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Comment by PurpleRamen | Hacker News Reader

EU can live fine without US cloud services, and it's not very dependent on AI at the moment. If access would be cut off, companies would just switch to other solutions, which BTW are already there. The question is more how much time they would have to switch and adapt. An unannounced zero-day cut off would be of course harmful for a while (days, weeks, maybe months), but on most parts could be probably solved in a short timeframe for the important parts.

Also, EU (and probably most parts of the world) are already switching away at this moment already.

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The EU is doing the exact opposite of switching away from US tech. In fact they just announced that the new EU digital ID wallet is going to require Google or Apple device attestation.

That is two US companies in complete control of the fundamental digital ID system of the entire EU.

Everything they say about "digital sovereignty" is performative nonsense because they simply have no other options and no capacity to build replacements themselves.

This is bad largely due to the effect on individuals who may find themselves banned from such services with no due process. As a threat to the EU's sovreignty as a whole it's one of the easier things to move away from if it gets weaponised (in comparison to cloud services that are intertwined with a country's economy and bureaucracy)

The EU and most of the rest of the world.

The UK is talking about sovereign AI but doing much the same with pushing reliance on Apple and Google.

they did not "just announce" that, it was a rather technical decision several layers down, made a while ago. Sure, some things are not easily created without US companies but the overall tendency is pretty clear and it is: reduce absolute dependencies.

I wish.

The EU could be fine but it's just not doing it. Companies in the EU and even EU institutions do keep on using US SaaS, from Microsoft to AWS to Oracle institutions and companies claim they want sovereignty but when it's time to deploy their IT plan, they just don't.

TL;DR: in theory yes, in practice it is just not happening at scale.

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