'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'
'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley' | Tilburg University
Ban American big tech? Okay, makes sense.
Create a European Silicon Valley? I don't know about this one.
The reason China and the US are global leaders in technology is because of their complete disregard for human rights and the environment. Creating a "European Silicon Valley" would simply bring us down to their level, or at least closer. Mimicking America has never worked well for Europe. We need our own European systems born from our own European ideas.
This is absolutely not true. Europeans not investing and selling off every bit of innovation they produce to american vulture capitalists is the reason we are behind.
Also what have tech companies to do with the environment? Sure now the AI BS is a strain on energy consumption, but it's not like EU started lagging only since 2022. China is doing generally much bettet wrt electrification than eg the Germans.
like arguing for slave labor a la chinese labor market, to compete!! we cannot entertain a race to the bottom, that is already being done, as a species
‘It is not enough to import evil! We must manufacture evil here at home!’
This 100% needs to happen. America absolutely needs to be taken down several hundred notches.
I don't agree to ban it, since we would go stone age. But there should be incentives to use european alternatives.
Instead, there seems to be a promise to not tax or fine them, in addition to giving them encryption backdoors on its citizens, and beg to buy overpriced Nvidia chips to give it all to Big US tech owned skynet. Reward is 30% tariffs to US sales on everything.
So you all are hiring soon? Lol
lol
"We must ban bad thing from somewhere else so we can do bad thing here
I believe when preceding a vowel-prefixed noun you should use "an", sincerely an hero
Europe is an exception to the rule as are others. As a native speaker I'd never even noticed this; but An European immediately sounds wrong; just like putting 'an' instead of 'a' UFO/unit/one etc... sounds wrong.
English eh, Why would it be consistent?
Isn't it consistent though? It's pronounced "juropean", so it does not start woth a vowel-sound, which is the (consistent) rule as I've learned it. I believe this only has to do with the ease of which it is pronounced. Preceeding "an" to any vowel-sound makes the pronounciation flow better. Same with "a" before any consonant-sound.
It's not so much whether the word is spelled with a vowel, but whether it makes a vowel sound.
In English, the y sound is considered a consonant when at the beginning of a word but a vowel elsewhere.
Europe makes a similar y initial sound as, e.g., yurt, young, yellow, yell, youth, etc. so in those cases the words take the "a" article instead of "an".
A yurt, a youth, a yell, etc.
Likewise Euclidian, European, Uranus, ewe, union, user, universe, unit, usage, all take the "a" article instead of "an".
And in the reverse, words like hour and heir become "an hour" and "an heir" because the initial sound is a vowel even though the first letter is a consonant.
In addition, we must work to create a European Big Tech industry.
yes, but also facepalm this is still missing the point
Big Tech industry
^ taps the sign above my head
THAT is the problem, yes the US version is one of the more aggressive cancers but recognize that the US is a product of the US mindset that worships big tech.
People are running out of water for their families because a category of techbro running my country consider the power hungry datacenters powering this AI "techboom" more important than human lives.
points at the sign
In a much more regulated environment you would have recycled water instead of destroying families water supplies.
A lot of these critiques are of unregulated capitalism as opposed to the entity of big tech itself. Now can you have big tech without unregulated capitalism maybe not, there's a reason it's as broken of a system as it is.
who has run out of water due to a data centre?
secondly that sounds like a local government issue
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/09/big-tech-datacentres-water
Nothing about this problem is local.
No Eurotechbro stuff, thanks.
European tech? Sure. But only if fully decentralised, peer to peer, FOSS, copyleft and all that.
And oh also, bars out fascists.
And without surveillance and that surveillance capitalism that only helps fascists and people from Pinochet to Duterte to Trump to do human right violations. Europe has data protection because it has human rights, and it has human rights because our history has taught bitter lessons about totalitarism. We need a way forward - not back.
Then it has to be tax funded and will never be self sufficient unfortunately. That means if political winds change, these products will die.
This is just me being a realist. I would of course prefer all of Europe to move to FOSS for the public sector.
No. Standards might be tax funded and adherence to them enforced.
