As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector.
My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings.
EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.
Europe doesn't need to create these companies. If Europe used this money to create the infrastructure for smaller companies to work together horizontally and vertically to form similar offerings they could end up with something better, at lower cost.
This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
In the cloud sector this would mean small companies that did everything from running electrical transformers in Berlin to data center management to running blob storage (on S3 protocol) to running machine learning SAASes or elastic compute services. All companies would work together to form a cohesive whole. Each company would own shares in related companies to insulate each other from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts.
The hard part is building something resembling a cohesive service out of all of this where smaller companies can plug in to the network easily and end customers can use every service they want and still have one bill to pay.
If they can use the 10 billion euros for that - to minimize fragmentation - then the market will take care of the rest.
Of course, it could just be handed over to SAP to build "SAP cloud" as a direct competitor to Amazon. In which case, yeah, we'll get a pile of shit.
This is already how a lot of IT companies in the EU function, someone makes the iOS app, someone the backend, someone the project management, someone the security audit, and someone does the logging of the different services that are analysed by yet another company. It leeds to a lot of backstabbing and over-billing, I don't think we should subsidise this.
I don't think any industries in the EU function like keiretsu, and what you're describing certainly isn't it. It's not the same thing as "just using small companies for everything".
It requires a set of small, interlocking companies, (many of which own pieces of each other and have very tight knit relationships) that form part of a greater supply chain. It requires trust and human relationships.
The set of companies in Shenzhen responsible for the "pearl river delta electronics manufacturing miracle" might be the closest analog we have today.
It is perhaps easier in manufacturing because standardization on interlocking components is easier, but it's by no means impossible in software, and with cloud computing we do have an emerging set of interaction standards (e.g. the S3 protocol).
I don't think that the EU actually will follow this path, because it requires pretty deep technical and economic understanding to follow through and policymakers who are resistant to lobbying from, e.g. SAP, but they certainly could, and the EU has surprised me before with smart policymaking where they clearly listened to experts (e.g. with GDPR).
Almost every major banks has its own startup incubator project that functions as a type of lead investor that directs the mariage of its children into these incestual relationships. This tends to skew the market towards serving the needs of its host company instead of looking at a market as a hole.
A bigger issue IMO, is that the EU can't grow business that grow a cloud business and instead thinks it can just will this into being.
I think I know what they want to do, define the economic relationships between companies and standardise them in RDF and other semantic web standards. Dunno maybe even set internal prices for memory, processing and network utilisation sort of like LIBOR does for intra-bank lending.
TB approach with „national champions“ can work too and may work better in a situation where there’s competitive market with few dominant players with unlimited resources. Look at Russia: they have achieved very high digitalization of government and society on locally built infrastructure. There are some state actors involved, e.g. Rostech, but large private companies did the majority of work, quite often not being directly affiliated with oligarchs or officials. The only thing they needed was to direct SOE to buy from local players and close the market for services hosted abroad. Technologically and CX-wise local platforms are strong enough now to expand abroad, but due to political climate this won’t happen soon. Europe can learn some lessons from this and try to do better.
One dollar spent in Russia gets you more than in US. You cannot compare household income directly, you must go through PPP (purchase power parity). Even then, you might have expenses that they don't (medical, for example).
So in the end, objective comparison would have to go much deeper, than median household income.
It doesn’t even make sense to compare economy in general. Russian economy didn’t grow during last 10 years, but there was significant growth in digital services with big investment in new technology and infrastructure. The government failed in many policies, but digitalization was their real success.
Nah, try to lose your paper internal passport. Your life will become very difficult. For any medical service, a paper "SNILS" and a paper "OMS" are required too.
Don't forget while the rest of the world(non US-EU) nations have to do back breaking work to produce products,
the euro dollar system can just print and buy those products and life beyond their means.
That's the power of having the world reserve currency system.
Not, it isn't. It is 915 EUR (before VAT) here, which makes it 1072 USD today. Makes it somewhat more than $1000 :-/.
On the other hand, my spending on Apple Stands in the last years was very similar to your personal spending on Russian nuclear fuel as used in US nuclear plants. That being $0. Turnips leads this one :).
That is wrong. I have lived in both US and Russia. Some things are cheaper, but, overall, life is more expensive in Russia due to sheer inefficiency. For example, you usually pay nothing for delivery of online purchases in the US, but it's a minimum of $5 in Russia, and you should often sit all day at home waiting for the courier with the package. Taxes on labor are higher. Sales tax is 20% in Russia, so all merchandise is more expensive. Cars are much more expensive, and even the gas is more expensive.
Depends. It could be argued that DARPA and it's development programs during Cold War were top-down. They were providing a market for the innovators, so they could pop up and do whatever their vision was.
But that is something different that taking all the funds by incumbents.
The US didn’t shoot for “building a cloud” with the DARPA investments. The goal of those investments were for very specific projects that assisted the military (short and long term) and the Internet and SV were a side effect.
Trying to build a “Rival Cloud” immediately sets off red flags for me because of how vague it is. What are the concrete goals? To replicate AWS? How much would you want to replicate? Which services? Which features in the services? Why would customers choose this over AWS? How could this organization be run (somewhat) profitably while being useful?
They already have Hetzner. Seems like the EU government could work with them to fund the new services they think are important. Maybe open source the components that they build so other EU companies could build similar services if Hetzner went bust.
And don't be fooled by all this "start-up friendly" propaganda. Yes, funding does exist. But it will be doled out $50k at a time. And remember to log all your hours and write reports for the program administrators.
I watched a talk by David Graeber, author of On Bullsh*t Jobs. He observes that actual service sector jobs, where someone does something for someone else, have made up a pretty constant 20% of the economy. According to wikipedia, 74.7% of Europe's economy is services [0]. It's going to be a rude awakening when the curtains are pulled back on a 55% bullshit economy.
I think the most successful model is when large gov agencies (DoD, NIH, etc) fund core, basic research and then intermediaries (Research orgs, Universities, etc) allow that research to be spun off into private companies. Stanford’s approach has been pretty successful.
You can apply even as a single person, just need to know your ways through the bureaucracy, how to formulate your application, business plan, etc. Not easy, but doable.
