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European Union officials have drawn up an aggressive 173-page plan to counter both President Donald Trump's trade moves and American tech giants including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.
According to a document obtained by POLITICO, European Commission officials are pushing their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies.
The goal: get Europe competing head-on with the American and Chinese tech giants it has lagged behind for decades.
[...] The EU would use a so-called draft "Enforcement Regulation" if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to grind the World Trade Organization (WTO) to a halt.
[...] The EU is hoping to emulate past successes, such as its development of the GSM mobile global standard, which fueled the rise of companies such as Nokia.
[...] The document seeks more stringent measures to block Chinese companies from taking part in tenders in Europe to penalize them for the level of subsidies that they receive from the government in Beijing.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/22/europe-plan-trump-tech-companies-1472326
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @12:47PM (23 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @12:54PM (1 child)
What I don't get is, part of this is to get rid of state-funded subsidies in China. They then plan to invest in companies? Erm, what's that?!
I'm all for leveling the playing field, but investment (eg buying shares) = ownership!!
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:29PM
Europe is simply recognizing that it is dropping from the developed countries list.
Free trade works best for a developed capitalism, while weak needs direct government help. My pet example is England against Netherlands story when wool ruled the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Plan_of_the_English_Commerce [wikipedia.org]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:25PM (9 children)
The EU is really good at throwing palletloads of money at research activities and institutions that never produce anything - I've worked with some of them, or at least reviewed work they've done, and I wouldn't be able to commercialise any of it. So I don't think this is any threat to either the US or China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:48PM (8 children)
I guess you never heard of GSM cellphone standard or Airbus or any of the numerous fine European companies. There is nothing wrong with investing in companies or research involving critical infrastructure at a national level. If you don't, you'll find yourself beholden to some idiot somewhere that starts a trade war with you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:19PM (2 children)
Unless, of course, you nurtured a economy that doesn't need large infusions of money from you in order to do the things they should be doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)
Good luck with your "nurtured a economy" when it comes to funding armed forces, postal system, health system, aerospace, etc. You really think corporations are going to build your country? Governments all over the world invest in areas of their countries where corporations won't or can't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:06AM
Luck? You just need to spend the money competently.
Corporate welfare being a huge example of the "invest" approach they use.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:55AM (4 children)
GSM came out of CEPT and was paid for by telcos. Airbus was an ongoing series of mergers of European aviation industry companies and consortia, with financial assistance from various EU governments (e.g. France had been propping up Aérospatiale more or less forever). None of that came out of EU-funded research initiatives.
In particular in this case they want to take on Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Europe is culturally incapable of doing that, name one single mainstream software product at the level of Windows, Office, OS X, Gmail, etc, that comes from Europe. Apart from SAP from Germany there's basically nothing, and even SAP is a specialised back-end product. The problem, as a friend of mine who works for a major German software vendor put it, is that "the European approach is to set up a study group and spend ten years studying and standardising and planning and agreeing on how to do it, and then look back and realise that by about the third year of the process an American company has already brought a product that did that to market. Alternatively, realise at the tenth year that what we've finally agreed to build isn't wanted any more".
Oh, and just for reference, I'm European, so this isn't a US person bashing the EU, it's a European frustrated that all the software I use comes from the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:27AM (1 child)
Uh, Linux.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:41AM
Linux came from contributors everywhere. Even if you assume exclusively that Linux == Linus, he spent the initial five years working on it in Europe and the remaining 23 years when it went mainstream and took over in the US.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:40AM (1 child)
StarDivision (Germany) produced StarOffice, which begat OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
The problem with most of the products you mentioned, is that they are inevitably monopolies. Interoperability requirements has led to near monocultures in most of these categories. This is not a reflection on the countries, but on the companies which got there first and entrenched themselves. No one can produce a Windows replacement. No one can produce an Office replacement. Because they are so huge and complex, that to replace it you have to be equivalent to it. Making a better, alternative product is possible and has been done, but it's not going to be as interoperable, and that's going to kill its commercial viability. That's why most alternative operating systems are niche embedded stuff or server-side.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:22AM
Even Office is not interoperable with Office. I have to open old Office documents in Libreoffice at times because Office will not open them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:41PM
Unfortunately the U.S. is starting to go down that path.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:53PM (3 children)
"protectionism, throwing money at cronies, ratcheting a little more on human freedom"
So...what Trump is doing?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:28PM
Too real too soon for the likes of khallow. They can only handle reality in their next reincarnation where they suffer from the consequences of their previous choices. Will be become a seal choking in oil soaked waters, or a chinese kid who can't breathe due to smog?
