US threatens EU digital services market access

https://twitter.com/ustraderep/status/2000990028835508258

56•heisenbit•2h ago

Comments

pera•1h ago

https://xcancel.com/ustraderep/status/2000990028835508258

f_devd•34m ago

Remind me to never look at twitter replies again, by far most counterproductive threads I've seen

luis_cho•1h ago

If American companies don’t respect Europe regulation it’s time to Europe invest in dedicated software competing with office 365, social networks, even android/apple/windows os.

closewith•1h ago

Many EU Governments run entirely on MS/Meta/Amazon and to a lessor extent Google services. Many (most?) government services run on Azure or AWS, and huge parts of the continent run on WhatsApp.

RobotToaster•51m ago

Which is a huge mistake.

We should have learned that the USA can't be trusted when Nixon ended bretton woods so it didn't have to give France it's gold back.

closewith•47m ago

Agreed, and all the worse for being completely foreseeable.

4gotunameagain•35m ago

  “It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”

Henry Kissinger ― US secretary of state, Nobel peace prize laureate, war criminal.

techterrier•51m ago

And are rushing to get away! I work on a product thats source available and self hosted. Many of our new customers are EU gov agencies.

closewith•47m ago

Good to hear, but probably depends on the country. Ireland is all-in on Azure and only deepening ties.

wkat4242•36m ago

Same with Holland. The tax office is moving away from their own office package onto m365 right now. They apparently had an alternative all this time, which I find very surprising (the media didn't really elaborate on this).

But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.

cyberlad24•1h ago

Mutatis mutandis, the same applies in the opposite direction.

luis_cho•1h ago

Since when Accenture is European? It’s this because these companies are not Palantir?

Brajeshwar•1h ago

Being officially HQ-ed in Dublin, Ireland might be the reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

jeroenhd•1h ago

Accenture is operating from Ireland, legally speaking. It may be in American hands, serving American shareholders and American interests, and it may have been started as a European front for an American business, but it's technically an EU company.

I don't think those kinds of details matter to a government looking to start yet another trade war, though. The list is based on the question "what legally European tech companies do business in America, sorted by income".

torginus•9m ago

By this logic, FAANG is also EU

reacharavindh•1h ago

Throwing stone from a glass box eh? If I understand correctly, US is by far the largest services exporter to EU… should EU merely apply the same “tariffs” that US might impose on these goods, some healthy European alternatives would finally gain some ground..

shellwizard•1h ago

What alternatives to Microsoft, Google, IBM or AWS exist in Europe?

nephihaha•1h ago

If these hadn't been allowed to emerge as monopolies we would have a wider selection.

jonnybgood•57m ago

Is that really the case for the EU? The EU doesn’t seem to foster an environment for competitive companies that can operate at the necessary scale the above listed can.

fxtentacle•49m ago

LIDL the supermarket chain is German and is running a large cloud operation inside the EU. And OVH from France is also pretty big.

You’re correct that few EU companies get as large as US monopolies, but that’s kind of the goal when you want a functioning market.

concinds•40m ago

A "functioning market" doesn't prevent oligopolies. Oligopolies are natural and optimal (desirable) in many industries, if not most. That's when regulations come in.

ivan_gammel•38m ago

You probably mean Schwarz Gruppe, the owner of Lidl, and their subsidiary StackIT. Yes, they are growing. Schwarz is also building 11B€ AI data center in Lubbenau, so I fully agree with you. We will be fine without American digital services.

eastbound•49m ago

Yes, funnily, mutual tariffs on IT services between the EU and USA would incentivize competition, which is a good thing. Unless the EU is try incapable of doing IT right, in which case it would slow the the EU economy, but let’s assume we’ll improve on that.

piva00•46m ago

Mostly an artefact of the non-application of antitrust laws, the US selectively decided to not apply those anymore for the past 30-40 years, corporate consolidation takes hold, companies providing a service grow enormously and are allowed to swallow prominent competitors to stamp them out.

The EU has many competitive companies, I think HN is too focused on "tech" as in digital/web stuff and quite blind to other technological industries...

nephihaha•45m ago

It seems to be. As in most of the world, nearly everyone is divvied up between Apple and Microsoft, and use Google Search, with Wikipedia being the default place normies go for information. I know there are people who use Linux and prefer to use other search engines, but they are few and far between.

concinds•43m ago

The EU has an extremely fragmented digital internal market, laws that suck for startups in most places, worse capital markets and funding mechanisms (and related laws), and doesn't have a Silicon Valley. It also underinvests in R&D and doesn't have a DARPA.

So yes, just tariffing or restricting US tech wouldn't help much. Europe "lost" that race fair and square. It needs to focus on fixing all those things.

wkat4242•37m ago

On the other hand a lot of these startups and tech companies are a net negative for the world. Externalise problems and pollution, internalise profits. We don't want society to be only decided by those who make the most money. That's why we have those laws.