Or use one of the many services which support you in doing that. There seems to be a service industry around that nowadays, which wasn't the case when I did a few years ago, or been to scroogy and stubborn because I can speak and write fucking AMTSDEUTSCH if I have to :)
I really hope that works for already functioning small business, because I did write and apply everywhere I could.
I have a British friend who would work with me on this idea of an appliance reuse/recycling factory in NRW (because it's the closest state to the best suppliers from FR/DE/BE/NL). We've done the research, there's little competition and we could be profitable within a year.
To summarize the idea: take broken/used/returned electronics like washers, fridges, dishwashers, dryers, TVs, laptops, smartphones. Fix whatever can be fixed and sell as refurbished, break down the rest and sell for parts and scrap.
Seems simple? That's because it is, at least the basic idea. The hard parts are securing suppliers and selling everything for a profit. But we believe it can be done, because there's a huge market for refurbs, and especially spare parts.
There's a myriad of small repair shops all over EU that are starved for parts. I used to get them for cheap from my previous employer and sell them at a profit. I never had enough parts to satisfy the demand.
The UK has several big companies and a whole lot of small ones. Mainland EU is lacking, there's a few big recyclers in the Netherlands, everywhere else it's just small companies that don't seem to aim for scale.
I could publish the business plan if anyone's interested. At this point, I don't care if it's me or anyone else who does it. But it has to aim for scale, it's a must have for the environment.
In France, the non profit organisation Envie is doing exactly that. It also employs long term unemployed to teach them a trade, it runs similarly as Emmaus. I buy stuff there because of what they do with unemployed people, but I am not sure they turn a profit.
Honestly speaking, it is hard for them to compete with cheap chinese white goods, their used goods are just a tad cheaper than brand new chinese goods.
Interesting, non-profit? Yeah tbf training technicians for appliance repair isn't that hard. People just need some basic knowledge and willingness to learn. 6-12 months is enough to turn anyone with basic capabilities into a decent repair engineer. But you also need a well made course and tests.
Just my own opinion, used white goods that were once high end will last longer than the cheap new stuff.
They just have more thought put into the design, there is no corner cutting like missing components and thinner metal, they're just better built. And they have features that are missing even on the newest cheap models.
Haier washers, for example, are a nightmare. They fail catastrophically very often, even the cheapest Bosch will last more. And the parts are simply not available, not new, not refurbished.
I'm not sure about that. It seems to work for refurbished computers, which are end of lease. For general appliances I doubt it, because not energy efficient enough, liability, warranty and so on.
Of course common sense would say refurbishing is better for the environment, but common sense? EU?
Computers are actually the more competitive electronics. Probably because they're easy to acquire, refurbish and transport.
Refurbished home appliances like washers/fridges/dryers/dishwashers/ovens are a good product to sell, there are lots of small shops that buy dozens or hundreds of them for resale, and of course, lots of individuals furnishing their own place.
Energy efficiency for them is not going up anytime soon, they've been stuck in the same ratings for more than a decade. They're simply as efficient as possible already.
Liability and warranty would be handled by the resellers, and if agreed, by us. Mostly by return and replacement, but it could be feasible to create an on-site repair service. We can provide the necessary parts, too.
The thing is, a properly fixed appliance will last just as long as a new one. In fact, the failure rate on used electronics can often be lower - newer models that use a new internal design fail more than older, "proven" appliances. The saving grace for them are the warranty and return policies.
Customers will still give 4-5 stars even if their first purchase was a dud, but it was swiftly replaced with another one. That always surprises me, btw. It's like, "oh my new Indesit fridge was DOA, but they replaced it the next day. 5 stars."
Anyway, a big downside is that transportation costs are rather high. And they can only be loaded by forklifts with special attachments, or several people at the same time.
However, the more thoroughly they're checked, repaired and cleaned, the fewer returns, the less money spent on transportation.
I know that. I'm using an old and big fridge from Privileg (Duo Cold). I thought of 'tuning' it with a microcontroller, but deemed it unnecesary after logging temperature and power use at different settings for a few days. Only impractical thing is the needed deicing after about half a year. But then I can at least clean and disinfect it thouroughly.
Which I btw. got for free from the streetside, it was just standing there with other stuff, probably houshold clearing. Saw it on my way home, checked it out, was clean. Looked OK. Went home, got my foldable sack barrow and a few rubber straps from my bicycle, went back there and had a nice upgrade to my even older, but much smaller and louder fridge. Which I then rolled to the communal recycling center a block away :)
Living in the EU and working as a consultant for some time, I could not agree more. In 2020 when every major company and gov agency uses cloud computing there are still many companies in Germany who refuse to do so because of security. I mean nothing concrete or factual, just "because of security concerns". The same companies have weekly security breaches that they are not even aware of always, sometimes customers notify them. There is still a heavy management focus in the EU, the kind of the manager is always right, no matter what happens. I could go on and on but when I hear about 10B spent (wasted) on a giant EU cloud I always envision these smart managers sitting in a room and doing white boarding session without a single solitary clue what is going on outside in the word. It is going to be the most expensive shitshow in the history of the EU. Popcorn is ready.
And when this boondoggle inevitably fails, and Europe falls further behind, the EU will reach for their tried and true hammer - protectionist laws and regulatory capture.
The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app.
In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job.
Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
What afraids me is, that here in Germany nobody seems to care anymore. The big numbers are just thrown around and everyone (especially the younger generation) has lost any sense as the media is just cheering along.
This is what I noticed in Germany as well. The government keeps tooting their own horn on how in every statistic they're the best in Europe and the media parrots that while the younger generations just takes it for granted and doesn't bother questioning the poor decisions the government makes while they spend the public tax money like drunken sailors because hey, "we're Europe's no. 1, what could our government ever do wrong?"
I agree that the waste of taxpayer money in Germany is beyond comprehension (while they do take utmost care when it comes to taxing you) and as a young German myself I also agree that many young people just don't question the media, if they get involved in politics at all. But I also know many who do and they've mostly just given up on the country. Because emigration aside, what are you going to do?
