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Germany opposes French push to tax US big tech in tariff war (www.euractiv.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
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[โ€“] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

Come on guys, this idea that we can just tell big tech to fuck off overnight is naive even by my standards.

Big tech offers several services and capabilities that are used by european companies and that we just don't have in Europe at the moment, and if we decide to retaliate against them we end up fucking up our own economy just like POTUS is doing.

This article explains the problem:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/

highly recommend the blog BTW, at least the articles that are not in dutch. He has talked a lot about these issues and has proposals on how to begin to improve the situation without shooting ourselves in the foot.

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  • [โ€“] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Nevertheless, the European Parliament could decide to phase out all non EU based cloud services for public entities by 2030 and let European companies build those services in the mean time. The switch for private companies would be much easier once these European alternativess have built the infrastructure to address big clients.

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  • [โ€“] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The blog in question has several proposal in that direction, though a little more sophisticated.

    He basically says that the EU should fund the development and deployment of certain key services that are technologically feasible and hugely important. Even doing this at a total loss, the benefits would be beyond huge and build the capacity we would need to take further steps.

    He lists 7 examples, but I'll give you 3. We need viable, comparable quality, alternatives to:

    • GMail/Outlook.com
    • Google Docs
    • Github

    The article is here:

    https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-european-cloud/

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    We already have viable European Alternatives for all these 3

    • Mailbox.org/Posteo/Proton/MailCow/OVH etc...
    • CollaboraOffice/OnlyOffice/CryptPad
    • ForgeJo/Codeberg
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  • [โ€“] 1 point 1 year ago

    None of those is nowhere near parity with the big tech alternative.

    I actually use mailbox.org, I pay for it, and I really like it. But try to convince most people to pay for that over a free Outlook.con account and they'll ask you for their money back.

    It's not enough to say "just switch, what's the problem".

    All those options are more than fine for me and you, and they're excellent starting points that could become great with the right push.

    And you could have pretended to read the link, it's actually interesting, by someone who spent a little more time working with and thinking about these things than either me and you.

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