A market of resources (to provide services via standard way) is possible - standard format search, standard format service tracking, standard format storage service, and what not.
Only if they'd want that, of course. They literally say what they want - a Silicon Valley. With all the dystopian shit.
I understand your tempered position. I really do.
But allow me to go on a bit of a rant here...
All the big tech companies in Silicon Valley have aways been heavily subsidised by the U.S. government without the U.S. taxpayers having any stakeholders' position afterwards. These should have always been partially within the public owned infrastructure given how they were funded by the public. Amazon is probably the most ridiculous case in the world in how long they weren't profitable and remained subsidised by the government to even be able to exist.
So, in regards if FOSS should be tax funded... yes. Because of the very reason I just mentioned. All big tech was and still is tax funded. With them taking even more money from people as costumers after already having taken money from them as taxpayers. While also just selling everyone entirely as a profile to get ad revenue from or as a surveilled citizen to serve on a platter to whichever government they want to influence further. This is insanely corrupt as a system. It should've not been allowed to even establish itself.
I think everyone who supports FOSS and open protocols is very aware of the pitfalls and uphill struggles to implement them against the current system. But I find that the general apathy and the further complacency of the general public is the true paramount adversity.
When you say "this is me being a realist", it is you accepting the reality that was imposed onto you by the people who are benefitting from its' imposition. Even more than the typical manufactured consent of capitalism, this is enforced submission to those rejecting the manufactured consent. Because from the rest of your comment, and the fact that you are here on Lemmy, you clearly do not consent to this reality, but you've accepted it as an inevitability. Which it isn't, as we are not in the grounds of that reality having this exchange right now.
Taxpayers should fund FOSS and open protocol software because it protects them long term. One quick example would be how to this day nobody can close protocols on email and how anyone can create their email and host the server if they so desire. It obviously requires skill and knowledge, but if one has them, nobody can prevent them from doing it for themselves or even others if they so desire. This is an absolute insurance that the system can't dictate one's individual terms.
And while the Fediverse may be very small in comparison to the general establishment, it is large enough as proof to present anyone who doubts that there is a way to get back to the true promise of the internet and that we can indeed get back our sovereignty from the conglomerates that destroyed that promise.
And the political winds can change in whatever direction they may, it doesn't matter, as it can't and won't destroy the resiliency of the concept. I just joined piefed.social after the Lemm.ee shutdown, and it doesn't matter because this is a resilient concept. And that is also the reason it cannot be contained or controlled by anyone over anyone.
Sorry for the very long reply. I hope I wasn't as annoying to you as I feel I am being. If so, I apologise even more.
Cheers.
Yes, please!
So not monetizable. Will never happen, too many interests, and EU is always weak to bribes.
Can we not? Silicon Valley sucks and imo hasn't done anything innovative for a long time.
I don't think that they haven't been innovative. Moreso, there's a deliberate strategy by FAANG/MIC companies to buy (or bury) smaller startups that are innovating.
Then those bigger companies mothball the tech with no plan to sell or market their acquisitions, nor release the IP rights on what they own.
It's not so much that there's no innovation, it's just good old fashioned tech monopoly behavior.
good old fashioned
techmonopoly behavior
That can happen, but I don't think that's the point. a) big companies could invest in expensive research like nobody else (aside from state research) b) these hubs are often about having the right companies and universities in one place, which results in employees and graduates spinning out their own innovative start ups, because the region has all the knowhow and manufacturing they need c) most big companies don't do very risky innovation, instead they buy successful startups to build upon them, but that can still be innovative if they buy them early on and finance further research
Open source and socialised software across the EU please, not predatory big tech companies.
what does "socialised software" mean?
Owned and operated by community at large, with the goal of bringing value for people, not for bringing people's money to shareholders
The EU should sponsor various projects or provide tax cuts to companies that contribute labor to projects. They don't have to take over the projects, just help them prosper for everyone.
One of old lines against left is that it's just people who want free stuff.
