Live data from Hacker News

Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

ciphercue.com

51–60 of 201 posts

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#51

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

Out of curiosity. There aren't any payment card processors other than Stripe? I thought I saw bunch of them.

Stripe doesn't just process payments. Are there comparable alternatives on the side of Developer Experience and the amount of services that you can build on top of Stripe? I have never found in any other product the level of care for devs and founders that Stripe has. I'm clearly not talking about "pay by card" and basic payment processor interactions.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#53

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

There isn't going to be "EU tech" as long as US can access the EU market as freely because for the mainstream anything it doesn't make sense to have a duplication effort for the EU. USA is/was easier to start business and get funding, you can access Europe just as well from there so why bother with the European based stuff if you are targeting a broad market?

After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for European base and EU is trying hard to clean up the field with things like EU-inc, digital Euro, common markets etc but its not happening fast enough to make a difference today.

Maybe if all goes well and Trump can finish his term or even invades Greenland then EU can have its "tech", but for now its happening slowly because its primarily driven by the hypothetical risks that are convincingly real but but costly to act on.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#54
This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double.

However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality.

Source: I have access to better data.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#55
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.

> If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me. Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by b…

The default stance should be that nothing you do is private on the internet. If we're talking spying then no service in any country will be secure unless fully encrypted with audits. Any country with an intelligence agency can force companies in their jurisdiction to give them access to data otherwise.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#56
post #28

> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate. This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the o…

> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN... Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?

They pointed out that the article is suggesting a completely wrong solution.

If the article was written by a human it would be valuable feedback for the author. Because the article was written by a LLM it was just the commenter being tricked to be engaged by generated noise.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#57
post #53

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

There isn't going to be "EU tech" as long as US can access the EU market as freely because for the mainstream anything it doesn't make sense to have a duplication effort for the EU. USA is/was easier to start business and get funding, you can access Europe just as well from there so why bother with the European based stuff if you are targeting a broad market? After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for Europ…

> USA is/was easier to start business and get funding

I think this would highly depend on the country. With a solid business plan, I could easily get funding via banks and literally start a company with the press of a button in web portal, in Sweden. Similarly, Estonia seems to have made it ridiculously easy as well. In Spain it's slightly harder, I have to fill out some forms, but with stable income, very easy to get a bank loan even for business ideas that probably shouldn't.

Sure, you won't attract multi-trillion VCs that route, but is that exclusively what you're talking about? How much easier can it be to start the company than the press of the button, since you seem sure it's much easier in the US than all the countries in the EU?

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#59

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

Asking for a complete replacement is how people get locked in. The way governments end up with m365 by putting out an RFP with the exact feature list of m365. Of course then you limit yourself to only one option. I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.

It's not about complete replacement. People don't buy a Golf because they googled "Toyota European version" and decided the limitations are acceptable, or because it has all the same buttons as a Hyundai. They do it because Volkswagen and a number of other European manufacturers make genuinely good, competitive cars.
Post reply on HN