At this point, weakening any American tech company really is a matter of data sovereignty for Europe. That may not be the main reason all this started, but I think recent months have underscored Europe's need, and supercharged Europe's determination in this regard. I'd expect significant changes in EU policies regarding tech companies going forward. Mostly calibrated to decrease American dominance in the sector.
In any other setting, I would agree. However, most of us here in the US are very unhappy with big tech. The lack of regulation is harming me as a consumer, but as a lobbying-based economy, America affords consumers little to no power. The EU might clearly favor their industries, and be overly aggressive in tech where they lack the momentum America has. The lack of any consumer-oriented support in the US makes me root for the other guy. Sometimes, E2E or USBC for the iphone is something I would argue most Americans are in favor for, but big tech refuses to implement to milk the sheep. Famously, lightning was only kept by Apple for so long because of the revenue it generates as a proprietary cable, despite the abundance of usbc cables. That type of monopolistic practices should be shamed, but we need the EU given America refuses to regulate big Tech.
personally, I think the way to deal with this is the way the Chinese have done it (very successfully)
if US "gatekeepers" wish to operate in the European market, it will be under license, with a joint venture that is majority controlled by European shareholders, with technology transfer agreements
essentially: using their own greed against them
and if they don't like it, they can operate somewhere else
The only countries that do this in the world are China and Iran. Russia and India do it partially, such as rules for storing data domestically so they can snoop on it.
Google, LinkedIn, Uber, etc left China. Meta refused to do a joint venture so never entered the market. The only big American names who did a joint venture were Apple and Tesl
There is no law in America requiring domestic joint ventures.
The Tiktok law gives the US gov power to ban social media companies controlled by a "U.S. foreign adversary" (only 6 countries) and offers the chance for divestment, but doesn't require moving operations to the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
You absolutely can, because the companies providing tech services need to get paid, either from local companies buying ad space, or directly from their users, and you can just block payment to non-compliant firms.
Given America's hostile stance to its former allies, joint ownership and technology transfer agreements as a condition for its firms operating in the EU market sounds more than reasonable. If US firms aren't happy with this, they can always lobby to impose similar restrictions on foreign big tech firms operating in the US...
If there were any.
The problem with flipping the table and starting a trade war is everyone loses... And the correct response to someone starting lose-lose games is tit-for-tat. Maybe big tech firms will think twice before throwing their support for an anti-trade candidate. (They absolutely could have used their position in media to stop this insanity, if they wanted to, but now we all have to lie in the bed they've made.)
And if they are collecting data against EU regulations how do they stop them? They already aren’t complying with the joint venture in this hypothetical. They dont pay the fine. Then you have to ban them.
Thats the dynamic in China. You have a domestic company that owns the operations and is fully regulated bu the host country. And you have to ban anyone that doesn’t cooperate with that model.
If the US removed every non US service that doesn’t transfer majority ownership of US operation to a US firm, like he is suggesting the EU does, then yes. That would constitute a Great Firewall.
The context of this is considering requiring companies to pay/acquire a licence to operate in the EU; if a company isn't willing to abide the terms of the license, not operating in the EU is the whole point.
As mentioned elsewhere, no you don't; you block the companies from being paid for providing the service. It's up to the companies to deal with it then.
In most cases the company isnt paid by the end EU user. They can still serve ads to EU users.
Say Google doesnt play ball with the EU and the EU disallows them from operating in the EU. EU user visits a search page and sees an ad. This ad comes from some company outside the EU. The EU user can access Google and Google gets paid. How do you stop the EU user from accessing Google.
> In most cases the company isnt paid by the end EU user. They can still serve ads to EU users.
You still don't need to specifically block either the EU user or Google's payment for that ad view.
To continue with the example, if the EU secures judgement that Google is not stopping services & refuses to abide licensing requirements, other assets Google has within the EU's jurisdiction can be at risk.
If a tech company operates in a jurisdiction against their laws, ultimately they would have to make sure they have nothing that can be taken from them there.
>To continue with the example, if the EU secures judgement that Google is not stopping services & refuses to abide licensing requirements, other assets Google has within the EU's jurisdiction can be at risk.
But Google is already not operating within the EU in this scenario. Google says "no thanks we dont want to play by your rules" yet google.com still exists and EU users can access it. That's why you have to block it, along with anyone else that doesn't go along with the proposed forced tech transfer to a domestic company. Or you dont block it and you arent enforcing the proposed rule.
its not relevant, what really is important is Googel/FB siphoning money away from EU companies that pay for ads.
This is the source of high valuation of ad driven US businesses: ability to siphon money from businesses around the world simply for showing an ad. Check "Google Tax" if you are familiar with this term
accessing service is a cost center, no need to block service.
The revenue stream is European companies paying US companies for ads (or rather European firms paying Irish/Dutch subsidiaries of Gogel/Insta/FB for ads).
How was the US planning to ban Tiktok without a great firewall? I presume they would demand that internet companies don't route their traffic. Stop them locally caching data etc.
America has a Great Firewall, it's called AppleMobileFileIntegrity.kext[0]. The TikTok ban relied heavily on the fact that a social network practically needs to have a mobile app and thus prohibited them from having it. It was less of a "ban TikTok" bill and more of a "government gets to kick apps off the App Store" bill.
Yes, you could use TikTok on the web; but... have you ever tried using TikTok's web interface? It's an absolute joke. And on the other end, shipping a webapp subjects you to all sorts of consumer-friendly technical interference like ad blockers and de-cluttering that is intended to make the social network serve the user and not itself.
