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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king, which means all users of big tech are also under that same jurisdiction, including any and all private and public organisations in any country.

This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world.

Much like the diving head first first into AI uptake, the whole cloud mania thing coming home to roost.

If calling a war criminal a war criminal results in sanctions, could sanctions be the new tariffs? I don't want to give him ideas...

This should scare pretty much any organisation outside of the US.

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One theory about developing countries was that if oil is found, it's naturally easier for a dictator to control, since it's a concentrated source of revenue. Just a small amount of mercenaries is enough. So there will be a series of dictators.

If there's no concentrated source of revenue, the people need to be involved and thus a more democratic path is likely.

With the internet and software, especially with platforms, you see this concentration of power effect. That then easily leads to certain kind of power dynamics. Ie just as a hypothetical example, if there's only a few closed conversation platforms, government can control them relatively easily.

And yet, we haven't found a good solution to that yet, and everybody uses smartphones controlled by Apple and Google, communicate via channels controlled by Meta and so on.

It's ok, European Union will enact another regulation saying that starting tomorrow we'll all be more innovative than the US.

Europe needs a whole new engineering culture if it wants to stay relevant in this field. It still is focused on outsourcing problems, people are too lazy for details and demand ready to use products.

I believe engineering in growing countries have completely different mindsets. They put the enterprise in enterprise and the results speak for themselves.

Of course you have to stay pragmatic here and not every battle is in the interest of a company. But engineers with the ability to pursue their craft, sensible knowledge management and training have become a rare sight. So R&D is just plainly better in other countries.

Problem is that this laziness of course empowers other players to grow to insane dimensions, like Microsoft did. Microsoft has many competent developers, but their success isn't due to software quality. Especially if you look at the latest cloud offerings. They are so large that they don't have to be good anymore.

> This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world.

He has even bigger levers to pull unfortunately. Sanctions are this giant hammer that can be dropped on anyone and the weight of the US ensures compliance. When the ICC chief prosecutor was sanctioned it wasn't just US companies who gave in, like Microsoft. His UK bank also blocked him. Sooner or later in the chain of dependencies there will be something based in the US or relying on something based in the US. Your MSP, the airline you travel with, anything will be used against you if sanctions are transmitted like a disease to anyone giving you assistance. No company or country wants to risk being buried to fight the US on this.

> His UK bank also blocked him

This is a 'funny' situation, and potentially telling as to who holds more power, given that the UK government has recently sanctioned two Israeli ministers: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settl...

Are UK Banks (maybe only this UK Bank) more beholden to the US than the UK?

Is / Would this UK Bank also block(ing) those two Israeli ministers?

> Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king,

and of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the SEC etc.

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