I had a discussion recently, and I think generally in Germany politicians are considered incompetent instead of corrupt. Like in cross border leasing/ public private partnership etc.
That requires a majority. Of course you should vote, but the question is whether it's realistic, given that as we mentioned most people don't seem to care much.
That's a really bad example, because the cost of the pandemic alone for the German government was forecasted as 1500 billion EUR [1].
Any spending that would make the pandemic become a fraction less severe is probably a net win. So if you have to chose between 60m EUR offer and a 95% chance of success of all features and in time delivery and another offer of 10m EUR and 90%, what should you choose? Why be thrifty at this point?
My question is rather why didn't they went out to spend more? So many more things that could have been added: public places check-ins (e.g. When visiting restaurants), more interfaces for laboratory to upload data, manual meeting log, collaborations with other countries...
> The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app.
Meanwhile in Canada Shopify and Blackberry got together and helped the federal Canadian Digital Service in coding up an app, with the code available on GitHub:
Yes, imagine SAP and Telekom would have said: see, we are so profitable and rich beyond our means by extracting value from our economy each and every day, we want to give something back and build this app for free. What kind of ad this would have been.
So they just come across as greedy, corrupt bastard - which probably has the positive side of being very much closer to the truth.
The German federal government had past bad experiences with the company contracted to collect car/truck tolls on federal roadways. The product launch was delayed due to the contractor and thus the government lost lots of revenue from tolls. A 15 year long fight with the owners of the company ensued. Maybe they wanted to avoid that by just putting a large pile of cash onto the table, ensuring that SAP+DTG put their best people behind it. Delays in COVID-App deployment cost real lives instead of just revenue.
It's great that it worked nice in Italy, but giving the contract to a random startup is more of a gamble I think.
You are comparing costs of bakery which made an apple pie with the price of apple. 60M budget included much more than just an app, which is basically a frontend to a sophisticated government operation.
If you want to make a point about inefficiency of German corporations, find the right figures first.
Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In fact, Italy collaborated with Germany on developing a contact tracing solution before, but the apps were developed independently with different requirements. I’m sorry.
The app development itself cost only 4 Million. The rest is the projected total cost through 2021 including the server infrastructure and especially the call center support, which takes about 2000 calls a day.
> That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US.
It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)
> My benefits are lousy but the contractor I work for probably charges my employer, yes.
On top of whatever your direct employer charges to the government agency hiring them to cover profit and other costs (management overhead, contracting overhead) associated with your employment, there's also contract management overhead for the government agency. For contractors, the total cost is usually a greater multiple of salary + benefits than it is for direct employees (though if the benefits suck enough, maybe still a smaller multiple of bare salary.)
Well, there are 2 models of SW development you can use here:
1) 30 top notch engineers to build the MVP and then iterate.
2) 300 engineers - the first 100 to step all over each other trying to build an app and the remaining 200 engineers fixing the bugs from the first 100.
If the app was developed on time and works, thats fine. 60 million isn't that much in the grand scheme of government contracts. In a situation like this i would want a proven vendor, and pay premium over startups.
UK has spent 11 billion on a healthcare IT system and got nothing to show for it.
It doesn't have nothing to show - lots of stuff did get usefully upgraded (thankfully) although of course nowhere near 11 billion's worth.
It's the public sector commissioning the private sector in matters that it often doesn't understand. This will fail far more often than it will succeed.
It’s also the byzantine vendor sourcing process that many gov agencies use. They end up hiring companies who are experts in navigating that process vs companies who are experts in the actual competency required by the project.
With just the difference that in Germany that app works, in Italy the correct infrastructure/process was not built, sick data information was never uploaded so the app is useless
There were plenty of cases where in app notifications lead to people getting tested and in touch with their local tracing efforts. You don't need privacy invading levels of analytics to measure that. With the low numbers we had over the past months exactly what else do you expect?
I had several notifications of low risk exposures, so the app is fed with some data. This doesn't happen in the Italian version of the app if you are living in some regions, for example.
If the app is useful, this is another topic, but it was not the point of this thread.
Excellent example with the app. It's an app that could have been designed and made with 100k, less people and better quality. And quicker.
The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
if you ask normal people, they will hate this - only some data fanatics want this feature.
people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree.
Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data.
we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.
The German tech scene struggled for about a month to stop the senseless data hoarding of the centralised digital contact tracing approach that was spearheaded and developed by a bunch of lobbyists. You might disagree with the concept that developed, and is generally accepted in a majority of Europe, but it's certainly not "the people" being against that.
The when and where of individual encounters, especially at low levels of infected population, are pretty irrelevant. At this point you should really be aware of how you can change your behaviour to minimise risk, that really hasn't changed in the past few months.
several people still remember the Stasi and they don't want a state controlled app to monitor their movement. If you want your app to have the biggest installation base (without asking for a mandatory installation) you can't ask for user location, with it enabled fewer people will install it
My family was directly affected by Stasi. I care about what the government knows and what it can do to you. I constantly have 2-3 low risk exposure notifications.
But it doesn't matter where they happened since I already know that I am carefully avoiding risky areas. I am sitting next to my window when working and people walk past that window within 2 meters. That alone could set off exposure notifications. Or maybe someone across the aisle in the supermarket?
Would I not go to the supermarket if I know it happened there? Would I not go for a walk if I knew someone 8 meters away from me on some bench was later diagnosed with COVID?
It barely serves any purpose at all outside of curiosity. The app already tells you everything you need to know.
Please don't compare anti-consumer behaviour of US mega-corporations with the atrocities that intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain committed on their own peoples. It's simply not in the same ballpark.
What if I have no app-capable smart and mobile device? Does the government provide me with one? Do I get an electronic ankle bracelet instead? What about a collar?
> people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs.
So when the app tells you to quarantine, you quarantine? Or it is important enough to share everyone's location data, but not for people to more radically adjust their behaviour rather than just avoid a particular location?
In Finland, the authorities reserved 6M to create a contact tracing app and all support systems. They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year.
Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government.
Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful?
Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.
>Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex?