Who knows, but they are seriously defending the Koch douche so awareness isn't in the cards this round.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:42PM (1 child)
Much of the same. But not everyone considers what Trump does to be a green light to do the same.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:58PM
I'd agree, except "throwing money at cronies, ratcheting a little more on human freedom" seems to be the politics of Obama and Bush as well. Maybe I could go on, but I'm not THAT familiar with American politics.
I'm sure Clinton and other Bush, etc, shovelled loads of cash to friends, at the least.
Not just in Europe.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:43PM (5 children)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/world/europe/trump-g7-summit.html [nytimes.com]
hahahahahhahahaha
"President Trump asserted on Saturday that he has the authority to make good on his threat to force all American businesses to leave China, citing a national security law that has been used mainly to target terrorists, drug traffickers and pariah states like Iran, Syria and North Korea."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Stable fucking genius you support there, "just a jooooke brooooo"
Get woke khallow before you ACTUALLY go broke
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:15PM (4 children)
I would fucking LOVE to see him do this. It'd be painful but it might actually force us to get our shit together. Trump is so completely, utterly, cluelessly wrong about everything, with his default algorithm being "do the opposite of what everyone tells me," that occasionally he may accidentally do something that turns out to be good for us, long-term. It's a hell of a gamble, but it may turn out to work.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:13PM (2 children)
Better hope it doesn't happen. The US is far behind China in number of patents filed each year. In fact, China filed more patents than received at the European Patent Org., Japan, Korea, and the US combined.
China has been working towards being the #1 power in robotics by 2025, and they started buying up competitors in the EU and US years ago. There's no reason to believe they won't succeed, since they're not guided by "next-quarter profits" thinking.
If you want the USA to be like what China was before it ended its' policy of isolation from the world, fine ... but it's a sure bet you won't like it.
To get back into the race, the US needs free university education and free health care. For-profit education and health care are draining the economy of money that could be invested elsewhere, as well as the lost opportunity costs that making universities accessable to all would bring.
It's the same thing with reparations to blacks for a couple of centuries of injustice. If it lets the country move on instead of replaying the hatreds of the civil war over and over and over, a trillion would be cheap, and the estimated cost of $200 billion would be easy to justify just on decreasing the economic burden of racism to the economy.
Most who were promised 40 acres and a mule never got either - what does that work out to after all those years of inflation? Pay your debts.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:08AM
That short term thinking you mentioned is a BIG fault of US companies: long term planning is needed to go up against China, but the American reward is "Gimme! NOW! I don't care about tomorrow."
Meanwhile, China is thinking decades ahead.
Belt and road...South China seas... robotics... making friends with neighbours and Europe...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:48AM
"The US is far behind China in number of patents filed each year. "
Yet Trump keeps complaining that China is stealing all of our intellectual property and he keeps insisting that their theft costs the U.S. billions of dollars.
It looks to me like the exact opposite is true now. We're the ones that keep stealing their intellectual property. So by Trump's own logic we should just start handing them over boat loads of money because we owe them all that money from all the intellectual property we keep stealing. Or maybe we should just start filing for more patents because, you know, more patents = more innovation, am I right? Then we can better do cross patent negotiations with China and not have to owe them so much.
I thought we voted for Trump because he wasn't going to parrot corporate nonsense that bought and paid for politicians do. We figure he had more money than the bought and paid for politicians and corporations couldn't buy him. Yet now he is here parroting the same garbage about intellectual property and how it keeps getting stolen. Sounds just like another corporate bought shill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:31AM
The correct phrasing is "it's a million to one shot, but it just might work". You have to actually say it out loud at a dramatic moment, and then nine times out of ten it will work.
(thanks pterry)