It was a (steel and coal) corp affordances union to begin with, so it's no wonder it's pandering to business rather than civic interests after all.

Von der Leyen is corrupt yet shapes EU policy without backlash, and the citizenry is left to pay the price, precisely because the EU pretends to speak for the people.

Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.

Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.

The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.

Is removing the dependence on US tech easy for the EU? No, it's tough and takes a lot of work and time. It's still a piece of cake compared to the dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They're incomparable.

If the government switched away from Microsft and refused to accept MS document formats for any legal reason - then things might shift.

Most businesses just don't care, they want they easy button.

A law firm does not want to screw around, they just click 'buy' on Word, Outlook, Teams.

There's a deep psychology to it.

I remember a developer telling me that Oracle 'was the only real database'.

It's not so much propaganda, just the propagandistic power of incumbency. People who only know one thing are hard pressed to believe there could be something else.

This is more than 50% brand, narrative etc.

We techies tend to underestimate the power of perception, even when it's of our own creation etc. i.e. people fighting over Linux and it's various distros.

Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.

Interesting because doesn't every sort of democratic state try to be 'a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls'? Depends how stringent and usually not stringent enough for many on the Left and on the Right.

When tempted to use the word 'fascism', is it not better to describe the issue with which one's concerned (maybe deeply) rather than using a fit-all word and take care not to devalue the significance of the word as it was, for instance, applied in WW2 to some of the appalling atrocities that occurred in that period and those we've seen reports of recently?

The only relevance to the article is that it indicates which parties have sided with the US administration to fight consumer’s digital rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_political_alliances

Trump keeps talking about taking it because he knows the media will bite the bait and talk about that instead and forget about the epstein list and other illegal shit his administration did.

Remember how he was also talking about annexing Canada in his election? Trump just loves to bait the media by saying crazy stuff since the media feeds on sensationalist stuff like that.