That's irrelevant when it comes to spending. The cost of something is always proportional to how much the customer(here the German government, read the taxpayer) is willing to spend not how complex the project is. While it might not be more complicated to implement than in Finland, the German government has more money than the Finish government so it was billed(read fleeced) accordingly.
It's like asking "Are SV engineer really 400x times better coders than Europeans?". Maybe not, but they can charge 400x more because their market conditions allow them to. Simple.
Which tells me that the claim "They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year." is complete bullshit as a comparison for the German numbers, because it is only for the app itself without any backend or supporting infrastructure. Especially because you made it sound as if the rest of the 6 Million budget was not even used.
In reality, on top of the app development they spend 400k on planning, specification and coordination, 3.2 Million on other software (backend and admin, I suppose), 1.4 Million for deployment(?) and communications, and further maintenance and operations is not in fact accounted for yet.
> hat's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Ah, nice moving goalposts there.
Yes, it's a very successful project and everyone involved deserves praise. Yes, Finland spent less than Germany for very similar results.
But they didn't spend 400k (let alone 150k) compared to 60 Million. They spent 4 Million compared to 20 Million, which is the overall development costs in Germany, with most of the rest going to the operation of a support call center (and that scales with population size, so legitimately more than 10 times higher in Germany than in Finland).
So why the 5 times higher development costs in Germany? Because they didn't do a public bid like Finland did. They threw money at some big companies they assumed could do it. And for that they got an app 6 weeks earlier than Finland. It turns out that those 6 weeks happened to be a time of low case numbers so that they didn't really matter. But that couldn't be known at the time the whole thing was planned, and if the pandemic had developed differently, those 16 million could have saved thousands of lives.
Another problem is that the needed investments are about similar, but the expected market is much smaller. For to language barriers we are really talking over a dozen separate markets. All these languages are killing the EU as a market. I'm German, but would always start a company in the US and not even consider starting in the EU for this reason even if everything else was equal.
> The EU just needs an investor climate similar to the US.
What leads you to believe that europe's problem is the investor climate?
I mean, this policy is clearly devoted to ensure that europe is able to control and manage critical cloud infrastructure, instead of handing everything in a silver platter to the US or, even worse, China. What leads you cto believe that a change in europe's investor climate would have an impact on this?
you mean channel military funds into civilian companies for nefarious purposes. google received CIA funding. easy tracking for the NSA n CIA. the fairchilds or other chip companies all military money. so yeah if the EU becomes war hungry definitely they will catch up with the US. but remember world wars have started in Europe.
I guess whether you consider them symptoms depends on what you think the problem is. Is the problem that we don't have GAFA-sized companies, or is the problem that data is not stored under EU jurisdiction?
That question is particularly pertinent if you consider that GAFA-sized can mean "big enough to influence legislation".
First of all, none of the GAFA were actually started as Cloud infrastructure providers.
So the question is not why isn't Europe creating big Cloud Infrastructure companies, one could argue that the biggest "pure-player" in Cloud is OVH which is European.
If anything it's the (insanely lax and pro-monopoly) American regulatory environment that has the biggest impact on the creation of big Cloud providers outside of the U.S.
The only country that manage tyo do that are China & Russia to a lesser extent because they have active protection against AWS/GCP/MS.
As to why Europe doesn't create big GAFA-like companies in other sectors, one reason is that the E.U is not a single market from the perspective of these companies.
Yes the regulatory environment is stable & simple enough for companies to operate in all E.U countries, but that's not all that makes a market.
The fact that europeans speak 27 different languages for instance makes building a european sized company much harder than a U.S sized one, for roughly the same market in terms of $$$.
EDIT: I don't think creating GAFA-style companies is a goal any state should pursue.
The U.S needs to get their head out of their ass and split AMZN & Google ASAP, & fix Facebook.
It doesn't help that the best engineers work for GAFA because of big salaries. European companies pay smaller salaries compared to the US ones.
A good engineer can double his salary by going to the US. Sure, he may see more social issues there because of no safety net, but maybe he doesn't care.
Less of a safety net is more accurate. Medicare, MediCal, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Social Security, public housing, welfare, etc. It’s the majority of US federal government spending.
Salaries are irrelevant since it's close to impossible for an European worker to move to the US, work visas are incredibly difficult to get and even if you manage to get one you don't have the same careers prospects as a native.
Hard is an understatement. I had multiple friends who had offers from US companies on the table for $200k+. They all fell through because it was impossible to get a visa (however internships are easy with a J1).
The one who went the furthest worked remotely for a very well known company from France for 2 years. Even with the company sponsoring the visa, he had to wait more than 1 year to have a shot, the lottery only happening once a year. He didn't get selected and eventually the company gave up on having any hope to ever bring him.
> If anything it's the (insanely lax and pro-monopoly) American regulatory environment that has the biggest impact on the creation of big Cloud providers outside of the U.S.
I don't think you can say the problem there is America's lack of regulation preventing European cloud providers (which was what the question was about) from starting.
It seems like the problem there is one of the European regulations being too strict.
Stifling regulation is not a force of nature, it is a lever that can be adjusted.
I think he means there is little to no protectionism in Europe when it comes to software - so we get 'digitally colonised' by the USA.
Whereas China and Russia have stricter rules about what foreign corporations can do, so there that allows for the creation of homegrown solutions like Baidu - would Baidu exist today if Google was able to run their services without interference in China since the start?
It’s cultural. It’s really hard to get investors to invest in things that aren’t a guarantee. Most potential billion dollar companies. Investors in the USA are fine taking risk investing in them. In the EU you don’t find that culture. Could part of it be regulatory in terms of tax write offs? I’m not sure.
I don't buy the culture argument after looking at the success of China. I think it's a matter of having a big enough internal market to be able to compete with the American monopolies.
Big internal market might be a part of it. But at least for China, investors do take some crazy bets. I know if many that are pretty head scratching. But in the end, it just takes a few of these crazy bets working out.
I think one of the reasons, other than legislation, is lack of motivation; it is more or less egalitarian and that promotes mediocrity, not innovation. In US you can become filthy rich relatively fast, not in Europe, so why bother? Just see the IT salaries in Europe vs. Silicon Valley, they are a lot lower, so really good and ambitious people move to SV, don't spend time in Europe.
because money is the only prime motivator in life?
