Us Threatens Extra Tariffs, Export Bans, for Nations That Regulate Big Tech
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As the US threatens to slap extra tariffs and export bans on nations that dare to regulate Big Tech, the discussion is abuzz with concerns about the implications for global tech governance. Some commenters, like A_D_E_P_T, worry that Europe will cave to US pressure, while others, such as bboygravity, see the tariffs as a wake-up call for the EU to take a stronger stance. The thread reveals a fascinating divide, with some, like saubeidl, preferring the "China model" of authoritarianism with functional infrastructure over the US's "anti-science regressive authoritarianism." Amidst the debate, a Gramsci quote shared by fifteen1506 sets the tone: "The old world is dying, the new is slow to be born: now is the time of monsters."
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And this is the only framework I can look to this news with. Either that or mercantilism, I'm told.
https://www.lacittafutura.it/cultura/il-vecchio-muore-e-il-n...
That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
I feel the US/Trump is our only hope of slowing this down as a guarantee of (future) true democracy at the EU level essentially doesn't exist for us any other way. The EU sees China as an example to follow and I feel Trump/US is the only thing trying to stop EU leadership of going there.
Currently we're seeing a global version of a SaaS rugpull, and this should wake people up, if they're not awaken already.
I think the person you replied to thinks that the US is a shining beacon of liberty that is going to force the EU to be less authoritarian.
I like to watch this small excerpt from Frank Zappa interview time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fam5wRXcoQE
My personal belief is that for good infrastructure you want capable local industry (to build it) AND a population that is not too wealthy (because this gives additional infrastructure more relative value, keeps the workforce for building it more affordable and thus citizens less likely to oppose the whole thing).
I don't think that having european dictators would really help either of those points, so my infrastructure expectations from neofascism are quite low.
The thing is, EU politicians have been more than asleep at the wheel for over 2 decades now coasting along, and it shows in the mess we are in today: energy polices, tech development, economic growth, unsustainable welfare state, lack of strong defense, etc.
All they do is flashy speeches and virtue signaling on the international stage while not actually fixing any problems, just cashing in their paycheques till they can reitre on their generous pensions and leve the mess for the next ones to fix or just keep kicking the can down the road.
Sure, the issue is that whenever Europe "got worse" in a serious crisis, it never ended well. Usually millions died, and it was only better after that for a little while. So what do we do?
How do you figure?
The capitol storming and freeing all that participated. Having major cities being taken over by the army. Stifling free press. You know all that good old dictatorship playbook stuff.
I don't have an opinion on that. It is the president's prerogative to pardon whoever he wants, no justification necessary.
> Having major cities being taken over by the army.
That is the National Guard. Not the same thing as the Army. The Army would be a very bad option should that happen. The cities are not taken over. The mayor/police chief of those cities have no desire to reign in crime, the federal government has to step in. Depending on your political views, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line is that people much more safer now in DC than they were 2-3 weeks ago.
> Stifling free press.
For this I have zero information. Link(s)?
I find that the people who make statements like this don't actually live in cities. Its like you got your talking points from Stephen Miller.
I actually leave in a big city. And I do not know who Stephen Miller is.
Second, no EU-wide regulation can come into being without support from Council, and Council is formed by member countries.
As always, people are complaining EU this, EU that, when EU in reality is their own country, among others. It will be your country that will do the censorship etc. If your country is small and weak it has low impact on the international state of affairs, regardless of its membership in the EU. Macron or Merz have much more to say than von der Leyen.
What specific actions has the EU done to ban free speech and control the political narrative?
I see the US deporting legal permanent residents when they peacefully protest against US policy[1]. and I see the US searching social media accounts and forbidding private accounts[2] for visa applicants. Both of those seem like Trump is attempting to control political speech more than anything the EU has done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
[2] To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.” https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Replacing it with a centralized totalitarian US government that we don't even get to vote on.
Trump's approach to free speech: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
I want whatever you're on mate.
The countries already want to it themselves. See the UK for an example.
If you have a 27 country bloc and are rationally limited to the actions of the most timid or compromised, it's pretty easy to manipulate the actions of the whole. We know Hungary is effectively a Russia proxy, for instance, and has massively influenced the response to Russia. Similarly a couple of EU leaders (Meloni, Orban) are Trump lickspittles/mini-mes so there again they'll deny any collective response that offends their best pal.
Are those obscure priorities though? Putting local employment/wellfare/environment first seems justifiable to me, no?
I would argue that EU action has been pretty aligned with their actual citizens interests during this whole conflict:
- Kept domestic consequences contained (energy price)
- Prevented escalation
- Scaled up domestic military readiness especially in border nations
- Hurt destabilizing Russian expansionism via sanctions/secondhand arms almost for free
I would much prefer a principled, strongly voiced NO to neo-imperialism in the form of massive support and intervention. But would that be in the best interest of most voters? I'd argue no.
