
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Protonmail (https://proton.me/mail) or Tutanota (https://tuta.com/) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen (https://filen.io/) for encrypted Cloud Storage
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#113As an European I can confirm this is partly true. I wouldn't say it's completely destroyed it's soft power, but politically we do feel betrayed so whenever possible people would be looking to switch to non-US product. However, in business we're so intertwined with the US that it's hard to tell right now if there ever will be a justified switch.
In terms of pensions - I think 99.9% of us have a huge chunk the S&P, so even though we're upset I doubt there will be any movement on that front at all. Money will win in this battle.
Personally I do feel betrayed as well and for the first time in my life I've started looking for where the product I consume come from. About a third is from the US. Stopped buying them, found a European alternative.
To all the Europeans out here - let them live how they want over the pond, let's use this opportunity to promote our industries and products as well as become as independent as we possibly can given our current financial and political constraints.
No hard feelings at all, live and let live.
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#114I use links2 and lynx web browsers.
The issue in EU is Big Tech has many "minions" in public administrations and local critical online services (many dominant online services are theirs anyway). They manage to make hard dependent the "web" on their cartel of whatng web rendering engines (and their SDK).
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#115For what it counts, I deleted my Amazon account today (and lost all my Kindle books in the process), I'll never buy anything from them again. I'll close my S3 storage account with a US company in the coming months : I'll switch to a German service. In the coming weeks, I'll also delete my GMail account (my devices are already deGoogled since many years). There a lot of European alternatives that respect our privacy,…
I don't know how to degoogle at this point. 90% of my registered accounts across the internet are with my Gmail account because I didn't want them tied to my private email.
You should probably spend some time on changing that. The only thing keeping me inside the Google ecosystem is my university and I hate that since they are paying for it anyway, so it makes absolutely no sense if not for it being the lazy way of doing things. Why choose to be lazy when it's clearly doing more harm than good?
I managed to install android with microg and it has worked flawlessly for 4 years now. There are many options to do this of course, but they all require a lot of time to set up. Still a better alternative than being locked up under Google.
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#116Switching search engines to what? AI-powered search also created by American companies? America's image is toxic to everyone right now (including its own citizens). But I don't really see that many valid alternatives. It's not like Europe has done much to cultivate any kind of relevant software industry.
You're right, but cooperation and centralization emerge under external pressures. It's almost like a natural law of social systems. (I could say more but don't want to digress, let me know if you'd like some pointers.)
In other words, Europe's weakness and dividedness is a consequence of the soft power the US used to have. The EU has the capital (human and economic) to be a world power in principle, but never needed to.
This has all changed very suddenly. Whether Europe can rise to the challenge I don't know, but it's the first time in a very long time that there is a possibility of it happening.
I find the game theoretic view quite interesting here. Even if we interpret Trump's action in the best possible light, that he knows what he's doing and playing the madman strategy to get others to comply, the destruction of trust that this strategy causes makes it impossible in the long term to build mutually beneficial cooperative structures.
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#117For what it counts, I deleted my Amazon account today (and lost all my Kindle books in the process), I'll never buy anything from them again. I'll close my S3 storage account with a US company in the coming months : I'll switch to a German service. In the coming weeks, I'll also delete my GMail account (my devices are already deGoogled since many years). There a lot of European alternatives that respect our privacy,…
From a software developer viewpoint, my biggest worry is about GitHub, owned by Microsoft. I self host my open source code with Forgejo.
Can you explain what exactly your worry is with GitHub? If you have your repos locally, you can always go somewhere else if/when something happens with GitHub. Except if you rely on things like Github actions or other features that are harder to move.
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#118> the US completely destroyed its soft power this week Soft power sounds like manipulation to me. So if we destroyed our manipulation, great. The United States has put its fingers on too many scales rather than respecting the rights of individuals in other countries to manage their affairs the way they see fit. I welcome tech competition from Europe. Let the best products and services win.
Yes, and.
Something like 40% of the humanitarian contribution in the world came from USAID, and Thanos just fingersnapped it out of existence last Tuesday.
Until that gap is filled, there will be tons of unnecessary suffering. A "more humane" way would have been to slowly wind down over a period of months/years, giving the market time to react. Even better would have been to work with foreign powers to spin off USAID-backed initiatives and transfer control+funding responsibility to them, but I'm just a girl with a unrealistic dream at that point
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#119Any links to read what people in EU are saying?
The FT Editorial Board: "America has turned" - https://www.ft.com/content/1511aa42-a9ad-4952-99c8-98bea07d0... Max Hastings: The trauma of Trump: can we still do business with his America? - https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-trau... FT: US tech will pay a price for Donald Trump’s approval - https://www.ft.com/content/2347e5d3-cbc2-4128-a108-bb89558e3... FT: How Washington plans to defend the dol…
I suggest you expand your information sources to include contrary perspectives. These read like the typical hysteriaporn to freak normies out. It would be equivalent to my sharing supporting links from the NYTimes or WaPo.
Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?
#120Switching search engines to what? AI-powered search also created by American companies? America's image is toxic to everyone right now (including its own citizens). But I don't really see that many valid alternatives. It's not like Europe has done much to cultivate any kind of relevant software industry.
LLMs are something everybody can reproduce with enough money, as shown by Musk itself recently: in one year they have Grok3 which is a SOTA model, without having particular talents or innovations, just following the recipe everybody else is using (and this is why you see new companies competing with established companies: all are training transformers with a lot of tokens, basically). So Europe can have their LLMs as…
> So Europe can have their LLMs as well: the important thing is to relax this stupid AI act
But you're kind of showing here why Europe doesn't have the software innovation America does.
Americans are not inherently smarter or more capable of doing innovative things than Europeans. It's just that whenever a European wants to do something interesting, there's a handy European regulation making it harder or less profitable to do it.
If this American administration is the impetus for that to change, that would be good! But I doubt it.