>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout
Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.
You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.
If the Us imposes sanctions such as "no more login to any Google/Apple/Microsoft/... accounts from EU citizens until they give Greenland".
Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude. "US big tech is so entrenched we'll never get away". "European cloud will never be good enough". "There's nothing like Microsoft 365". At my work they don't even want to think about alternatives.
I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
Everyone has been going gung ho about Canadian PM speech but the banger one for me personally is the Belgian PM. He said it best “Being a happy vassal state is one thing, being a miserable slave is another”.
Europe deserves every bit what’s coming to them.
Also the Canadian MP is involved in deploying surveillance[0] on his own country so I am not sure why people are giving him props. He is part of the problem.
Here in Belgium voting is mandatory, so the clowns we have are who the public decided were the best candidates. The only excuse we can make is that single-vote list-PR is worse than ranked voting.
It's adding the property that it's an all-in-one turnkey solution. Which is an extremely attractive proposition compared to having a dozen separate tools. And to paraphrase the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.
There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.
I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.
The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?
I think you're misreading the source of the defeatism. It's clear what European leaders should do if they want to compete with US big tech. They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.
But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.
To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.
If Europe were capable of doing this, Europe would not need to do this. They'd already have active and vibrant tech scene compared to US one - EU is bigger than US by population, and certainly not less smart - in fact, a lot of people live in EU and work for US tech companies. So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not? They decided their political model must work differently, even at the cost of not having big tech. So now they don't have big tech. And no amount of committee meetings is going to change that, even if all governments would want it really, really hard.
The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy.
Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.
> making the creation of billionaires a policy goal
Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.
In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.
> They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.
The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?
No, the last thing we should do is transform Europe into a neoliberal stronghold like America. It's not all about making money. It's about creating a civilisation for citizens, not business. Business is just a means to an end.
The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)
I would hedge most businesses don’t need the full offering of 365. You could get away with an email provider, a way to author documents and some file storage which are abundantly offered on other platforms like infomaniak.
I'd imagine this attitude would start to disappear as soon as alternatives start being used. It's already happening to some extent, but it needs to trickle down into the general populace. The relevant names just aren't in people's minds yet (although there definitely are areas where there aren't exact 1-to-1 replacements available).
I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!
I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.
I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!
Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.
> I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!
The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.
And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.
Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.
Those were different times. Right now Holland has been governed by oligarchs for the last 30 years. The country is unrecognisable.
Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
Even if MAGA goes away in 3 years when Trump (hopefully) goes away, the US will remain an oligarchy. Billionaire's interests comes before citizens' interests. This is because of a supreme court decision that allowed billionaires to buy elections. For this reason, even though I am American, I'd like to see European alternatives to US apps and services, because they are more likely to serve my interests.
The big picture isn't that different in Europe. Most EU countries are also oligarchies, just with a lot more bloody histories and national traumas. The social safety net is kept to the level of remembrance of those traumas. Once people start forgetting them, the oligarchs will take away the rights one by one.
The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.
This is a tired old trope that really has no basis in reality. There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed. In two out of the last 3 elections, the major corporate money backed candidate lost. The government is run by the 24 hour news cycle and the attention economy, not by the decree of billionaires. We operate firmly under the tyranny of the majority.
It likely isn't over with him. Trump is just the frontman and possibly fall guy for project 2025/federalist society. They are his entire cabinet and their plan was to replace all government workers with their own loyal people.
Then invest in and attract people to build it. I'd move to Europe if the salary was competitive.
IMO start by funding the living crap out of open source projects. Mandate that hardware sold in the EU comes with unlocked bootloaders and documentation sufficient to develop drivers from.
Relax IP protections so developers are allowed to reverse engineer products and build derivative works from them (extending the life of, facilitating compatibility).
Ban security systems used by big companies that enforce OS conformity (like kernel based anti-cheat, or banks disabling tap-to-pay on phones running beta android/rooted).
Double down on platform interoperability - e.g. Allow me to write a chat app that uses Facebook messenger as a back end.
Hey-ho there you go, European competitors to Android/iOS will pop up overnight. Asahi Linux and other OSes will get a shot in the arm (ha).
There's no profit in technology so there's no interest in starting a business leading to low demand for workers.
Stimulate the sector directly through investment and indirectly by enabling competition and the demand for jobs will increase - following with it salaries.
Cash injection isn't enough though, if you don't break down monopolistic barriers, businesses will fail regardless
Isn't the salary difference more about differences between Silicon Valley (or Big tech in US) and Europe?
One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).
Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.
I'm talking about provisions to increase competition in the free market - not classical "corporations bad" regulations.
Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft thrive off competition barriers.
For example;
Why is Asahi Linux on the MacBook not daily drivable? Because we can't write drivers and require non-scalable geniuses to reverse engineer hardware from photos of circuit boards.
