surely, surely someone has already brainstormed it...
The whole TechBro mafia structure behind Trump has again and again threatened damage against Europeans. A good example was Vance trolling on the security conference in Munich, where he complained how the ultra right are silenced in Europe. This showed that the new agenda that the TechBros in the USA do, is actively hostile - this in addition to Trump acting as agent Krasnov buddy for Putin. So, any more money that goes into the USA, is ultimately money that goes against Europe. In many ways Canadians understand this problem MUCH better than many governments in Europe - just look at the german government. They are absolutely unwilling to stop being so obedient to the USA. Denmark at the least understands the problem - why is Germany so strange?
However, that is not something that can be reversed meaningfully in less than a decade. So for now, I would play the long game like Germany while working to get the EU to build up a military force large enough to significantly reduce our dependence on the US.
Looking at it dispassionately as a European living in the US, if you wanted to foment the sort of mistrust many Americans have of Europe, I don't think you could have created a more invidious policy.
https://nltimes.nl/2026/01/15/dutch-experts-warn-us-takeover...
The Dutch national government mandated login system relies on technologies and hosting of a private company that was in conversation with an American counterpart about a possible acquisition.
Bad? Yes
The Netherlands selling their login service? No
I'm not really sure what Denmark is complaining about? It sounds like Google decided that removing Danish media and news from their services would have no impact on their finances whatsoever, therefore they are firm on their negotiating position since it's basically "take it or leave it".
And Denmark is also somehow trying to force Google to list and index their media, and at their price.
I think a lot of friction between businesses and countries in Europe can be better understood if we better understood the difference in how countries treat things like "business" and other stuff. I understand in the US it's different, money basically rules, you can fire people whenever you want and so on, but in many places in the world, people have a different relationship to businesses, it's not just about money there.
Particularly when it comes to journalism. From reading news from Denmark about it, politicians been repeatedly argued that Google's framing reduces journalism to a revenue input, ignoring its democratic function.
I think it's ok if the highly productive parts of society subsidize the crucial-but-low-productivity areas (healthcare, education, etc).
Otherwise this happens https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/te... See all the important careers on the bottom right. And your people elect fascists because the education system sucks and they don't know any better.
Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon are society destroying companies. They are Walmart times a trillion. Any country that is not directly taxing these wildly profitable companies are leaving free money on the table.
Other commenter's note about national security issue is more on point but then I doubt that bailing out failing news platforms would make them as influential as they used to be in the bygone era.
Honestly, it doesn't sound like a lot of these EU countries are interested in digital sovereignty or developing their own services. They just want to force the American companies to sell their services at rates favorable to them by getting their regulators involved.
But it's actually the opposite. They are trying to get their lawmakers to force Google and Meta to provide them their services at below market value!
Danish media are trying to survive, as high quality journalism is necessary for democracy to function. They can’t avoid being on the big platforms, as Google and Meta have this dominant gatekeeper position in the market - this is where the media pull new users into their sites.
So the argument presented by Danish authorities and media companies were that information should flow freely in a democracy and by doing a huge experiment like this without informing users is against the rights of Danish citizens.
I’ve been part of multiple clinical trials and consent was always there. The control group exists. They know they’re in the study but they may not know they’re the control group.
One does not need google in their lives to be exposed to advertisements to a local brand. Or pay a percentage fee to paypal or visa if you buy a local product.
US tech companies lose much more from a decoupling than Europe does.
The moat crossing isn't in competing with the likes of Google or Paypal directly. The moat crossing is in accumulating enough capital to build the thing that leapfrogs them. Being a middleman allows you to accumulate a lot of money while expending fairly little of it. Then, you focus on the next thing, be it AI or whatever, while collecting middleman fees.
This has a collective effect on a nation's economy. You could tell the American companies to go kick rocks and develop your own local alternatives, but then you're expending your capital on developing a local alternative, not developing the Next Big Thing (TM), and the Americans are. The risk is that your economy becomes less competitive overall while becoming more competitive with one segment of the American economy.
This is an issue the US finds itself in now as it tries to onshore manufacturing again after allowing someone else to play middle man for decades.
Yes, the US has plenty of capital resources but that doesn’t directly translate into production when you have to setup not just a single factory but an entire supply chain.
Edit: with all of the negativity under this comment I'm reminded of a hilarious experience I had when I first interned at FB during grad school: I was on some online game with a friend of mine and his friend (whom I'd never met) and we were on voice chat. My buddy asks me how the internship is going and I gave the standard "it's hard but I'm learning a lot" response. Afterwards the third guy chimes in and asks if me I don't feel ashamed (or whatever) about working for FB. It was literally my first tech internship so I said something equivocal. Then I asked the guy what he did/where he worked. I shit you not the guy was literally a radar engineer for the US army. The irony was clearly lost on him and he even went as far as insisting he (as opposed to me) was doing very good/valuable work.