Only in the sense that they are not in the spotlight when EU officials talk about Ukraine. They don’t say “We have more important things to do”. But you are of course right, they dominate the agenda.
I tend to agree but
1. We risk Balkanisation of the internet
2. Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed - which will just end looking like a sped up version of the Matrix screen
3. If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities (which let’s face it is the destination of search and posting text or photos).
The power of social media is the power of a phone in every frigging pocket of every adult on the planet.
So we end up with normcore social media, partly because regulation will ramp down the extreme reactions of the algorithm, and partly because LLMs will replace a lot of queries, and they are mostly normcore because they are based on every written word ever, and that is a huge anti-extremism weighting
The natural gas supply among other things. Europe has made itself first dependent on Russia and then on the US for the basic survival of its population.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
Yes, we need to move away from fossil fuels but the reality is that we are still dependent on them so we may as well look at strategic independence and economic gains and produce what we can ourselves.
So, your long game should be to forge amicable relations with your next-door neighbour, rather betting everything in your relationship with your manipulative friend on the other side of the pond. In the meantime, you should also become self-dependent.
Russia would love to regain the European land the Soviet Union lost.
And Putin is not an idiot to attempt expansion to lands with no ethnic-russian population. Such thing is clearly not feasible without the power structures of the former USSR.
People like to think that if they would have assassinated Hitler early on, WW2 wouldn't have happened, but that's wrong. That would have just left the power vacuum empty for someone else to capitalize on the German populations' grievances and start the war.
The history lesson is to make sure the masses of people are taken care of by their leaders, not to start censoring, imprisoning or assassinating political opponents who capitalize on the peoples' unhappiness.
That means the moderate right (think laissez-faire pro-immigration pro-business, the only remaining other voting bloc) and extreme right (hate based parties) control, easily, 50% of the vote. They are not currently allied but the problem is that a shattered left is not something the right (or anyone) can work with. If the left fully shatters, the right will be forced to join the extreme right.
So right now, it takes essentially EVERY small insignificant party cooperating not to hand EU countries to the extreme right (yes, in Germany there's more margin, in the Netherlands less, France is on the brink, ...)
That makes your "dumb" not dumb but a serious catch-22. Any compromise that makes ANY party that has 5% of the vote walk out is a total non-starter, because one vote of non-confidence and "hitler gets elected again" so to speak.
Mass immigration is the only thing currently saving Europe from demographic collapse in the working age population. It is the only thing keeping pension systems afloat for the moment. It is faltering, the working age population will still collapse (and immigration is not saving anything but the huge cities. In the south of Europe entire regions are essentially depopulated and those regions are growing despite mass immigration)
Yet another problem where there is no choice. Or there is a choice between "collapse now" and "collapse in 10 years".
We're seeing a repeating theme here.
And no worries: the EU governments are going to use spending cutbacks to get themselves out of this situation. Which again is the stupidest thing imaginable, because I can't even imageine a way to make that work ... but here we are.
And why is nobody asking "WHY has the left failed" and explain it? Winning over voters to your side isn't that hard. You just have to talk to them, see what they want, and give it to them, or at least negociate a compromise. That's it.
So, have politicians on the left bothered engaging in conversation with the voters to discuss their grievances and work with them on their issues to win their votes back? Or have they ignored their citizens' issues from their ivory towers and resorted to calling everyone who disagreed with their unpopular polices "Nazis", "fascists" and "alt-right supremacists"?
Because I only saw a lot of the latter and none of the former. Isn't it wild how if you diss your electorate, they won't vote for you and cause you to loose elections? It's almost as if that's a known self regulating feedback mechanism of democracy, that the left refuses to acknowledge and seeks to blames someone else for their self inflicted failures.
The problem with the left is that they've been ideologically captured and refuse to acknowledge or even discuss the pressing issues the population wants to discuss because of the optics of those issues (like illegal migration and asylum abuse) go against the ideological purity tests of the left whose policies often are the root cause of those issues. Isn't it obvious that if run a country on optics instead of Realpolitik and common sense, shit will hit the fan eventually when the bill is due and people will vote you out with both hands?
Until nations actually implement serious cybersecurity enforcement, this is a good thing.
> Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed
A massive part of the modern-day propaganda machine. It's worse than awful and it's intended.
> If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities
Ultimately, this is a better direction. But the regulations need to be carefully curated for freedom instead of suppression. Unfortunately, current political climate and public sentiment isn't going well for public safety.
Strongly disagree on this one. Utilities and heavy regulation are a necessary evil that should be used sparingly, not as the norm.
I mean it seems like social networks (and potentially search, but I'm less certain here) seem like a natural monopoly, so it would make sense to turn them into utilities.