Left ideologies are not, in fact, about getting more free stuff (and the "bread and circuses" thing originates earlier than right or left liberalism, and is used just as well by right factions, and Rome is generally loved by the right more than by the left, making a funny comparison to Sparta which is more loved by the left, while Athens is again loved more by the right).
Still, see, in a situation where European nations are gradually becoming less and less democratic, without significant resistance utilizing modern technologies for building a dystopia worse than cyberpunk books promised, and the questions in computing revolve around dependence on governments and corporations in all things done with computers, - in this situation you write about "open source and socialized".
Not about using those same technologies for building a direct democracy before "elected representatives" use them to make us serfs or surplus biomass. Not about using them to track all state officials' locations and their finances (if they don't want that, they can pick another job). Not about revision of patent systems benefiting corporations and in practice making any truly free system of communication on the Internet dubiously legal.
No, about "open source" - which is the "circuses" here, for things to be cool and interoperable, and about "socialized" - which is the "bread" here.
I'm an American who has worked in tech for nearly 30 years and I fully support this, so much so that I'm considering moving to Europe to help build it.
Likewise. Actively trying to figure out how to network out of the United States.
This is all talk. The EU and European countries are articulating what they know their population and the EU tech sector wants them to do BUT in the end, they will do none of it. Maybe vote a few laws, fund a few cheap FOSS projects that will never truly be applied/ used by EU countries except for a handful of cities, public services. But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.
Talking spaces such as this lemmysub are places where we, the end users and creators can collaborate to pressure them to at least consider things and get out of this Trump/Xi dependency our politicians want for us.
But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.
The EU puts the interests of its elites and bureaucracies above all others. Because the EU is its elites and bureaucracies, that's how it's built.
OK, I don't even live in an EU country (OK, suppose in like 50 years by some miracle Armenia joins it, and suppose I get Armenian citizenship before that ...).
But - it's not EU's particular problem.
EU is sort of a system built entirely of "liberal democracy best practices" as they were seen in year 1999. And all its faults are highly average and general for liberal democracies.
It's the crisis of liberal democracies as a thing, because modern technologies allow representatives to guide their populations like a Victoria II player does. Like in a global strategy. And it works. It's not even only modern technologies, it's also "political technologies" like what was normal for USA for many years, but to the rest of the world has spread only in the 90s and 00s. In USA those were, until some point around Reagan, balanced by functional journalism and protest culture.
Except the fact that it works in the sense of having necessary feedbacks and controls and computing power is only one side of the coin, the other side of which is that direct democracy can work too. This removes direct democracy's disadvantage of impracticality, and removes representative democracy's advantage of stability (the opposite of what politicians call stability, stability of democracy is the direct opposite of stability of elites, culture, morality, economics, laws and policies).
And the fact that it works in the sense of political technologies means that representative democracy gains a significant disadvantage of not being really democracy anymore. Those unfortunately work. Those can still work when voting for decisions, not people, but it's harder to make a populace support two inconsistent (from the point of propaganda) actions than it is to make them support a politician who'll support both and then make them doubt the inconsistency.
So to adapt for changes liberal democracies must become direct liberal democracies or turn into Russias. I have spoken.
The EU is slow moving. That can be detrimental to techhnological arms races sometimes, but the stability it provides also has a lot of benefits. Currently they are consulting start-ups in a bid to streamline innovation and incentivize venture capital. Germany is now actively trying to make business administration easier. So the necessary steps are being taken, but it will take time to implement as is the wont of the EU and its member states.
All change starts with talk, but I do think that European politicians see the acute need for a new innovation framework that is tailored to the times. Even when that framework is in place it will take several more years to visibly notice results. But then the EU per definition looks at the long game, so it's not a bad thing per se.
I think you have missed a few chapters, it's not slow moving it's glacial age moving. The free software policies have been already talked about since 2003., that's 22 years ago. None of this is new, it did not appear with trump, nor with the Russian invasions. It's way older projects and it all remains as talks, memorandums, conventions. Never anything enforced, GDPR is not enforced seriously, DMA will not be etc...
Let's not kid ourselves anymore with the voluntary inaction of the EU.