Personally, I'm looking at east asia and latin america.
Muslim refugees are not responsible for Epstein, Greenland, US import duties, US ignoring Minsk agreement or Facebook actively supporting fake news with engineering resources embedded into political campaigns. The vast majority of muslim refugees integrates extremely well and perform shitty jobs that help our society, all while being traumatized from wars they were born into.
The social media accounts of the "far right" sit in st. petersburg propaganda mills and their advertisement account managers sit in san francisco. Workers at US-tech companies are responsible for the unchecked bombardment of our citizens with propaganda and fake news.
Though the commenter mentioned working at a FAANG, so maybe they're far more culpable in this situation than the average person. If that's the case, I'd have to agree with you.
If one must point fingers, a better target is those actually in power.
"Yeah guys, I got enough blood money now from ad targeting people in the US, so to clear my conscience I can come give you guys a hand to fight the evil guys I had no issue with when they were paying me big money, but only IF you pay me 50% of what they pay me."
How about thanks but no thanks. We don't need this kind of fake virtue signaling "help". Enjoy your money somewhere else.
Edit: sorry I sound so mean, but it's how I feel.
y'all are extra spicy on this topic seemingly.
EDIT:
> We don't need this kind of fake virtue signaling "help"
i wasn't virtue signalling anything - that's why i said money is still an important part of the calculus. i was literally just curious if there were such accelerated pathways for SWEs...
They all do ads. Apple is about to add them to their Maps.
https://advertising.amazon.com
https://advertising.netflix.com/en-us
> then posturing like a anti-FANG freedom fighter for 50% cut, which might rub some people the wrong way as being a by hypocritica
The only place I was posturing was in your imagination. I guess you're salty about FAANG salaries in the US (and that's what has you tilted) but I was literally just asking about comparable salary and accelerated immigration pathways. The comment is very short - I don't know where you're getting all of this content from.
My 2 cents.
It's not about "someone in my company is running some kind of ads service" but that you and your colleagues collectively have had a net negative impact on free societies all over the world.
Nobody is jealous about FAANG salaries if you need to step over unconscious homeless people on your way to work, fear about healthcare, university tuition and that your kid might be shot at school.
100-120k net is considered quite a good salary and is unattainable even for most as a contracted employee. You do get benefits like healthcare and pensions which work differently. You can get higher rates if you are good at marketing, but then you need to insure your unemployment and pension yourself as well.
My latest info on Silicon Valley compensation (Google, Netflix, and Twitter) was that 400k/year gross before tax and RSU was typically achievable with even higher regular occurrences. 50% of that is still way over what you typically find here. (Switzerland excluded but all prices are inflated in Switzerland.)
For example safety is not guaranteed due to extreme homelessness and easy access to guns, so you have to pay more for gated communities and security/concierge. You need to privately pay for healthcare and also pay off debt from university tuition, both is much cheaper in EU. If you have kids, you have to pay for private schools.
Then all over the US the infrastructure is so extremely bad that you don't even have sidewalks and you need to take a car to get anywhere, with really bad public transport.
If you want to just emulate European lifestyle in the US you really need to spend a lot of money.
FAANG is Facebook(Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google(Alphabet) right?
Facebook and Google are heavy on ads, Amazon has ads all over their shopping experience and in their video product; AWS isn't connected with ads though, Netflix has an ads tier in their video product too, I opted out of Apple so I don't know what ads look like on their products but I think they have a small ads product?
I'm not quite sure why the negative responses to your offer though. Sure, it's a bit mercenary, but it's an offer. Personally, I don't think it's really about personnel though, recruiting FAANG employees to Europe wouldn't generate European FAANGs; Europe needs to look at the business conditions that spawn these kinds of companies and see what they can change to encourage the kinds of companies they want. Why did Apple survive while early computer companies from Europe all folded and also where have all the European handset makers gone; where are the online megaretailers for Europe and why didn't they consider selling their surplus computing resources; why haven't Euro television companies developed a cross border streaming service; maybe something about search engines, maybe what stopped Europe from playing in the search engine wars before Google became dominant; bonus non faang question, why did Europay merge with Mastercard.
SV took workers from all over the world because these workers were extremely skilled and cheap. They didn't compete with Americans for jobs because there were simply not enough Americans with the needed skills.
Foreign tech workers need housing but they don't own land and can't vote in your elections, so the fact housing is bad is 100% on US citizens.
This is, of course, stupid. You're arguing that if a tyrant king comes around, all of his neighbors should work tirelessly and for free to make sure the tyrant king's subjects remain under their control, so that the tyrant king still has materiel to invade you with. Most people are not in a position to individually resist or rebel against the system. Revolution is a collective concept, and the fish rots from the head. There's no causal link between denying someone a path to emigrate from their hellhole and them actually fixing their broke-ass society. They just wind up becoming a tool for that society to throw at you.