I'd look to why it became a monopoly. I'm not sold on social media being a monopoly given the number of services out there, but either way they only got so large because they were effectively given get out of jail free cards with regards to legal liability protections given to the by the government. Removing those rather than standing up all the plumbing needed to regulate them as utilities seems like a much more simply approach.
You mean Section 230 and other analogous laws, right?
I'm not sure how you have comment and interaction heavy sites (like HN) without some sort of protections here. Like, YC would probably shut HN down rather than pay for enough people to moderate it 24-7.
Certainly, Facebook and Youtube would require absolute armies of moderators to comply with the law if they were treated as the publisher of user-generated content.
Maybe that's a tradeoff you'd be willing to make, but I'm pretty sure such a policy would be wildly unpopular and likely to get reversed pretty soon.
What's not fine is US oligarchs using social media platforms to influence elections - something Musk and Zuckerberg have both done, on the record, with fines to match.
That's not fine anywhere.
The US seems to have persuaded itself it is, but the EU - rightly - has other priorities.
The content is not on other apps though. Maybe other apps have other content, but it's not the good content that people want.
- install Firefox/Zen as main browser
- install uBlock Origin
- switch to Brave Search / Qwant for search engine
- switch to signal for IM for communicating with your parents and loved one (still use WhatsApp elsewhere)
- help family setup passkeys using Bitwarden EU
- advocate that they don't need to buy the latest android but can get 2nd hand e.g. motorola edge+ (2023) and help setup your parents linageos
- when switching router pick one with openwrt support and setup AdGuard on the router (some asus routers already have such things build in)
- buy european processors like ... (?)
- buy european motherboards like ... (?)
- buy european RAM like ... (?)
- buy european SSD/harddrives like ... (?)
- buy european graphics cards like ... (?)
Trully a road to independence. /s
EU can for sure get a most of those you mentioned from South Korea and Japan who are also having issues with US. At least with those countries EU has stronger hands than with US.
Amateur hour at the white house. (Or shall I say Trump hour?)
Basically it will be outsourcing the traditional government censorship, oppression and propaganda work to the tech private sector because it's 1000x more efficient that the government at this, and it also helps keep the image of those in power clean since if they get caught they can throw big-tech under the bus with some fines. It's literally the perfect setup.
How do I know this? Is it because I'm clairvoyant or have a tinfoil hat on? No, it's because US big-techs like Apple literally did the same deal for the CCP in China, so now that the can of worms has been opened, all the other countries want the same deal with big-tech.
And if you think the EU leadership is somehow morally above these types of practices, boy you couldn't be more wrong. Their unscrupulous use of Israeli Pegasus spy-ware and Palantir surveilance-ware proves they're not, they're cut from the same cloth as the rest. They'll gladly copy the CCP great firewall and give it a coat of blue paint with some gold stars on it and say it's for "protecting your democracy".
There is no such thing as EU leadership, other than the governments of the 27 members. So it's kinda unlikely that the above would happen (certainly possible but I reckon it's pretty low probability).
And yes, EU wide censorship introduced by the EU commission and forced onto EU members is definitely possible if politicians of all 27 members agree on that.
If you think your nations politicians don't have the balls to push for laws that suppress your freedoms just so they can keep their seats you're delulu.
The EU does not exist as a unit, it's 27 sovereign states cooperating. In the EU the single market is an achievement across countries, but can't compare with single large internal markets.
China as the second economy of the world managed to succeed with a centralised plan.
So I think market size and economic power is a bigger indicator than centralised vs not.
It is. As you said, Meta and Google started with small investments, but now they are multi trillion dollar behemoths. Any company, even with millions of dollars in funding, can’t compete with them because they have tens of thousands of developers and infrastructure worth tens or even hundreds of billions of USD. They have penetrated the entire EU market and have enough money to burn, allowing them to survive any competition that isn’t state funded. The risk for private capital is huge, and the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.
The only alternative would have been the Chinese route, building local equivalents of Google, AWS, Amazon, Meta etc. like they did in China but it seems that ship has already sailed for the EU, given the current state of things.
This isn't true, it's just that all of the EU excess capital gets invested in the US, so it appears true.
A decade ago I would have expected EU alternatives to be much worse but I'm less sure these days. Most US tech companies have moved past the innovator stage and spend most of their efforts on rent seeking and marketing.
All that said, I don't actually expect the EU to handle this well. They've been fumbling long term threats with regularity, and I don't they'll suddenly start doing better. They'll probably muddle along with most of their US dependencies until a massive disaster hits them in the face.
US sucks as an ally! Please do not cover it up under "big tech"!
If we would develop local alternatives, there is a good chance US will bomb them!
I fear that this slowly but surely sets up a sort of "we need our own strong man" vibe over time...
Europe at least has missed the last couple of trains on this. No one has trillions of dollars to spend and catch up with the US tech sector.