You cannot understand how sorry I am about it. I am the result of a intra European wedding, I went places thanks to EU collaborations, I owe my wages and work hours in big parts to EU wide regulations. I still am an EU cheerleader in many wide ranging subjects. But on this one, in which European countries have the most economic, work opportunities , attraction pole, social benefits to reap for future generations. They are too much listening to the FANGS and banks and not enough to economists. It's basic lip service that has been going on for too long.
Am American in tech. I would like to come help. Actively trying to get out of this country.
Ah, yes, BTW, people are talking as if immigration doesn't exist.
Once upon a time a certain Eastern Roman Empire was dealt the final blow by Ottoman Turks, and its former inhabitants possessing very valuable competencies and knowledge would be plentiful in South Europe.
Perhaps had that not happened, Europeans would get to the "colonizing the new world" activity a couple of centuries later.
Starting with the assumption that the US does many technology related things better, we should just adopt a mantra of making second-best copies of whatever the US does better.
Catching up is always quicker and cheaper than being the first to get there.
Invest in copying.
Even better, do it in the public! FOSS is the way to go
Yup. Just make the copying blatantly obvious and protect the new project from copyright/IP claims.
Finally, first real feasible comment about EU catching up to US and China. This is how countries like Korea, despite how tiny it is compared to the EU, still grow so well economically and stay #1 in various areas of competition. They play 'catch up then compete' game so well and are probably the best at it. They become #2 or top 5 or whatever in many things, synthesise them together to become #1. Even integrated solutions of these #2 offerings combined are what makes their packaged offerings so compelling.
"We will produce our own TechBros™ with blackjack and hookers."
"American silicon valley, European silicon valley, all made in Taiwan"
~Some Ukrainian guy probably
Yes, another Silicon Valley is definitely what we need ☠️
Even if you are American, you should support this movement. The best way to end or reverse enshittification is through competition. The big American tech companies are no longer competing to make good or innovative products. They are competing to see who can monetize the most while risking the least.
Better enforcment of GDPR and DSA may be enought to effectively ban big US tech without passing any new law.
High tech doesn't have to be abusive.
High tech doesn't have to be abusive.
No, but they regularly seem to choose that path.
Why ban? Tax it.
You need to have something shitty to see if the other thing is good. Otherwise we will just build EU-approved Meta that does the same shit from all over again.
And use the tax money to help fund open source alternatives? Yes please
The point is to have a growth sector.
How about no??
Silicon Valley is an epicenter for the world's most expensive narcicism. For 5k a ticket you'll get first rate sycophancy, the kind Nero would enjoy. There's probably about as many dead sex workers buried underneath silicon valley as there are indigenous corpses underneath boarding schools.
No joke, Silicon Valley needs to die - in a fire.
Could we perhaps consider ways of making software that doesn't involve killing hookers?
... And it even doesn't do anymore what it did to gain the past glory.
True but that is probably not what the vision is supposed to be.
This brings up a point I've been meaning to make for awhile: I don't think Europe has it in them.
The UK actually did some innovating, I mean Alan Turing himself was a Limey, and back in the day they had the likes of Sinclair and Acorn, and they invented the ARM processor, they're one of very few nations to have a processor architecture to their name. Basically the rest of computing innovation happened in the United States, like the industrial revolution before, we took what Britain invented and ran with it. Meanwhile Western Europe has had fuck all influence in the last 50 years of computing. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, sure...by an Englishman. 35 years later, let's take a look at the top 50 visited websites worldwide and see just what Europe has done with their groundbreaking tech.
Of the 50, 30 are American. The top nine: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit and Wikipedia, are American. Tenth is Yahoo Japan followed by Yahoo!. The UK does not place on the list, and only four websites are from the EU: Xvideos and XNXX are French, Xhamster and Stripchat are...What's the adjective for 'from Cyprus?" Cyprian? Cyprese? Cypriot, apparently. "Honorable" mentions to Canada and India for their only entries, Pornhub and Eporner respectively.