Also, this egalitarianism and promoting of mediocracy you speak of makes no sense in regards to people who want to attain personal growth. Not to mention having a system like the US comes at a massive cost in regards to the wellbeing and welfare of the general population.
Innovating isn't just about money. Not to mention a ton of innovators exists in the EU, they are just not the same scale as amazon/google etc.
I never said money is the only motivator; also egalitarianism and promoting mediocracy does negatively impact people who want to attain personal growth, being treated the same as the village idiot is not a morale booster. Appreciation is a top motivator according to Maslow.
No, the EU blames FAANG for skipping taxes and monopolistic behaviour. They might just prefer to punish US companies rather than domestic ones.
What I don't like as an EU citizen is that our network infra is ridden with Huawei equipment. I'd much rather have US equipment and services if domestic companies aren't capable delivering it rather than One Belt, One Road. Just take a look at Kyrgyzstan and how it's going to become a Chinese colony.
Is lack of corporate accountability exclusive to GAFA?
You can kill ~300 people and noone goes to jail. You can launder money for druglords and just get a fine.
What does a corporation have to do to actually suffer serious consequences, like jailtime or breaking up a company? Something that's not just 'cost of doing business'?
Pretty much. Just like the funding for Covid recovery and green projects. All taken up by big companies, zero chance for a small business to get a grant. Which is simply stupid.
Throw more money at the current system, which has gotten bloated and complacent and clearly doesn't really work. The taxpayers pay for it.
"We have never done this in the past, we are not doing this now, we won't do it."
I just send a pitch to a European VC fund with a new, totally disruptive technology. Their answer: "This is a crowded, very competitive market, hence we are not interested." I mean, really? First, this shows that the market is there. Second, such a device does not exists in the market and would disrupt the market. I don't get it.
I am a dual citizen so if we don't find money in the EU we just go to the US.
I don't think the point is to create new giants, but rather to coordinate smaller players' efforts against the old giants. Obviously, there would have to be innovation taking place for that to happen, but it doesn't seem to be a goal on it's own.
Does anyone know much are European businesses paying for US and Chinese cloud services per year? If we can pay 10B€ in order to move 20B€ of spending back into the EU then I'm all for it, no matter if we innovate or just subsidize existing providers.
I agree and IMO a project like this would probably work better if the rules stipulated that it can only be used to fund startups. Eg: only companies younger than 3-5 years old, with fewer than 200 employees, and less than 100M in market cap. Such rules could help prevent established players from grabbing all the money.
There must be ways to specify that the companies cannot be subsidiaries, and that creating spinoffs for the purpose of collecting money will result in massive fines (eg. 100x what was collected). From what you're saying, the problem is not the fundamental idea of having the government fund tech companies, its political corruption inevitably preventing a sound execution of said idea.
Tax system does not allow for that; employees need to be paid at least minimum wage per sector, not equity, otherwise tax people will shut them down and health insurance will not exist (it is paid as percentage of salary). Every year if you have equity you need to pay taxes on the appreciation of what you own, so if you have a small salary and some equity you have no money to pay the taxes on equity. Good developers will not work for small salaries and the startup will have no money to pay.
And not the least, startups are shots to the Moon with the expectation that most will fail; you cannot do that in this case, if you guarantee the money there will be no motivation, if you don't guarantee any money there will be no funding. Investing is different in Europe, that's why there is no SV here.
I've never raised capital or founded a startup in Europe, but from what I've been told by Europeans there are several challenges that the continent should try tackling
- Talent and Pay gap with the US
- Risk averse investors
- Over-regulated markets
I don't see how this plan will solve any of the above.
If I understand it correctly this project aims to build common standards / data exchange methods between different providers all on a foundation that follows European privacy principles.
Why on Earth would we want to create GAFA sized, privacy violating, information power concentrating and privatizing molochs? The current pluralist landscape suits me and demicracy just fine!
I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies
is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning
capitalist system.
The world, at least the western world, desperately needs viable mature competition not based in the US.
I would go so far as to say not having it is a real problem for democracy and maybe even go as far as it being an issue of national security.
With the close ties between intelligence services and social media in the US, it is a problem for the US, but certaily more outside. However it is a challenge to avoid 5 eyes.
Less conspiracies, two rich and powerful persons in the US can decide what information is permissible in an election and what is not.
This would not matter much, if there were at least 10 different healthy competitors with at least a few million users.
Hopefully being more distributed also internationally, it would be unlikely that each leader would make the same decisions.
Like newspapers, they can suppress a story, but another newspaper might go with it.
Sadly in the US, the mass death of newspapers often means that a region / city /state might only have one newspaper in a monopoly situation.
I do not know if the state injecting billions can get to where we need to be.
> I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning capitalist system.
I think it’s a simple confluence of the US having many English speaking people with lots of money, plus English is spoken worldwide, plus labor is readily available in the US.
There exists buyers, labor supply, and the inherent ability for software to scale with very low marginal costs means targeting the US market results in a higher probability of success.
Once you can grab the rich US market, you now have the momentum to grab other markets, and being first is more important than being better where network effects are in play.
As an EU citizen, I don't believe for a second that this will result in anything useful, ever. There's too much vested interest that's quietly making the politicians do what the big business wants. Has been the case for a long time now.
The only thing that's going to happen is that those big and old companies will get their hands on that funding while fulfilling exactly zero of their promises.
I agree that the EU has too many regulations preventing innovation and high taxation preventing investment. However, I think the main reason is that "big tech" is a winner take all market. For example, look at Google, they are investing way more than $10 billion in their cloud and yet still can't make a dent in AWS, even Microsoft is still far away. Same thing with search (Microsoft invested billions in bing) or Office (Google investing billions in docs) etc. There is no way in hell €10B is going to be enough. The market already picked AWS.
The only country where these are not dominant is simply the one where they prevent these winners from entering, that would be China, they have their own cloud, search, retail etc.
On the other part of E.U., in Romania, no matter what kind of business you want to start you need to battle with the bureaucracy.