I personally don't want the EU to become the US. And Investors gambling with other people's money is what gave us the world financial crisis of 2007. No lessons were learned as usual.

Tarq0n•40m ago

You say that like scale is an inevitability. If Microsoft's offerings were unbundled into lots of smaller interoperable solutions we'd all be better off.

1718627440•30m ago

The opposite seems to be the case. The EU fosters really competitive markets, so large companies are really hard to emerge. There are tons of small software shops in my city alone, you can walk through the city and see ads for them in front of their houses.

csomar•47m ago

No you would only have the European selection.

nephihaha•43m ago

There is currently no real European equivalent/serious competitor to the Apple/Microsoft duopoly, Google monopoly, Wikipedia monopoly etc.

ivan_gammel•33m ago

On Wikipedia: German chapter is the second largest (>100 FTEs) and collects donations directly, funding root org from them and keeping significant part for its own operations. It’s not exactly an American monopoly.

nairboon•29m ago

> There is currently no real European equivalent to the [..] Wikipedia monopoly

8 out of the 10 largest Wikipedias are European languages...

csomar•24m ago

The parent was talking about the scenario where Europe is forced to create alternative (like China) and that it will lead to a better/wider selection for him (I assume he is in the EU) and my answer is that it will lead to only a European selection.

Interestingly, the only people having a wider selection are the ones outside of EU/US/China as they'll be free to pick up whatever they want.

matwood•40m ago

Possibly. Until recently, anyone who was in tech wanted to move to the US because there was simply more opportunity. Salaries are higher, chances of making it big are higher, failing is often seen as a positive in the US, etc... The adage that the best place to make money is the US and the best place to spend money is the EU still rings true.

The US become less welcoming to immigrants is a great opportunity for the EU, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to take advantage and overcome the structural differences.

https://www.challenge.org/insights/structural-differences-in...

input_sh•42m ago

None of those are products, those are companies that offers 100s of products.

The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really).

Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.

McDyver•39m ago

You're actually making the exact point you want to attack.

That's why Europe needs that push to get their act together and start being self-sufficient, digital services-wise.

whazor•42m ago

I think you can make a bigger list of US firms that are benefiting from EU laws, like Epic Games, Garmin, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft. But these companies are again also benefiting from maybe other American more established and US protected companies.

fxtentacle•1h ago

Yay, jackpot! We taunted the monkey in the glass box into throwing the first stone.

The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.

The US sees TikTok as a risk. For the EU, it’s Microsoft Office.

jeroenhd•1h ago

> the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to)

I think the American government is mad at the DMA more than anything. Breaking up the monopolies that are currently firmly held by American tech giants goes directly against the interests of the White House, especially now that they're able to openly bribe the president.

stakhanov•54m ago

The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?

Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea!

I am all for it. Through this model, we might actually enjoy effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture! Who would have thought that this day would ever come? Once again, it turns out I have been too cynical all my life.

kevin061•52m ago

Please destroy US tech, Ursula.

rvz•46m ago

The EU can only fine US tech giants because it's good at suffocating its own European companies with some of its members states having one of the highest taxes and subject to the EU's regulations.

It's no wonder AI startups like Mistral (France) are so dependent on US VCs and the same is true with Lovable (Sweden) who were able to grow faster than Europe trying to strangle them.

Since there are rare startup home-runs that are from Europe, the EU instead needs find a way to impose fines on US big tech companies. They (EU) will certainly do the same with the Big AI companies very soon.

SilverElfin•37m ago

Is this all simply spurred on by the recent fine against Musk/X? That wasn’t even about censorship but other issues. Not to mention the irony of threatening market access after throwing high tariffs on key allies while going soft on China.

throwaway13337•35m ago

The tariff talk was ostensibly because the EU exported more goods to the US than the US exported to EU.

The US exports far more digital services to the EU, though.

Understanding those things, it would seem a particularly unwise framing for the US government to focus on EU digital services exports.

LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software, and in particular making it far easier to handle the regulatory compliance and regional fragmentation that have traditionally held back software companies in the EU. Combine that with growing concerns about software trust, and the EU looks like an increasingly attractive bet for future software investment.

Ironic, then, that Europe seems slowest to adopt the very tool that could finally solve its fragmentation problem.

Two governments, two very different strategies to cripple themselves. The race is on.

zkmon•26m ago

US would like entire world to adapt American laws, values, norms, morals, life styles, mindset, ethics etc. Any deviation would, ofcourse, be uncomfortable.

anomie31•21m ago

I'm not read reading that whole screed, I just want to know if there's any regulations that apply to America only.

Otherwise, how can words like "discrimination" even be appropriate?