Past few months? Just look at their response to security and Russian aggression. I lost hope years ago.
This is a good thing, because a lot of European led regulation has been pretty terrible.
In england? started to break due to the black death
In russia? Lenin.
You might think Trump wants to serve corporations. However, mostly by incompetence, he is doing the opposite.
In other areas - when the entire Canadian federal (and most provincial and territorial governments - many municipal governments, and of course the entire educational sector due to low-cost licensing) and large-scale industries are completely dependent on Microsoft 365 + Azure platforms (probably AWS as well) - information technology and management usage of US technologies is definitely not being boycotted...
I saw an attempt at a very large company to abandon M/S, it was working but there were a huge amount complaints. Then after a couple months, you can guess what happened. Certain people, usually 1st and 2nd level management, got exemptions, then some "important" finance people. Guess what, the move failed because you ended up with 2 tiers of employees, the revolts started happening. After 1 year, the relented and went back to M/S.
However - it is not just that when looking at Microsoft 365 + Azure - it is the inter-connected dependencies between SharePoint Online, Teams, Purview and the desktop OS/Office applications; Metadata/smart-documents, IRM/DLP/Records Management, etc.
I don't care how effective it is, because there is no anger behind it. It's just a thing I stopped doing, like some people stop drinking or eating meat. Those habits stick.
https://www.wsj.com/business/us-alcohol-industry-canada-boyc... (Not paywalled) https://archive.is/r8Cxr
It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
But the EU leadership is so weak now that we never know, even if it doesn't make sense.
Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No. Can the EU Commission do without extra tax revenues from US tech? Yes.
The US tech industry doesn't have as much leverage as they think they do, the hardest part to replace is the hardware, which mostly isn't built in the US anyways
That reminds me of Mark Zukerberg which threatened to leave a while back... and denied it soon after realizing the bluff didn't work.
When I worked for big tech the US was always the most profitable market, usually followed by the UK. Albeit that was a long time ago. But the EU has economically declined since so I doubt things changed much.
Again, I've been away from FAANG for a while, but the EU (note that this is 27 countries) was super, super profitable.
From an ads perspective, you made money from selling to a bunch of relatively rich consumers (the EU) AND (this is more important), lots of EU companies spent loads of money on US advertisers. This is what pushes up prices and thus revenue in the EU.
Yes, the US consumer does spend a lot of money, but their super high revenue from tech is more a function (rather like their equity markets) of lots and lots of foreign money coming in.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about what happens to these markets if/when the Europeans stop spending as much money in the US market.
Wrong. The answer is yes, they very much can. Do they want to? No.
Also you can just use cracked OS (illegal, but if Microsoft is out, it will become abandonware) and create alternative API for cloud services. How hard do you think it would be to create i.e. S3 compatible API? Wait that already exists - https://github.com/jchristn/S3Server
And you could continue with whatever Azure, AWS etc offers. In the end, it is just some variation of a REST server.
Windows is not that important. It's more about Outlook, Office, all the enterprise apps running on US clouds, etc.
Furthermore EU equivalents of Yandex do exist - https://www.seznam.cz/ (Do you see the Yahoo in it?) or French Google: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en or equivalent of Google Maps https://mapy.com/en/ just have a look here: https://european-alternatives.eu/
They are small, sure, but the moment competition is gone, there is no reason for them not to scale
Win some, lose some. Living in the EU, I really hope the EU bends the knee on this.
India and Brazil are part of BRICS, so they don't really need that much of a push to be fully aligned with China on most things.
BRICS is a joke.
1. Information control for political censorship
2. A source of cash from fines
The issue will not drive anyone into anyone else's orbit.
- The precarization of work by wage compression and anti-worker rights lobbying (Uber)
- The overexploitation of attention for financial (ads) and political gains (tolerance and reach for the ultraliberal, protofascist, neonazi groups and narratives) through American state-sponsored algorithmic manipulation (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
- Assimilationism, erasure of local culture, traditions, identities, to achieve cultural hegemony (Netflix)
Oh, this is not true for a long time. Much better money can be made by making people want.
Trump has already stuck 50% import duties on Indian products, conveniently exempting pharmaceuticals, of course. The pretext being “Russian oil.”
Since the government didn’t budge on oil, they’re hardly likely to budge on tech regulations.
"Might"?
Brazil already exports to China almost 3 times the amount it exports to the U.S.
And after the recent rise in tariffs against Brazil, China announced an huge increase in soybeans and coffee purchase from Brazil. Because of that the price of US soybeans dropped and American farmers sent an open letter to Trump asking him to not cause trouble.
What happens on social media is of the herd, by the herd, for the herd. As Nietzsche would say like organized religion it produces nothing but a herd or slave morality.
It will loose steam just like organized religion.
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