Think of every society like a building made of sentient bricks. If the bricks decide to leave, the building falls apart. But if the bricks are prohibited from leaving, then the building remains standing. Even if America doesn't actually restrict people from leaving (in fact, Trump kinda wants that), offering them no place to go is about the same thing as not letting them leave.
And, to be clear, the rot didn't start with Trump. It started with neoliberalism and the destruction of America's welfare system creating a permanent underclass of scammable peons. That same rot is present in much of the EU for the same reasons. America just succumbed to it first. You're watching a preview of what will happen in your country soon if you do not take immediate corrective action to fix the problem.
If your industry cannot sustain itself without checks from tech companies for using content as LLM training data that is quite a precarious situation. What was the economic situation for the news industry in Denmark prior to 2021?
The question is, if they want it so bad, why don't they just establish a state fund for news and journalism so they can subsidize it themselves?
It honestly just feels like a shakedown.
SilverElfin•1h ago
At least for the next 50 years or so, the memory of this Trump administration will undermine any coupling to America. In the interim, I am not sure why these countries are even wasting time talking to American companies or representatives - they are absolutely not going to be a trustworthy long term partner:
> Rønde described the “Kafkaesque” experience of negotiating with local representatives who appear to have no actual authority.
dc396•1h ago
reactordev•1h ago
ta20240528•30m ago
He should give into his vices, embrace his inner-Putin and demand a “land-bridge” from Washington State to Alaska.
For national security reasons, of course.
mhitza•1h ago
I can see ways that could be really effective, though trying to get a sane word out to these bureaucrats nowadays seems impossible.
bflesch•1h ago
It is a courtesy that citizens from free countries pay US tech companies a middleman fee over various ways. What US tech workers fail to realize is that
So many of these things were done due to convenience and convention, making US tech workers richer and richer. I feel people are realizing what kind of pricks not only the management of US tech companies but also the US tech workers themselves are. Especially on HN these affluent workers from US tech companies run around and parrot the most stupid talking points while thinking their wealth comes from some sort of special skill.We made them rich. They looted our data and poisoned our societies with fake news. They show no respect towards our systems or culture.
c-linkage•1h ago
bflesch•56m ago
It is inconvenient to buy a Tesla to help save the planet and then see emerald nepo baby Elon Musk doing hitler salutes, and US citizens downplaying it due to their special understanding of freedom of speech.
Or a sweaty Peter Thiel morphing from startup evangelist to religious nut babbling about the antichrist.
Or a Jeff Bezos who ships stuff from china to europe being so unhappy with his life that he needs to marry the wife of his neighbor.
On top of this there's this still unresolved child sexual abuse scandal that basically implicates all of US upper class including senior leadership of US tech companies, who suddenly come out of retirement like Sergey Brin because they keep being mentioned in the Epstein files.
For more and more non-US people the inconvenience of seeing all this outweighs the benefit of being able to use some sort of web application. We have survived before on Nokia phones and TomTom navigation systems, and we'll be able to do so again.
US tech companies had US government support and helpful non-US regulatory environment to capture value from our countries. In their core, they are rent-seeking middlemen, parasitic to our economies.
The parasite needs a host, but the host can always find a new parasite.
subroutine•55m ago
ta20240528•34m ago
You were pretty pissed when the Chinese made a better social media app.
Maybe is because of your deep love of democracy and freedom, but it more likely that you can’t countenance not being in charge.
bflesch•29m ago
Not to mention that Facebook and Google unknowingly ingested phone contact lists from smartphones of their users on a massive scale. So their "advantage" was extremely unethical behavior, which today would be considered an illegal crime.
So yes, it is literally Apple and Google stopping my European company to do the same, because they make it really hard to leech user data from their platforms.
> nobody is forcing you to use them
Do you remember internet.org? There's an interesting section in "careless people" about how Zuckerberg was working on bundling Facebook with smartphone contracts so people can use it for free. One country rolled out Facebook for free and it resulted in the Rohingyan Genocidg because Facebook enabled unchecked fake news along religious divides, while over years ignoring all warnings about the problem.
breuleux•17m ago
Netflix is a good example: the functionality isn't difficult to reproduce, and the only thing that restricts its library is copyright, which the EU could just stop enforcing for American companies.
sieep•1h ago
This is obvious in the recent AI race. EU-headquartered companies remain rare compared to their US/Chinese counterparts.
ori_b•57m ago
ta20240528•57m ago
Some stuff just went goes to the USA, because it always went to the USA - even though the original advantages are long gone.
Screw with it enough and the users (the world) just route around the damage.
As the UK can attest after Brexit.
bflesch•44m ago
The other things you list are weak arguments:
I think the delusion among US tech workers is immense. The moat is not that big. If other countries stop sharing your idea of copyright and software patents there is not much you can do.mixmastamyk•59m ago
One simply needs to start using them. Investment can be focused on integration work and bug fixing.