Rising tensions with the U.S. are spurring new plans in Europe to do something that has long seemed impossible: break with American technology in favor of homegrown alternatives.
President Trump this week dropped his threat to take control of Greenland by force if necessary. But even the possibility of armed conflict with allies has injected new urgency into long-simmering debates in Europe about how to reduce its reliance on U.S. tech infrastructure and tools that support swaths of the economy.
The worst-case scenario for European officials? A White House executive order that cuts off the region’s access to data centers or email software that businesses and governments need to function.
Fucking do it, we need to understand how reliant we are on them and how dire the situation actually is. People like the FSF, the EFF and so on have warned us about this for decades at this point.
What choices does the EU have for processors, RAM and most other tech components other than to source it from China? ARM is technically in the UK, but they only provide RTL, not masks or any or the other huge chunks of the backend needed to produce a viable CPU.
I’m all for getting independence here. We’re in a precarious position.
That’s another, even more complex, debate indeed.
But a sizable chunk of the internet and government infrastructure in Europe relies heavily on American technology.
All the AWS, Microsoft, Google services are a massive security threat, especially because we know that they’ll bend to the whims of the orange buffoon if required. They can literally paralyse Europe at the push of a button.
Hardware is a seperate issue, this is about US software. However you are right in that chip making is disturbingly US and Chinese.
Maybe we should do a Chaos Monkey approach: Shut down a random US company in a random region for day. Repeat every few days. Just resilience testing.
us-east-1 has entered the chat
It is not a bug, it’s a service?
Well, DNS issues is something the US struggle with themselves.