Out of high-tech domain, I was thinking that my grandma could sell the jam she makes - but she can't sell it legally if it's produced in her own house - no matter how low is the production. Maybe just at some kind of farmers market, but that is iffy.
If I want to invoice some custom development for software, I can not do it as an individual. I either need a BS in Compute Science or setup a SRL.
The romantic view of starting out in the garage is quite illegal in these parts.
You need to spend a lot just to test a business idea. And what yous spend is not actually investing in the business, but just wasting time and resources with the bureaucracy.
And once you have a business set up then the fun starts. For extra sadism, try winding down your business!
I wonder if Europeans know US companies of much bigger dimensions are capable of keeping their own accounting and the sky is not falling. But in Romania, every month the accountant must get the paperwork, do the magical incantations (that nobody! reads). The Annual report even costs extra since it's more stuffy and it gets uploaded to the Finance Ministry so they get a chance to do nothing with it.
Sorry for the rant, I'm also traumatised by living here and knowing it could be different.
Bold of you to assume there's a social safety net to speak of in Eastern Europe. It's only on paper.
You have to be a cripple or not worked for like a year or two in order to be eligible for some very minimal sum a month, and even that is taken away from you if you don't actively look for work and haven't found it in 6 to 18 months.
The whole thing is crafted in a way that unless you are living in shanty towns and rely on your relatives stealing food and clothes for you, then you will not want to descend that low on the social ladder just to get something like 200 EUR or so. And that implicit and indirect discouragement works really well; people just don't bother pursuing social help because it's meaningless and 99% of the time you won't get it anyway. Only the gypsies are persistent in it.
It's every man for himself here in EE. I am not complaining by the way; I've never known any other state of things so I don't actually care about social safety nets at all. But when we here in EE heard about the "Corona stimulus packages" (basically you get money because of the pandemic even if you didn't lose a job) then a lot of us couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the idea that something like that would ever happen here.
There's only the social safety tax which you get clubbed if you don't pay. Other than that you are on your own and will pay out of pocket for whatever thing you imagine the safety net should have provided.
Social safety nets in post-Communist EU countries are purely theoretical. People throw money at bureaucratic structures which evaporate the money. Practicaly, think US-level of "social safety net", including healthcare. I'm not exagerating.
Personally, I think various quality of life improvements would help a lot. Make running a business simpler!
Your first year in business should not be spent on lawyers and accountants, but in Germany, it's unavoidable. It's a serious barrier to small entrepreneurship.
I run a simple website, and keeping it online takes a surprising amount of time. The law is damn hard to follow, even with the best of intentions. I don't even want to think about hiring people.
Simplifying immigration would also help. I need to renew my freelance visa. I can't get an appointment. Nobody can. I have to go to a government office at 6 AM and queue until 10 AM to get an appointment. It takes 2-3 months to get a visa in general. If you don't speak German, you'd need an interpreter.
There are a few other steps I didn't have to go through, but they're not easier. Everything involves fighting for an appointment 2-4 weeks in the future, then trying to figure out your position in an opaque system. If you're in trouble, good luck emailing or phoning anyone. The immigration authority answers in 3-4 weeks, if at all.
The list goes on and on. I can't imagine building a disruptive business in such an environment. Running a blog is already a pain in the ass.
BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba.
I hope they will come to other continents soon.
Is "modern devs" the modern "No true Scotsman"? Plenty of developers and organizations get by without managed databases. Although in "7-day sprints on loop forever" world of startups, any effort to require less knowledge to run the stack is probably welcome, hence it seems "most devs can't live without" for a lot of things, like managed databases, containerization and yadda yadda.
Having a managed database is the sweet spot for productivity/efficiency between maintaining a full time database administrator and having engineers learn how to do it themselves.
How can a serious company using a relational database get by without paying for database expertise in some way or another?
Yes, of course once the company reaches a certain scale you need specialized roles and/or software that you use, that makes sense.
But is "companies of scale" what "modern devs" refer to? What is a "serious" company?
There is a lots of parameters that goes into the choice of self-hosted DB / managed DB, not just if the devs are "modern", or the company is "serious".
There are other companies, though, that have great cloud-managed DB offerings. Herzer (I'm not previously familiar with it so don't know if they already do this) would do better to just partner with one of these companies in a "marketplace" like arrangement.
I was extremely close to switching to Aiven-managed postgres until GCP finally supported point-in-time-recovery on postgres.
> It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure.
IMHO Hetzner is far above AWS/GC/Azure in price and simplicity.
The only drawback I see in Hetzner is that they don't have a lot of data centers with a relevant geographic dispersion, but that's only relevant for a Unicorn-level scale, or applications that require TP99.99 latency in the lower-end of the double-digit scale uniformly throughout the globe.
You skipped over without mentioning the gist of the comment you replied too, which was the large amount of additional services that those other companies offer, but Hetzner does not.
If you're referring to AWS's "serverless" offering, they are mostly managed instances of FLOSS offerings with the exception of dynamodb, and arguably are far from justifying the colossal premium they charge for using them. I mean, does anyone claim with a straight face that without AWS it's practically impossible to get a database or a message broker up and running?
It’s a completely different thing to „get it up and running” and to fully operate and monitor 24/7 a highly available environment using full time SREs with strict contracted SLAs.
Your comment is rather disingenuois and naive. If you have any experience whatsoever with AWS you wouldbe fully aware that AWS quite vocally advertises that reliability is the responsibility of the customer,not theirs. Theygo even further by stating in their "well-architected framework" that it's on you to handle redundancy with multiple deployments across separate availability zones. So your baseless assertions fly in the face of reason once you actually lay attention to the operational side, because as it's easy to see and understand it makes absolutely no difference if you parrot keywords all day because in the end reliability is on you, and if it's up to you anyway then that is not an argument in favour of vendor lock-in.
Yeah, they're really barebones. Do everything yourself, which is nice tbh. Last time I used them though, they had some draconian restrictions on mail lists. A few complaints and your server gets shut down. I was just sending newsletters to subscribers.