Why can't you install an alternative to Android or iOS on your phone? Because we can't write drivers and/or the hardware blocks you from even trying.
Preventing monopolies from ring-fencing empowers the free market through competition enablement. Ultimately, it's impractical to tell us non Americans that you need to build a hardware and software stack entirely from scratch and have that be competitive within a few years.
Without those barriers - perhaps the EU would have a homegrown mobile operating system. Perhaps Linux desktop adoption would be bostered enough to justify further investment in OSS initiatives.
The tax authority in Norway alone employs 500 full-time software developers. If all of Europe followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles for all publicly funded development - and prioritized open formats + protocols + interoperability - it would within only a few years be possible to greatly improve software reliability for all nations.
> followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles
Has this actually produced any tangible results?
I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.
- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".
- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.
Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.
One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
French gov open source is a joke, single repo dump once from a zip file given by the contractor and then nothing. And that's when the source is provided, France Identité is closed source and Play Integrity dependent.
If there is a single policy change I could pick for public spending on IT it would be to forbid outsourcing to “contractors” and thinking of software delivery as “projects”
Everyone wants to, and not just from the US, but China too. Digital imperialism is real but nobody is confident yet how to effectively fight it. India especially is kind of trapped because our IT service industry is deeply entwined with the US and our government doesn't know how to safely untangle it from the US without harming our economy.
With the current speed of things, Europe will need a hundred years to effectively and totally set free from the US digital dominance. You will know if this timeframe gets shorter if a torrent of change, news and enthusiasm floods almost any European company, either IT or not, mobilize vertical and horizontal government agencies and a large share of the population actively participates.
I've got no horse in this race, but, didn't they say the same things during the current US president's first term? Both about technology and defense. What came out of that?
> the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American
That sounds like performative bullshit though? A "feel good" thing just like plastics "recycling".
Are people actually choosing to pay fair price for a non-American product? Are people choosing to invest in or start local competitors to those American products? Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? And so on.
First time round, Trump would consistently say lots of worrying stuff, but people in the US administration would stop him from following through.
This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.
The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"
Readit News
Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.
Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...
People need to stop buying into propaganda.
Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.
I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.
There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.
I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.
> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap
You answered your own question.
Not sure whether Excel is still good.
But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.
To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.
Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.
Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.
In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.
The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?
The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)
I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!
I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.
I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!
Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.
The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.
And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.
Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.
Why the difference?
Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.
The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.
IMO start by funding the living crap out of open source projects. Mandate that hardware sold in the EU comes with unlocked bootloaders and documentation sufficient to develop drivers from.
Relax IP protections so developers are allowed to reverse engineer products and build derivative works from them (extending the life of, facilitating compatibility).
Ban security systems used by big companies that enforce OS conformity (like kernel based anti-cheat, or banks disabling tap-to-pay on phones running beta android/rooted).
Double down on platform interoperability - e.g. Allow me to write a chat app that uses Facebook messenger as a back end.
Hey-ho there you go, European competitors to Android/iOS will pop up overnight. Asahi Linux and other OSes will get a shot in the arm (ha).
True that. Also in many countries in Europe, IT jobs are not "special" anymore and salaries are similar to the median.
Stimulate the sector directly through investment and indirectly by enabling competition and the demand for jobs will increase - following with it salaries.
Cash injection isn't enough though, if you don't break down monopolistic barriers, businesses will fail regardless
One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).
Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.
Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft thrive off competition barriers.
For example;
Why is Asahi Linux on the MacBook not daily drivable? Because we can't write drivers and require non-scalable geniuses to reverse engineer hardware from photos of circuit boards.
Why can't you install an alternative to Android or iOS on your phone? Because we can't write drivers and/or the hardware blocks you from even trying.
Preventing monopolies from ring-fencing empowers the free market through competition enablement. Ultimately, it's impractical to tell us non Americans that you need to build a hardware and software stack entirely from scratch and have that be competitive within a few years.
Without those barriers - perhaps the EU would have a homegrown mobile operating system. Perhaps Linux desktop adoption would be bostered enough to justify further investment in OSS initiatives.
Has this actually produced any tangible results?
I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.
- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".
- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.
Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.
One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
Meanwhile, very country still runs on Microsoft and IBM.
Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.
If there is a single policy change I could pick for public spending on IT it would be to forbid outsourcing to “contractors” and thinking of software delivery as “projects”
Feelings are different now. IIRC, the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American.
It has become broadly clear, that it is about self preservation.
That sounds like performative bullshit though? A "feel good" thing just like plastics "recycling".
Are people actually choosing to pay fair price for a non-American product? Are people choosing to invest in or start local competitors to those American products? Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? And so on.
And the app is running on a phone with an OS coming from which country?
Like sibling said, this feels like performative BS.
Dead Comment
This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.
The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"
Deleted Comment