1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
I guess I’m not alone, gold is exploding.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.
From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its succeeding at it.
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
Am I missing something? [1] lists Guangzhou’s GDP as 435,746 M USD, while [2] lists Russia’s GDP as 2,173,836 M USD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
Sure, the US admin wants a strong US military, for example, ideally with 100% US weapons. Etc.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.
And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.
Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
I am pretty sure that would not affect me if I moved there, but I am completely dumbfounded that nobody seems to want to change things. One party wants the status quo and one party seems to want to make things worse.
I am not sure I would be able to stand that.
Sounds like you're doing some shady, disgusting bullshit or you're exaggerating the regulations. I hope it's the latter.
What about China? India?
1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive
2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.
3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.
so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.
China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions
edit: fixed formatting.
- Business law is in its infancy and local courts excessively favour the Indian side. In the event of a dispute, enforcing the terms of the contract can be very complicated or even illusory.
- Banking and insurance services are complicated, slow and expensive.
- There is not one but many different sets of legislation per province. There are gaps in the legislation and it is necessary to go through a long compliance process based on the manufacturer's or supplier's legislation, involving translation, negotiation, etc.
- Each time there is a change in decision-makers, at least part of the process must be repeated.
I work for an energy company and we have a team that has been working on an Indian project for almost ten years, without the project really seeming to have progressed.
The Indian market is a bottomless pit if you don't have a very high-ranking political sponsor in the Indian government.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
There isn't right now but India very much wants to be that in about a decade
well, you can finally hardcode the date in mm/dd/yy format without worrying for a menu to change it.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
Companies are supposed to compete anyway, without having to get pissed off first.
I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
The regulations were insane.
I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
- signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)
If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU or US
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
The Internet Research Agency worked to get Trump elected in the US. Putin paid them to push Trump here.
Has Russia won EU tech by foreign interference in the US?
FWIU Yandex is operating out of EU now?
"Russian Court Imposes $2.5 Decillion Fine on Google" (2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD44zqhCnMo
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.
By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?
What do you mean?
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
What failed with Mistral?
Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
Before or after the bubble pops?
What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course
2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country
If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.
In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Basically all videoconferencing (except teams) is built on the back of French open source software.
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards! Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Or here's the linked article:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
And here's the app, Visio:
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
Have you used Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
And then build out Google App suite, Office 365 exquivants
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-go...
- https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
I had a lot of trouble getting certificates updated while running on my OpenWRT router. But other things were easy but tedious, like setting up a DNS record on one of my domains, and temporarily opening ports for it an certbot (a rust clone) etc. But now I feel I understand it all and tweaks should be easy from now on.
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.
Now everybody realises you can trust no one.
Which they are.
A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)
- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.
- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.
- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.
- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.
- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
Small steps, but steps.
The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...
Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.
Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required.
You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.
They will learn :-)
It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
The US is literally threatening to invade an EU overseas territory.
Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU. Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade".
I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.
Threatening to take over Greenland by force isn't considered "going to war" for you?
They should do both. Resilience must be achieved in depth.
> It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
Most of the outrage in the EU right now is about Trump's threats against another NATO country (Denmark / Greenland). The funding of the NATO has been slowly shifting for a few years already.
That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
Tixeo was fairly limited in its use and imposed on critical businesses (defence, nuclear, transport, energy, etc.). The aim is to extend the service to more areas, such as SMEs, universities, NGOs, etc., for all sensitive communications.
I don't think the project is intended to replace Zoom and Teams for the general public. Most public ministries use Teams and the Office suite.
French industries have been the target of quite a few cases of espionage by ‘advanced North American actors’. They have therefore been trying to distance themselves from US services for some time now (Google Tchap and Olvide).
Every choice comes with a cost.
With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.
The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so. The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion.
Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user.
I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!
Meaning the US based companies would bear _some_ of the burden of making it easier to ditch them, and switch to "sovereign" solutions.
The rest of the world would have a vested interest in letting this happen, since it would also reduce _their_ dependence on the US.
The question then becomes "what happens first":
1 - European commission pressuring the Irish government to send its police to seize AWS servers in Dublin (when fines are not enough any more)
2 - US administration pressuring the tech companies to shut down service in Europe (when threats are not enough any more)
No dedicated servers (VM only). Ok let's check VM price https://en.outscale.com/customized-virtual-machines/
Press the "Do you have a Cloud Project?" which is the only button? Oops! Something went wrong here.
Is this supposed to be an AWS replacement?
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.
Other than that I agree I'd love to move there.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#:~:text=LaSuite%20étant%2...
Basically, Discord, but based on an open protocol to enable better interoperability. With a meeting functionality where you can send links that works directly in browser with no account. Also the discord video chat UI is garbage.
I know there are things like revolt chat. But my point is, I'm surprised that this is not more "filled".
And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
as it was, so shall it always be.
any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
Earlier repo submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
The core problem is Europe has been very successful betting and building upon though choices made by others (eg. Cheap manufacture in China, cheap energy in Russia, cheap defense/capital from US, cheap manpower/migrants from developing countries...).
Europe from its high ground flaunts this model to the whole world ("look at our development metrics! Our social spending") while completely ignoring the sustainability and the costs bore by others and neglecting its own responsibilities.
And now everything is crashing down simultaneously.
I wonder what would happen if EU countries started encouraging ad blocking via their ISP DNS servers?
Edit: I'm not saying they don't.
I’m fed up of having to use Americans tech for everything and people getting along with it.
Chinese managed to separate almost completely from the American tech market, eu can do it too.
Maybe get stronger relations with China too, this 70 year old consensus where we must follow the USA whatever the case is finally ending.
For instance, i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan. Cheaper microprocessors, unrestricted access to newly annexed Taiwanese factories.
Sure, and let's give Ukraine to Russia while we're here so we can get their gas. The problem with the bullies is that they'll keep taking.
"What do they call it?"
"Le Zoom"
I see a lot of talk about "sovereignty" and "European software". What I don’t see is action.
Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
Building serious products and services in this space is easily 5 year investment, by that time there will be a new US administration.
Hope is not a strategy, but it's certainly cheaper in the short run.
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But have you divested from US assets?
Maybe one should, considering we just deployed armed troops with live ammunition to scare of America.
I fear we don't know how close this was. Maybe, we'll know in 50 years.
Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.
So a huge waste of taxpayers money...
This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
I wish I could cancel my Office subscription but my kids still need it for school. I wrote them to take a hard look at that requirement.
The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