„Cloud“ is increasingly more about services than just bare compute. I feel like Hetzner targets the cloud market from yesteryear. Maybe that niche is big enough to sustain the company - certainly while many are still making the intermediate transition from on-prem hardware to managed offerings. In the long run, I‘m sceptical.
Happy user of Hetzner's dedicated servers. Very nice platform and lots of bang for the buck, paying ~$40/month for Intel Core i7-980, 2x HDD SATA 2,0 TB, 1x SSD SATA 250 GB, 3x RAM 8192 MB DDR3 and unlimited traffic. Hard to beat really.
Only gripe is that they only have servers in Europe, wish they had at least North/South American + Asian centers too.
This particular one was indeed from server-bidding, but needed it within 24h so my selection was less than if you have lets say a week available for bidding/winning.
Tried to use it earlier this year. Opened an account to host a new project.
Went to login the next week to create the instances and launch the projects. Couldn't login because the Hetzner console was broken for 2 days. Yes you heard right, everything was broken and unusable for 2 days. Imagine the AWS console down for 2 days for comparison, that doesn't happen.
Few days later when the service was restored. I found out the account was banned. It seems they ban new accounts automatically because they're afraid of bitcoin miners or something. It's not uncommon among cloud providers to ask for an ID or something to verify the account, only problem, Hetzner banned the account but didn't ask for anything.
Couldn't raise a ticket to have the account unlocked because the only way to raise a ticket is to open the account and raise a ticket, that's not possible with the account locked.
Tried to contact support through the provided support email on their site. They never replied. Tried to contact again. They never replied.
At that point the project launch was 2 weeks late. Had to have horrific meetings to explain why everything was late with my reputation on the line, all the fault of Hetzner. Will never use again.
They have also answered me on twitter and email. All within several hours or less. But anyway, even if such terrible situation really happened, two weeks? I would have changed provider the next day. Not counting the fact I duplicate critical production deployments and replication on two providers always.
I've used many cloud providers over the decade. It's not uncommon to lose a week to fully open an account, going through some checks and verification with support. I was expecting Hetzner to resolve the issue a couple days after contacting them, just like AWS always responds after exactly 2 days when I send them a request.
Hetzner user here, it's still very barebone compared to US cloud providers (but amazing pricing). No IAM, no EKS, it's mainly a VPS provider just like OVH.
Scaleway looked closer to an AWS competitor but I haven't used it enough to know how good it is.
I run a couple of things on Scaleway. It works very well and looks very similar to Digital Ocean. Great UX for the console application and chap prices. But like Hetzner only a basic service.
Maybe we could create EU cloud catalog website for people to find all the providers that actually already exist (in Sweden the company Glesys is a similar provider).
> Scaleway looked closer to an AWS competitor but I haven't used it enough to know how good it is.
I've tried out Scaleway a while ago , and unfortunately they double-charged my CC just because. I'm not sure how widespread is that behavior, but to me it was enough to remain a OVH/Hetzner client.
Hetzner doesn't compete with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
They compete primarily with companies like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, Scaleway and traditional co-location and dedicated hosts.
Look at the software offerings from Hetzner, they're barely existent. AWS and Hetzner are very clearly not in the same business. AWS makes its money primarily off of software services, Hetzner makes money primarily off of primitive (basic) hosting. The AWS software side of the business has enormous margins compared to the primitive hosting side. You'll find that Hetzner barely has any margin, as with all the others in their segment. Meanwhile AWS is a half a trillion dollar global juggernaut, funded by its software margins.
AWS is a corporate parasite - this is their real main offering, which feeds unnecessary or already unavoidable existing complexities. Being a long time AWS user myself (like in half of my projects), first thing I do with any new client, is try hard to persuade not to use AWS.
Whats the moat of their software? These things are easy to duplicate (judging by the number of competitors they already have). Also keep in mind that cloud is being fed by a massive tech bubble and free money that leads to overspending. If every big tech co (amazon, ms, google, ibm etc) becomes a cloud provider offering the same services, how do they plan to maintain high premiums?
> Hetzner doesn't compete with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
This assertion makes no sense at all. I mean, if you're in the business of getting an online business up and running, it seems to me that both do provide the infrastructure that allows you to achieve your goals.
Arguably, AWS and GCP have more data centers spread throughout the world, but beyond unicorn-scale companies you'd be hard pressed to find any business that does need that sort of infrastructure. Yet, when you're at that scale you're far better off running your own infrastructure, both in terms of cost but also reliability.
They also likely have 90% of income from 10% of clients, like any other sufficiently large business, while all others are just a cannon fodder in IT unicorn media echo chamber.
Scaleway and OVH are also great if you have clients or audience in the EU. Hetzner is just a reseller of others' infra but it's also nice. Kind of annoying how they ask for your ID and issue randomly generated login names, but the platform is good.
I signed up for their storage offer (that you manage via their Konsole tool), and the first thing they needed to let me use my account was a scan of my ID. They even required a photo of me holding it.
Good couple of years ago when I decided to give Hetzner a shot, they sent me... a papper contract by post, and then... asked to sign a copy and send back. That was the last time I've ever dealt with them.
Whenever I read about the EU's struggles to compete with american tech companies (also SAP vs Salesforce), I think of Steve Yegge's rant on AWS, quote:
> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
> All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
> Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
> There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
> It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
> All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
You're seriously claiming that the EU cannot compete with US companies because you can't credibly threaten to fire people to show that you're serious about a policy decision?
1. In Europe salaries are not worth personal sacrifices
2. No compay aims for IPO, few are public
Maybe, if you'd hire only desperate people from Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Romania, AND they all had a mortgage... then squeeze like this would work.
Apart from results (for whom?) being not the only thing to judge a compan culture for, I am pretty damn sure that Amazon does not, in fact, rely primarily on constant explicit threats of firing people to make people just fucking do what their boss tells them to do.
All. I worked with many top tier companies and policy adherence is null without reinforcement; this is the reality, without motivation everyone ignores policies and decisions.
There are many other forms of motivation and reinforcement other than explicit threats of firing pople, and most of them are less aggravating. In fact I very much doubt Amazon actually does that constantly, and I also doubt that it was the key reinforcement in this specific case, even if it wasn't simply an exaggeration.
