- cross-posted to:
- europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Europe’s sovereignty cause isn’t just about hitting back or holding onto valuable data — it’s also a bid to shore up a moribund European economy. Consultancy firm Asteres estimates EU spending on US cloud services alone adds up to $264 billion per year. Diverting more of that cash to continental companies would strengthen Europe and reduce the geopolitical leverage wielded by the US. More government spending on domestic tech will also help the likes of Capgemini, according to Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tamlin Bason. EMEA government spending on IT will top $250 billion in 2028, reckons research firm Gartner.
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The problem is that past efforts at autonomy have failed miserably and only extended the US’s lead. Tech regulators have crafted many hammers against Big Tech over the years with the combined impact of a squeaky toy — neither 2016’s data-privacy rules nor 2024’s artificial-intelligence act have left any visible scars on the likes of Alphabet Inc. or Meta Platforms Inc. Politicians, meanwhile, have found it more expedient to pick winners than create viable homegrown tech ecosystems.
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With big European firms tempted to stick with the suppliers they know best, and domestic cloud companies like France’s OVH Groupe SA well behind dominant US rivals, the ultimate irony is that Big Tech is selling its own products as “sovereign” in Europe. Rather than allow their European cash-cow business to be regulated away, Amazon.com Inc. and others are simply adapting their EU operations to local requirements — segregated entities, locally staffed — and promising more jobs and investment in the process. EU-friendly software wrappers for US tech can even come with a double-digit mark-up, University of Amsterdam researcher Leevi Saari says. This is a troubling distortion of what sovereignty really is; it’s similar to Nvidia Corp.’s own pitch to help EU governments build data centers, including in Munich, which I’d call “sovereignty-as-a-service.”
The longer EU sovereignty remains a talking point rather than a genuine strategy, the more likely the continent will remain a tech-taker.
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New ideas should be tried. Entrepreneur Gilles Babinet suggests that, instead of conjuring up piecemeal copycat tech tools at taxpayers’ expense, Europe’s large public sector should set the rules of the game for interoperable, open-source software that would mount a genuine challenge to Big Tech. Nor should regulators blink when it comes to confronting the market power of the likes of Musk — as seen in Brazil, which banned X over threats to disobey a court order.
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I have voted for public money, public code for more than a decade now. It’s about time the rest woke up.
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I’m not sure why people reflexively always do Europe+tech = open source. IMO the problem doesn’t relate to the source code being open or closed, but the startup environment. There’s a lot to think about and innovate here, that goes way beyond the code. Open source is also often used low key as an excuse to ship poor quality software that attempts to redeem itself on an ideological basis, and that’s also how you get everyone to keep using Silicon Valley software.
I’m also concerned that there’s this push for Open Source funding coming from the many developers that have some projects dreaming of being paid to work on them, who then make great sounding arguments to politicians, who don’t understand much of the matter and you get millions or billions spent on grants, which ultimately don’t solve anything, because the output ends somewhere between abandoned and not sufficiently competitive. A real, working solution for European tech is more involved.
MS Office, for example is a product with 30 years of development behind it. How do you replace it?
- You could buy a competing commercial implementation. Something like… Ah, hang on … Google Office or Apple’s offerings or …
- You could start up a new EU company to develop an office suite. Five to ten years later you may have something that can compete, but that company needed secure investment so it didn’t get acquired over that period. There’s also no guarantee it will succeed. Probably a €250M gamble.
- Or you can build on open source and accelerate faster. Deploy what exists today and invest in the development to enhance it.
If you want to minimise risk and move quickly, I don’t see another option.
How many of the Excel formulas are used and not just kept in the program because of a large (public) contract whose operations marginally depend on it?
30 years or 100 years are only marginally significant.
What we need in the EU is law (enforcement) clarity. Uncertainty of law application and enforcement is a terrible investment and general economic signal that is benefitting only US tech as they can account for the risk. That is why they “dictated” a Digital Omnibus that doesn’t just erase digital rights in the GDPR and AI Act, but simply makes them blurrier.
Tell me, EU company, what is clearly forbidden or not. You may have a sofa fucker calling you Nazi, but you would have a flourishing tech industry in exchange.
Part of the solution could be to realize that companies might not need those giant suites, but smaller, more focused solutions.
“30 years of development” is utterly irrelevant. It means only that the company has existed 30 years. You can write e.g. collaborative text and spreadsheet editors from scratch in months. There’s AI around now too, which has significantly accelerated development.
And using or contributing to open source is not mutually exclusive with private companies or making, at least, part of the source closed. Not in favor of one or the other here, just think that this is not overly relevant.
As to acquisitions, there seems to be a need for an incentives and/or regulatory framework as indeed it is to be avoided.
Perhaps, simultaneously, there’s also something to be done in the Open Source world to fix its various issues. It just needs new thinking, as Open Source currently tends to lag behind, and just funding is unlikely to fix it.