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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A group of technology companies and lobbyists want the European Commission (EC) to take action to reduce the region's reliance on foreign-owned digital services and infrastructure.
In an open letter to EC President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, the group of nearly 100 organizations proposed the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to invest in key technology and lessen dependence on US corporations.
The letter points to recent events, including the farcical Munich Security Conference, as a sign of "the stark geopolitical reality Europe is now facing," and says that building strategic autonomy in key sectors is now an urgent imperative for European countries.
Signatories include aerospace giant Airbus, France's Dassault Systèmes, European cloud operator OVHcloud, chip designer SiPearl, open source biz Nextcloud, and a host of others including organizations such as the European Startup Network.
OVHcloud said the group was calling "for a collective industrial policy strategy to strengthen Europe's competitiveness and strategic autonomy. We are convinced this is the premise of what we hope will be a larger movement of the entire ecosystem."
Proposals include the sovereign infrastructure fund, which would be able to support public investment, especially in capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, with "significant additional commitment of funds allocated and/or underwritten" by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and national public funding bodies.
It also suggests there should be a formal requirement for the public sector to "buy European" and source their IT requirements from European-led and assembled solutions, while recognizing that these may involve complex supply chains with foreign components.
[...] This isn't the first time that concerns about US hegemony in technology have been raised. Recently, the DARE project launched to develop hardware and software based on the open RISC-V architecture, backed by EuroHPC JU funding, while fears have been aired about the dominance of American-owned cloud companies in the European market.
Such concerns have been heightened by recent actions, such as the suggestion that the US might cut off access to Starlink internet services in Ukraine as a political bargaining strategy. Starlink owner Elon Musk later denied that this would ever happen.
The letter notes that these issues have already been set out by the EuroStack initiative, made up of many of the companies that signed the letter to EC President von der Leyen. The Register asked the European Commission to comment.
On the other side of the pond, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) recently published a report claiming that US companies face "substantial financial burdens" due to the European Union's digital regulations.
It says that US tech companies are losing "billions" through having to comply with regulations such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and having to obtain user consent for their data to be used for advertising purposes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday March 22 2025, @12:22PM (7 children)
They can't be losing billions if they are still there, doing business. They are just not making as much money as they would like to do, if there were no regulations. They are still making money after all. They don't run services in Europe as some kind of charity case.
I guess this was not what the US had in mind with all the treats of boycotts, tariffs and what not. Question is perhaps how soon euro-alternatives might be viable. Or perhaps this is just like in the USA where corporations like to flock around the "government" pork barrels to get themselves some, nearly, free money or do things on someone else cents.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 22 2025, @01:11PM
They couldn't lose billions doing something, if they weren't doing that something. Basically, they're saying that they could be making more, if it weren't for those pesky rules. We assume they're still making profit, but it is possible for a business to lose money, but still lose less money than if they discontinued the activity in question.
These losses can be achieved in a subtler fashion too. If a business does business in the EU as well as elsewhere in the world, they often have to follow the EU rules elsewhere. For example, I work in Wyoming, US yet I have received basic training on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Wyoming doesn't have a thing concerning data protection and the US is relatively limited. But my employer has some dealings in the EU - and more importantly, gets a lot of business from EU businesses that have to follow this regulation (a regulated business doesn't get a pass if a third party violates GDPR with the business's data). These regulations can be very sticky.
So someone could lose some money in order to comply with a regulation that they aren't required to follow, merely because their customers are so required.
My view is that there is some case to be made for these regulations, but the regulators are notorious for their disinterest in reducing the cost of regulation. And there's a lot of EU (or member state) regulation that sticks (mandatedcompliance with ISO standards are another example). What turns these into naked protectionism are funding policies like the proposed one above where EU companies are subsidized (here with alleged infrastructure funding) in large part so that they can afford to comply with regulation.