[0] On Android, TikTok did ship an APK to evade being kicked off Google Play; but that's only slightly more effective than telling people to go run AltStore on a Mac or PC to dev-sign a TikTok IPA that will be missing half the features because Apple doesn't allow certain permissions to be provisioned on free dev accounts.
Specifically, weapons over which we won't have full control after we take delivery. There's another point in that agreement, design authority over those weapons must be in EU — e.g. no licenced components (even 100% manufactured in Europe) that USA needs to provide software updates for.
Yeah. I think regulations of that nature may be coming.
I think in the US, we've put ourselves in a really bad spot. Most will likely blame Trump/Vance, and they definitely deserve their share. But the American tech industry has been contributing its quota towards this break for a long time as well. And we should be honest about that.
Also, I know that no one will want to hear this on HN, but workers at American companies have also not made us any friends in Europe. There is a strong undercurrent of resentment due to some American workers not having the ability to maintain a humble and collaborative demeanor online or IRL.
> I think in the US, we've put ourselves in a really bad spot. Most will likely blame Trump/Vance, and they definitely deserve their share. But the American tech industry has been contributing its quota towards this break for a long time as well. And we should be honest about that.
I think that televised meeting with Zelensky was a wake-up call to many people, including myself
we can't allow ourselves to become any more dependent on the country that elected this regime, and not once (because a mistake can be forgiven), but twice
the current dependency also needs to be reduced to ensure the long survival of our societies and way of life
But other search engines already crawl Google's websites. If we want to call that IP theft. The alleged IP theft against Google would be new and of a different kind than what Google is committing.
Again, if we want to call web crawling IP theft. Which seems dubious.
These are the kinds of hypocrisies that I'm talking about when I say that American companies from Amazon to Tesla are also responsible for the worsening fracture between the US and EU. Trump and Vance should not escape responsibility for their share of this fiasco. But this transatlantic break is something that was very much a team effort. And as a team we in the US have been, perhaps unwittingly, working towards this hostility for a long time.
Maybe this will finally see European software engineers getting better compensation. The companies might avoid it if they move quickly as the US tech industry is a garbage fire at the moment (from an employee perspective) but that will eventually subside and they'll be competing against US companies again for top talent.
> Mostly calibrated to decrease American dominance in the sector.
If the EU takes actions specifically designed to hurt the US, do you think the US wouldn't respond in kind? This is ironically similar to Trump imposing tariffs on Canada and acting surprised when they imposed tariffs in response.
The relatively free trade between the US and the EU has been mutually beneficial. The number #1 selling car in the EU is made by an American company [1]. And the US is a huge market for luxury European cars [2].
Everyone is better off by being able to choose between a European or an American car rather than being forced to buy domestic.
The tech industry though is majoritarily dominated by US companies, that pays close to no taxes compared to the benefits they make on EU citizen.
This is a large scale extraction of wealth from the EU, and it has been going on for 20+ years.
They can cry all they want about it, it's very clear we (the EU) have much more to gain than to loose by kicking them out and growing our own solutions.
Not to mention the fascist turn the US are taking with this presidency, we don't want these people owning our digital lives.
> If the EU takes actions specifically designed to hurt the US, do you think the US wouldn't respond in kind?
The US has started the trade war against EU already, with tariffs on steeel/aluminum - assuming they are still active, Trump seemingly lacks cojones to keep tariffs up once others retaliate.
Not to say the active hostility against EU, by threatening to annex Greenland (which is currently a Danish territory), open support for Putin in his aggression against Ukraine (which threatens Europe) and so on.
At this point the US should be seen as a hostile foreign nation by EU. EU is doing well by tightening the screws against US tech giants. Those companies are possibly a threat to essential infrastructure, and should be treated as such too.
> The US has started the trade war against EU already
On March 12th the US imposed a tariff on steel/aluminum, the EU responded with an tariff of total equivalent value on US steel/aluminum/agricultural products [1].
This is the core of my point, the US created a tariff against the EU, the EU responded in kind.
> the active hostility against EU, by threatening to annex Greenland...[Trump's] aggression against Ukraine
Trump has said concerning things about both Ukraine and Greenland and I don't want to downplay that. That being said, the US is currently sending both weapons and intelligence to Ukraine [2].
In fact, he US has given Ukraine more aid than the EU and all of its member states combined (though less than all of Europe combined) [3].
Being the largest supplier of aid, sending weapons and sharing intelligence with Ukraine is clearly not siding with Russia.
I think big tech deserves anti trust regulation and action because it is good for a competitive market that actually puts customers first. They’re too big and powerful and abuse their power to hurt fair competition. But I think the type of aggressive action you’re talking about - and the motivation to do it solely to weaken America - will open up a lot of destructive actions back and forth.
America choosing to spend less money on Ukraine, pushing for resolution to a conflict that has resulted in mass deaths for Ukrainian males, and renegotiating tariffs doesn’t deserve the kind of hysterical overreaction I’m seeing from Europeans. In the end, if it escalates to open warfare on each other’s economies rather than a reset of trade agreements, it’ll damage both the EU and US to China’s benefit.
For the moment, and only because it wants to be the global hegemon, and I promise you that the CCP is not isolationist and will do far worse to Europe than even Trump, for all his destructive and inflammatory idiocy, will do.
Sonehow I doubt it. China was from time immemorial a nation of merchants. They excel in trade. Even their communist experiment, from a historical perspective, quickly gave in for them to revert to what they do best.
The US has a history of fucking over other countries for their own benefit instead.
I am not saying that EU should align with China or any such thing. There is no reason to not rely in them for trading however.