Meanwhile, South Korea makes the list twice for Samsung.com and Naver.com, which is apparently their Google; they do everything from search and email to online payments and ISP. I'm pretty sure that if the US is descendant, the future is Asian, not European.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Europe has got nothing that even sort of competes with any of them, so for the last few months they've been publishing headlines about another township switching their computers from Windows to Linux. At one point there was announcement that EurOS or whatever they were going to call it was going to be a fork of Fedora...because they forgot SuSe Linux exists. They boldly announced they were switching from getting software directly from Microsoft, to getting it indirectly from IBM. For their x86 computers.
I simply don't think Europeans have it in them; the ones that did moved to the US over the last century and a half.
The top nine: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit and Wikipedia, are American. Tenth is Yahoo Japan followed by Yahoo!.
Those American things you list, they are not very good.
This brings up a point I’ve been meaning to make for awhile: I don’t think Europe has it in them.
Do you know who Fabrice Bellard is?
Do you know who, ah, ok, Linus Torvalds counts as a USian by now.
KDE developers are mostly from the EU, I think.
Opera browser, when that was a thing, were mostly from European countries, I think.
Nokia, eh, Nokia, Nokia. Siemens. Sony Ericsson. Bosch. German carmakers.
Minitel, do you know what Minitel was?
Many of the fundamental things used everywhere, like some error-correcting codes for satellite communications, have people from the EU as authors.
Actually, I think if you compare fundamental achievements, and not commercial ones, you'll see that European countries are not that far behind.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Europe has got nothing that even sort of competes with any of them
Yeah, the hardware production thing is generally sad. This wasn't so even in the early 90s, so my own modest honest opinion is that this was killed because of the US creeping patent war. Similarly to other things. A relatively recent development.
I mean, yeah, competencies don't pop up overnight, but frankly there's no magic in making a computer.
There's hardly achievable level of minimization, involving patents impeding competition and very narrow margins, which prevent anything outside of the main "computing silk road" of ASML-TSMC-Intel&AMD&ARM from functioning.
If it were up for me, I'd just say that late 80s' computers were good enough. Or at least early 90s' ones. When that "computing silk road" hadn't yet become as unavoidable.
and only four websites are from the EU: Xvideos and XNXX are French
France is still a great nation.
I simply don’t think Europeans have it in them; the ones that did moved to the US over the last century and a half.
Y-yeah, that part has changed a lot, because on the other end of the pond there's not much "innovation" now too.
Does it really matter if the American entries are "good" or not? Where's Europe's answer to...any of this?
Oh yeah, Nokia, the company that made dumb phones a quarter of a century ago, failed to enter the smart phone market at all, disappeared, was sold to Microsoft as their phone/tablet division, failed again and disappeared again.
Ah Bosch, the makers of my pain in the ass why the fuck did they do it that way router. Particularly the standard base needs to be jawholed up someone's lederhosen.
German automobile manufacturers, whose motto seems to be "Never use a part when a system will do." Expensive and complicated to maintain and not tremendously durable. Meanwhile the Japanese will sell you a war worthy compact pickup truck.
France is still a great nation.
At what, exactly? The Austrians make better wine, the Italians make better food, the Germans make better cars, the Greeks make better spelling, the Swiss make better chocolate and the British make better television. And apparently the Canadians host better porn. From the news of the last few years, all France is apparently good for is rioting against its own government.
The point still stands that the biggest web presence of the entire EU is hosting porn. In the column under "Type" the United States features search engines, video sharing platforms, social media, marketplaces, news, weather, software, email. Russia and China both feature news, email, social media. South Korea manages "consumer electronics" and "news." These places sound like they're trying to run a society, meanwhile Europe has the second through fifth most popular porn sites.
Globo news out of Brazil makes the list but the BBC and Reuters don't?
Also, Temu is American?
Oh great. The rest of the world is apparently only good for getting fucked over...literally.
We need to get our shit together people!
The absolute best Europe could do would be to get machines running a RISC-V architecture running Linux in production and distribution. RISC-V was developed at UC Berkley, GNU at Harvard based on UNIX from Bell Labs and the Linux kernel by a Finnish-American named Torvalds. ARM is probably closer to production ready than RISC-V but you'll have to pay licenses to England and Japan for it.
