Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

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There's no way I could describe it without sounding conspiratorial, so I'm just gonna lean into it: imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile (like Russia-EU relationship already did), how long would it take before all of EU's tech suddenly stopped working? Not saying that's gonna happen or is even likely to happen, but I don't think investing money into bootstraping some sort of a backup is necessarily a bad thing.

China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that.

None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.

> EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile

The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.

People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went. Or Chinese supply chains during Covid. Change comes rapidly sometimes. It just takes one lunatic president…

I don’t think comparing energy and IT sectors is correct. „Russian“ scenario is about being forced to have full autonomy in software, and that is happening now. For example, see how fast they started rolling out alternatives to Miro - I know about at least two products in this field. ERP, CAD, office tools, certified Linux distros… Yes, Russia has a focus and policy consistency advantage in IT, but I don’t see why Europe in crisis could not build a comparably efficient task force.

I think you misunderstood me. I made the comparison to the Russia/Germany situation to point out how quickly a political situation can tear apart even countries interleaved by business relations in critical industries. Germany was completely oblivious to the danger of Russia axing their energy supply, citing the same thought expressed in the grandparent post: ”Surely they wouldn’t do that, it makes no economic sense!“

The EU should therefore not rely on the USA staying a reliable partner just for the sake of the market relations, especially with the possibility of a second Trump term. America is self-centered, unreliable, and politically ruined—you can’t work with populists.

All this is to say: Technological sovereignty is the right direction.

> People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went.

Those people were completely clueless. I don't have a better way to phrase it. Nordstream 2 was an insane idea the second it was announced.

At a personal level, it feels better to have something of your own to hold on to instead of someone else’s, so I think beaucrats will also respond accordingly.

In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that.

Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.

Let‘s not call it „cloud fragmentation“ please. It’s cloud competition. Cloud is an utility and probably should resemble energy market regarding the choice of suppliers and simplicity of the switch.

> The economies are too integrated for this scenario.

This exact reason was put forward by political thinkers in the 1910s to "prove" that a major war in Europe was completely impossible. It was then put forward again in the 1930s to "prove" the same thing; for real that time.

There’s one plausible escalation scenario: Trump wins and America becomes authoritarian state the same way as Russia did, gradually destroying democratic institutions and opposition. In such scenario EU will be forced to reconsider the relationship with America and pursue strategic autonomy. It is still not a matter of days, months or years.

Cloud act and it's various variations

Oh it's much simpler and immediate than that: Trump wins and stops funding Ukraine, like he has already promised to dozens of times. That would instantly lead to the EU having to double their spending, which would certainly mean increased unrest within the EU and a whole lot of grudges towards the US.

And it wouldn't be the first time Trump specifically caused grudges. The US just giving up on the Iran deal has certainly already done the same. Not only was the EU also a signatory, but so were the UK, Germany and France individually. And then he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which was also openly opposed by the three I've already mentioned. So now the EU has to second-guess every treaty the US signed, because apparently that signature means less than it used to mean.

But those two past actions would be nothing but a sentence in history books compared to at least a paragraph about the US cutting funding to Ukraine.

>That would instantly lead to the EU having to double their spending

Not going to happen. This will result in partitioning of Ukraine and non-aligned status of it. It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances. That war is already lost by everyone except EU, so whatever is American strategy there, it won’t do much harm.

It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances.

It is absolutely not a "satisfactory outcome" for anyone in the West if Russia's neocolonial aggression is allowed to succeed.

Except for certain segments of the populist right and far left, who are bizarrely unified on this issue.

> The economies are too integrated for this scenario.

So are the US and Chinese economies. Yet, here we are.

> I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example.

The servers, maybe. I highly doubt AWS will continue to provide access to its platform. Actually there is zero chance they do. The servers are not useful much without the AWS platform.

One historical example:

After the second world war, Europe was developing space launch capability (multiple governments and companies in Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats that competed with American ones couldn't get launch opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed its own launcher.

EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symp...

> imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile

It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.

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