Refusing to do what you're told will in fact get you fired in most European companies as well. I actually witnessed that happening not too long ago. So what's even the argument here?
Not sure what you are talking about. If people don't do their job you can just fire them. The only difference is that in e.g. Germany it will result in the employment contract expiring in a few weeks instead of the same day. I don't really see why people make a big deal out of a few weeks as if it is equivalent to waiting until the end of the universe.
A great opportunity for Siemens to collect money for their abysmal Mindsphere IIoT platform...
I get a feeling the EU is on a very bad trajectory into a more and more planned, copycat economy.
Someone develops some product / service (e.g. flexible infrastructure as a service aka "cloud") market decides if it is good. EU falls behind in that category. EU commission throws money at pet projects that in best case will come close to the original offering but will just burn money (/ flood money in certain pockets) in most cases. Farewell market economy (or what is left of it)
The EU has been in that program going all the way back to agricultural subsidies. I see those subsidies and research funds as the historically first form of a massive UBI scheme, an electorate-friendly scheme. Its just that the Income comes with a lot of bureaucracy and a menial job.
The scheme is not sustainable but at least it prevents social upheaval
Not even that, those companies have already been investing in their services for years if not decades. And have decades of institutional knowledge build up to scale their compute resources. Seeing those low key IT effort and the failing of corona containment im really thinking of emigrating to either Asia or north america once corona stuff has been settled.
There has been a similar project developed in Poland already. (https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-betwee...) In practice it's not much more than government-branded version of Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. So far it serves well as a marketing vehicle for a handful of the biggest corporations, but it's barely used by anyone.
I can see it could make sense as a solution to some particular problems though – European regulations often forbid banks from processing/storing customer data in other countries, so even though the tech is provided by the American tech giants, having everything hosted locally makes it possible for local financial services to finally move away from hosting everything on premises.
you cannot "force" funding. if you lack behind the competition, you must embrace protectionism.
China is successful in that sphere compared to India because they closed the market and developed sustainable and partially better alternatives to American products.
Europe must so the same - tax and limit American products. Let the home market copy and adapt then innovate. This is THE ONLY way.
You forget that unlike the US, innovators in the EU will have to fend off the bigwig corporates. And the country-level governments are firmly in the pockets of these few corporates. One could argue the same for the US, but the US is moving into the position where the EU is right now.
It seems difficult to be protectionist when it comes to online services... And do you really want to live in that world? Do you want your government to build a great firewall and limit your access to content from outside of your country?
This would lead to a local tech scene, actually REALLY localised products (where you dont have to wait till google decides to roll out features in Germany after 7 years) and best of all: JOBS. This would lead to millions of jobs. It would make Europe super interesting for high skilled labor and bring a nice twist into the migration problem we are facing now.
Yes, this would hurt America, but yeah... who cares? They are not paying taxes anyway.
And look at China. Look at their amazing apps and services they have there. We have NOTHING here. It is time to do the right thing and to say bye to American companies. We can make our own companies.
AWS was built despite Google. Steam was built despite Google. Netflix got built despite Google. Even DuckDuckGo was built despite Google.
The European telecommunication companies could have built another search engine. Via DNS, the telecom companies had all the server contact knowledge that Microsoft is prying from users' memory with their data collecting.
There was Cliqz, a European search engine, that got dismantled due to Covid, without anybody offering some emergency funding to keep it going.
If a EU firewall is installed, millions of jobs will be created because everything will be done manually again. European companies had the opportunity to create competitive companies, but they didn't. Why should they create a good-enough Google if Google is banned? More likely, they will create a worse Altavista, and they are cut off of all the innovation that builds on Google.
The next unicorns, they don't rely on Google's blessing. Everybody can build them, even a company in Europe. Using their developers to copy Google would be a waste of talent and opportunities. China has to do it to control their news, but why should Europe?
After all, there are no American companies demanding the shutdown of Google just so that they can create the next innovative products. They just create them. If American companies can innovate despite Google, why can't European companies do the same?
There's a sense in which I agree with you, but it's for a different reason.
I want a future where the "foundational" internet services (like chat, broadcast social, payments, etc) are decentralised/federated. And it seems like that's the end result of increased internet-service protectionism.
This won't be possible with all internet services, but it seems plausible for several of the large, stabilised ones. Though I'm not sure whether we're quite ready for it yet.
Hrrmpf. NEIN! That sounds like make work/Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme/bullshit jobs a la Graeber.
The reason for I(C)T to exist is to optimize until all those are gone! Otherwise you can go back to FAX, Phone, Post and paper files, and would probably more 'efficient' because of less friction between cybernetic fiction and factory floor.
Wouldn’t be the end of the world. Most of those are really toxic and in the pocket of the NSA. Content licensing could lead to local competitors of Netflix easily.
No doubt you'd be the first to howl should an American say "I do not like European (tech) products at all". (Well, if there were any to dislike.)
>i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive.
Why not ask for the moon and the stars while you're at it? You make it sound like all that is needed to develop (as tachyonbeam pointed out) European equivalents to "Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc" is to shut down access from anywhere in Europe to and from these companies. Do this today and tomorrow EUGoogle and EuroFacebook will appear as if out of nowhere! Why didn't Brussels (or Paris, or Berlin) think of this already?
>* You make it sound like all that is needed to develop (as tachyonbeam pointed out) European equivalents to "Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc" is to shut down access from anywhere in Europe to and from these companies.*
This isn’t far fetched - it’s a well understood result of Chinas Great Firewall. With American companies banned in China, Chinese companies were free to copy American firms and capture the value of the Chinese market. Protectionism has work, and even India is considering it
China is the one example where they've been able to fill the gap. All other markets have failed miserably. And even in China the goal wasn't to create better alternatives (which based on UX or privacy the 100% are not) but for the communist party to be able to control and suppress free speech.
In Russia Yandex (search engine) and VKontakte (social network) were and still are quite successful (Google and Facebook were never banned, unlike China). And they were not created to control and/or suppress free speech (at least originally: Putin didn't care what happens in the Internet until around 2014, and it was free from censorship).
My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings.
EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.