Oh, and that's all desktop and server stuff. You've got an even deeper ditch to dig to get anything mobile that isn't based on Apple or Google tech. Not even Microsoft managed that.
Even if you did get that done, which you won't, you will have built "European digital sovereignty" upon the crumbs that fell off of America's dinner table. The 21st century was invented in Britain and built by the United States out of parts manufactured in Southeast Asia while Europe masturbated. And this was perfectly acceptable until this year, with the election of Tariff McBlusterCuck. Now you're gonna do it on your own.
Sure.
How about helping businesses actually stay in Europe. It's almost impossible to scale up in europe due to insane moats everywhere.
Because people already owning shares in important companies or connections to politicians or company bureaucrats etc - they don't need to scale up. That's intended.
I swear, the humanity is stupid. I just can look at everything around me and see all kinds of socio-economic arguments to be right. All of them at the same time.
You absolutely need to scale up. I've been on several european teams who had to reincorporate under LLC just because its impossible to compete in Europe as a new business. There's just too much moat.
I agree and welcome meaningful regulation but in Europe its absolutely being used as a market moat, especially in tech. People who are defending this looking at this issue through the wrong lense of political theory crafting rather than how these tools are used in practice.
The only places in Europe that are actually growing tech now are Eastern european countries that losen up the moat to allow innovation in and dont have strong incumbents that reinforce the moat.
you don't have to have a silicon valley
I am old enough to remember Siemens SL45 mobile phone and Symbian but European politicians focused on killing those. If we see Big Tech in Europe it will be Social Credit System and Chinese style surveillance. Europe politics is corrupted to the ground. They say they hate corporations and take money from them after that.
European politics is far from perfect, although it is arguably better and less corrupt than in the US now. But it was not politics that killed European mobile phone industry - it was competition along with mismanagement and miscalculations of the European mobile phone manufacturers. Symbian was just a weak and clumsy platform compared to iOS and Android, it could not compete in a changing market.
lol, android and ios was as clumsy as symbian, difference was that android and ios was backed by us gov contracts for apps and phones for gov administration and that's why they could improve basically for free, where symbian got to compete without gov money. But no people don't see big gov contracts behind those "great" silicon valley companies because those articles are not main stream. There is no public money public code. Blind dumb fucks. European politics just sell gov data and tech contracts to us companies for last 10-15 years instead of backing EU companies. Keep living in lies.
Yes. Also Silicon Valley is a wrong example.
Old Nokia is a good example, Acorn, ARM of old.
Except what those people want is exactly a second Silicon Valley, just loyal to them.
"chinese style surveillance" Oh please this is just sinophobia
Isn't London considered the most surveilledq city in the world?
Ban might be a bit much, but we're using tariffs and taxes as a confrontational trade war measure. Might as well use them in return and funnel the proceeds into homegrown solutions that can compete legitimately.
And please hurry.
Breaking news: oil found in Europe.
There's plenty of oil already found in Europe.
Will not happen. Companies in EU are not underregulated.
That choice was made years ago. This is like native Americans realizing that they have to invent rifles.
We have a lot of expertise in the field of technology and the building of this kind of systems, so that is not the problem.
Citation needed. Who has the knowledge to create social networks or neural networks in Europe? Who is going to make them popular?
Lemmy would be promoted much more if people cared about creating European data, with a neccessary debate about copy rights.
The Netherlands has ASML that could produce the chips needed for AI.
That's one part of the process. Others can buy ASML machines but only TSMC has the best processes to build the most efficient chips and yet again other companies know how to design those chips.
This is USSR playing catch-up with Western digital technology all over again. It's a bit arrogant to think that Europe can do it simply by dedicating resources to it. Those in power have ignored those who knew what was coming. How are they going to know to whom they should listen now?
It's good that something is finally being done.
Instead of just copying big tech from silicon fucking valley, we could also improve on it somewhat, such as making the software open source.
GDPR was a good move. Hopefully others are soon on the way.