Keep in mind the alleged problem: big US companies dominating EU markets. Well, why aren't the big EU businesses dominating their own home field? My take is that the reason is that government isn't paying them to do so. This is a common problem with the EU approach (and shows up in a lot of other places too). Once they get reliant on public funding to do anything, then they won't do it otherwise.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2025, @02:39PM (5 children)
I suspect this is the more likely story.
That said, what the EU could do is create an EU Linux distro, or "bless" a particular one (e.g https://www.suse.com/c/suse-ltss-extended-security/ [suse.com] ). And the idea for this distro is to be a very stable _foundation_ that businesses and government can build on for decades. That way they can build millions of lines of code on apps on a stable foundation that doesn't change or break every few years. Imagine how much you can save if you can have a stable platform that you can use for decades. In comparison the current situation is as stupid as building a skyscraper on a foundation that only lasts a few years, so you have to keep moving the skyscraper to a new foundation and things keep breaking and the percentage of breakages doesn't ever seem to go down significantly.
Most businesses and government don't need their OS to have tons of spying and telemetry back to the USA, nor does their OS need ads, AI and other silly stuff embedded into it. If they want to use AI they can and should run it on top of the OS. It does not need to be part of the OS.
They also don't need the OS UI to change that much and that often.
Commercial OS vendors (Microsoft/Red Hat/Ubuntu etc) need to change (and often break/deprecate) stuff for the sake of making people pay (one way or another) for the newer versions.
Maybe they can also try forking a browser too with a focus on stability and security.
I'm not saying don't change anything. You need stuff to work on and with new hardware etc. However, seriously there's very little that the you need to change at the user and UI side. For example, tell me what does the Win 11 UI do that's significantly better than Win 7 for businesses and gov stuff?
I want an OS as boring and reliable as a good concrete foundation. I want the changes in zillion lines of corporate code to be related to actual corporate app features and bug fixes. Not because some hipster decided a function was ugly or some CxO wants to extract more money.
BTW I'm suspicious on how terrible Log4j's track record for insecurity is. With such a bad track record I'm wondering whether its primary purpose is an NSA etc backdoor and its secondary purpose is a logging library.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2025, @03:44PM (2 children)
Oh yes, great idea, Linux by EU 'B Arker' committee...what could possibly go wrong? The only thing they'd do right would be to have one set of EU wide 'harmonised' backdoors installed....and even then, I'd have to qualify that with a big 'maybe', based on past experience of the advanced IT muppetry skillfully practised by one member state's spooks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2025, @04:02PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2025, @05:54PM
I'm not a leftpondian, technically I am part of the '...rest of the world...', though I do have to admit that the more I see of it (or, more specifically, humanity¹), the less I'm convinced of that fact.
I've had dealings with the EU, calling them 'B Arkers' may have been taking it too far though, as it's technically something they aspire to be, not what they are...
¹ With the honourable exception of the Sentinelese...
(Score: 2) by number11 on Saturday March 22 2025, @04:36PM (1 child)
There are plenty of "EU" Linux distros already, though it can be difficult to geolocate a distro that's not commercially produced (RedHat, Ubuntu, etc.). I'm pretty sure the distro I use is produced in the EU (using the country of the head maintainer as evidence). And it doesn't change UI willy-nilly, at least if you stick to XFCE like I do (I agree that the UI should be as boring and unchanging as possible). Getting the EU to reach a consensus on what distro to adopt would probably be difficult, though.
As for US companies bitching that they shouldn't have to meet EU standards... goose, meet gander. Let them take that up when EU parties are not required to comply with US directives (e.g. restrictions on who they can do business with or sell product to).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Saturday March 22 2025, @06:00PM
Well Suse [wikipedia.org] is still around and that is a commercial German company, so there is even a fully EU produced distro (AFAIK its the only one), so if the EU wanted to mandate a local distro that is an option (in fact I seem to remember some German cities actually did mandate it for government systems, until Microsoft made them a better offer).