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upstart writes:

Europe's $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard:

There's a reason every decentralized system eventually finds its way onto a platform: platforms solve real-world problems that platform users struggle to solve for themselves.

Everyone needs platforms: writers, social media users, people looking for a romantic partner. What's more, the world needs platforms. Say you want to connect all 200+ countries on Earth with high-speed fiber lines; you can run a cable from each country to every other country (about 21,000 cables, many of them expensively draped across the ocean floor), or you can pick one country (preferably one with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts) and run all your cables there, and then interconnect them.

That's America, the world's global fiber hub. The problem is, America isn't just a platform for fiber interconnections – it's a Great Power that uses its position at the center of the world's fiber networks to surveil and disrupt the world's communications networks.

That's a classic enshittification move on a geopolitical scale. It's not the only one America's made, either.

Consider the US dollar. The dollar is to global commerce what America's fiber head-ends are to the world's data network: a site of essential, (nominally) neutral interchange that is actually a weapon that the US uses to gain advantage over its allies and to punish its enemies:

The world's also got about 200 currencies. For parties in one country to trade with those in another country, the buyer needs to possess a currency the seller can readily spend. The problem is that setting up 21,000 pairwise exchange markets from every currency to every other currency is expensive and cumbersome – traders would have to amass reserves of hundreds of rarely used currencies, or they would have to construct long, brittle, expensive, high-risk chains that convert, say, Thai baht into Icelandic kroner to Brazilian reals and finally into Costa Rican colones.

Thanks to a bunch of complicated maneuvers following World War II, the world settled on the US dollar as its currency platform. Most important international transactions use "dollar clearing" (where goods are priced in USD irrespective of their country of origin) and buyers need only find someone who will convert their currency to dollars in order to buy food, oil, and other essentials.

There are two problems with this system. The first is that America has never treated the dollar as a neutral platform; rather, American leaders have found subtle, deniable ways to use "dollar dominance" to further America's geopolitical agenda, at the expense of other dollar users (you know, "enshittification"). The other problem is that America has become steadily less deniable and subtle in these machinations, finding all kinds of "exceptional circumstances" to use the dollar against dollar users.

America's unabashed dollar weaponization has been getting worse for years, but under Trump, the weaponized dollar has come to constitute an existential risk to the rest of the world, sending them scrambling for alternatives. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game that was rigged in his favor, but he still flipped over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all.

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard.

quietus writes:

... have you no sense of decency, sir?

(Attorney Joseph Welch, 1954 Army‑McCarthy hearings)

"The European Commission, in a comprehensive decade-long effort, has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, thereby directly infringing on Americans' online speech in the United States. Though often framed as combating so-called "hate speech" or "disinformation," the European Commission worked to censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history—including the COVID-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues. After ten years, the European Commission has established sufficient control of global online speech to comprehensively suppress narratives that threaten the European Commission's power."

Thus opens a February 3 report [PDF] of the Committee on the Judiciary of the US House of Representatives.

The report is a long, long through-the-looking-glass argument against the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), specifically its Code of Practice on Disinformation.

That DSA, goes the argument -- with a long list of screenshots of heavily redacted e-mails, and the occasional Fox News article as source -- has been used to gang-pressure a whole bunch of election campaigns in European countries: France (2024), the Netherlands (2023 & 2025), Slovakia (2023), Moldova (2024), Germany, Ireland (2024 & 2025), and Romania. Romania's 2024 presidential election is a particularly nasty example, with the EU and France pressuring Telegram and TikTok to block content associated with conservative candidate Călin Georgescu, despite the absence of evidence supporting allegations of Russian interference used to justify those actions (says the report). [Paywalled]

What the report also -- inadvertently -- highlights is how the European Union (and Australia, Japan, South-Korea and Canada) and the United States are diverging on the treatment of social media.

Out of the EU's 27 member states, 15 of them have a partial or complete ban on smartphone usage in schools in place. Nine EU countries -- Spain, Greece, France, Italy, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Austria and Portugal -- are currently discussing a ban on social media usage under a certain age (mostly around 15, 16): a debate driven by concerns about addiction, mental health impact, and the spread of harmful content.

South Korea has implemented a school‑wide phone‑ban since 2024 and is actively discussing, but has not yet legislated, a social‑media age limit for minors. Japan is considering age‑restriction policies and has a government‑led working group, but there is currently no legal ban on smartphones in schools nor a statutory social‑media age limit. In Canada, most provinces have mandatory school-wide bans, but there is no age limit being discussed (yet), while Australia has no ban on smartphone usage, but is the first to have a federal law barring under-16s of having accounts on major social media platforms.

Get 'em while they're young, I guess.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/u-s-allows-tsmc-to-import-chipmaking-equipment-to-its-china-fabs-samsung-sk-hynix-likewise-receive-go-signal-from-commerce-department

The U.S. Department of Commerce has issued a permit to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to import U.S.-made chip-making equipment into China for its Nanjing fab. According to Reuters, Samsung and SK hynix were also given import licenses to bring in specialized equipment that used American-made components into their Chinese factories. These three chipmakers used to enjoy validated end-user status, meaning they could freely import restricted items into China without asking for individual licenses. However, this privilege has expired at the end of 2025, meaning they now have to seek annual approval from Washington, D.C., to continue receiving advanced tools.

"The U.S. Department of Commerce has granted TSMC Nanjing an annual export license that allows U.S. export-controlled items to be supplied to TSMC Nanjing without the need for individual vendor licenses," the company said in a statement to Reuters. It also said that this "ensures uninterrupted fab operations and product deliveries." This move to require annual licenses for the Chinese factories of these chipmakers is a part of the White House's effort to keep advanced chipmaking tools out of China.

Beijing has been working hard to achieve "semiconductor sovereignty," just as the U.S. has been trying hard to prevent it from acquiring the latest chips. Aside from that, ASML, the only manufacturer of cutting-edge chipmaking tools, has been banned from exporting its products to China and servicing those that are already installed. Because of this, we've seen reports that the country is covertly working on reverse engineering EUV lithography tools, and that it has even come up with a "Frankenstein" EUV chipmaking tool, but has yet to produce a single chip.

The U.S. does not allow EUV lithography machines with U.S. technology to be exported to China, even to companies like TSMC and Samsung that have Chinese factories. This means that these fabs are only limited to mature nodes of 16-nm and up. The revocation of the validated end-user status for the China-based fabs of these companies shows that Washington is tightening its grip on chipmaking machines, even older DUV tech, to make it difficult for Beijing to create its own technology.

Despite this, the East Asian nation is pushing hard to develop its own equipment. The central government has even told its chipmakers to use homegrown tools for half of new capacity. And while the country is still years behind cutting-edge tech from ASML and other Western companies, it's slowly taking steps in the right direction.

Original Submission