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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Software, cloud, AI, financial services, movies, computer games, space (i.e.: Starlink), military technology, etc...

There are entire categories of things where it is just the US doing the thing, OR without the US the thing would implode.

For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple).

Let me put it this way: If every undersea fibre link out of the Americas was suddenly severed, people in the USA might not even notice for a while. The rest of the planet would make a winding down noise as every second piece of hardware or software stopped dead because of some missing dependency.

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> For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple).

Not for long.

https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_unveils_its_own_pc_os__harmo...

There's also Sailfish OS and Tizen, which could become suitable replacements if investment and necessity arose.

American Exceptionalism.

From my neck of the woods, we've largely viewed the Americans as part of a security arrangement (Pacific) but, as a trading partner, they are far behind the Chinese (so much so that its a constant political discussion on how to balance the two competing alliances).

This is largely what Trump was trying, and failing (miserably) to address with his tariffs, nobody buys from the US anymore.

If the fibre was cut through the USA, then yes there would be a period of difficulty, but it would be very quickly replaced with other countries technology (keeping in mind that most Western governments were looking to move to Chinese Huawei telecommunications kit until the US made aspersions as to how secure peoples data/secrets would be if that happened, completely ignoring Snowden's revelations that the US had been engaged in using the hardware in overseas telecommunications systems for that exact purpose)

Sure, that'll be easy!

Just clone the repos from GitHub, wait... oh no.

We'll just deploy it to AWS... wait... IAM is in US East 1 only. Dammit.

Okay, fine, we can live without all of those JS CDN URLs, right?

Where's NPM managed from again?

Crates.io?

NuGet?

Uh-oh.

Right - cool, there are no offshore backups

Go you :\

Just yesterday I applied for several job postings for building European Sovereign Cloud at AWS as well as other companies doing a similar thing. The tariff disaster was a global wake-up moment. Don't expect all of these things to remain US-only.

BTW Europe is already the center of the Internet at layer 3. Servers are cheaper in Europe. Bandwidth is cheaper in Europe. So I assume all those services, especially the free ones, are only hosted in the US because of latency or national pride.

You live in a bubble and you think that just because you use American products (GitHub owned by MS, AWS and the rest) the rest of the world does too.

Why don't you have a look at Asia (and it doesn't even have to be China, it can be Japan too)? Most major Asian companies have clones of the software stack that you mentioned and do not rely on it as much as you think.

These days there are (luckily) alternatives to American products, and this American-first ideology will only accelerate the speed at which the rest of the world will switch to alternative ones.

I thought Huawei's only competitors in telecommunications are European, though?

I'm not in the telco space anymore, but Motorola, Cisco, Alcatel Lucent (or whatever they are now) are all a mix aren't they, Euro/US

I think it’s Ericsson and Nokia (which bought Alcatel Lucent I think) that are the main competitors.

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