this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Ban American big tech? Okay, makes sense.

Create a European Silicon Valley? I don't know about this one.

The reason China and the US are global leaders in technology is because of their complete disregard for human rights and the environment. Creating a "European Silicon Valley" would simply bring us down to their level, or at least closer. Mimicking America has never worked well for Europe. We need our own European systems born from our own European ideas.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

This is absolutely not true. Europeans not investing and selling off every bit of innovation they produce to american vulture capitalists is the reason we are behind.

Also what have tech companies to do with the environment? Sure now the AI BS is a strain on energy consumption, but it's not like EU started lagging only since 2022. China is doing generally much bettet wrt electrification than eg the Germans.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

like arguing for slave labor a la chinese labor market, to compete!! we cannot entertain a race to the bottom, that is already being done, as a species

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

I don't agree to ban it, since we would go stone age. But there should be incentives to use european alternatives.

[โ€“] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's good that something is finally being done.

Instead of just copying big tech from silicon fucking valley, we could also improve on it somewhat, such as making the software open source.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

GDPR was a good move. Hopefully others are soon on the way.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

This 100% needs to happen. America absolutely needs to be taken down several hundred notches.

[โ€“] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Open source and socialised software across the EU please, not predatory big tech companies.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

what does "socialised software" mean?

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Owned and operated by community at large, with the goal of bringing value for people, not for bringing people's money to shareholders

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

ok, so this is about how you run software, i.e. who owns the server hardware, while free software is about how software is developed, right?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not sure where you're pulling it all from, I suspect you have some kind of supposed gotcha in mind

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

no i'm just trying to clarify as i've never encountered the term before

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

I don't think it's a term, really, more of broad idea applied to this topic

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

The EU should sponsor various projects or provide tax cuts to companies that contribute labor to projects. They don't have to take over the projects, just help them prosper for everyone.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 115 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

In addition, we must work to create a European Big Tech industry.

yes, but also facepalm this is still missing the point

Big Tech industry

^ taps the sign above my head

THAT is the problem, yes the US version is one of the more aggressive cancers but recognize that the US is a product of the US mindset that worships big tech.

People are running out of water for their families because a category of techbro running my country consider the power hungry datacenters powering this AI "techboom" more important than human lives.

points at the sign

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

In a much more regulated environment you would have recycled water instead of destroying families water supplies.

A lot of these critiques are of unregulated capitalism as opposed to the entity of big tech itself. Now can you have big tech without unregulated capitalism maybe not, there's a reason it's as broken of a system as it is.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Instead, there seems to be a promise to not tax or fine them, in addition to giving them encryption backdoors on its citizens, and beg to buy overpriced Nvidia chips to give it all to Big US tech owned skynet. Reward is 30% tariffs to US sales on everything.

[โ€“] [email protected] 57 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

No Eurotechbro stuff, thanks.

European tech? Sure. But only if fully decentralised, peer to peer, FOSS, copyleft and all that.

And oh also, bars out fascists.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

And without surveillance and that surveillance capitalism that only helps fascists and people from Pinochet to Duterte to Trump to do human right violations. Europe has data protection because it has human rights, and it has human rights because our history has taught bitter lessons about totalitarism. We need a way forward - not back.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Starting with the assumption that the US does many technology related things better, we should just adopt a mantra of making second-best copies of whatever the US does better.

Catching up is always quicker and cheaper than being the first to get there.

Invest in copying.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Even better, do it in the public! FOSS is the way to go

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Yup. Just make the copying blatantly obvious and protect the new project from copyright/IP claims.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Finally, first real feasible comment about EU catching up to US and China. This is how countries like Korea, despite how tiny it is compared to the EU, still grow so well economically and stay #1 in various areas of competition. They play 'catch up then compete' game so well and are probably the best at it. They become #2 or top 5 or whatever in many things, synthesise them together to become #1. Even integrated solutions of these #2 offerings combined are what makes their packaged offerings so compelling.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

So you all are hiring soon? Lol

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I am old enough to remember Siemens SL45 mobile phone and Symbian but European politicians focused on killing those. If we see Big Tech in Europe it will be Social Credit System and Chinese style surveillance. Europe politics is corrupted to the ground. They say they hate corporations and take money from them after that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

European politics is far from perfect, although it is arguably better and less corrupt than in the US now. But it was not politics that killed European mobile phone industry - it was competition along with mismanagement and miscalculations of the European mobile phone manufacturers. Symbian was just a weak and clumsy platform compared to iOS and Android, it could not compete in a changing market.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Yes. Also Silicon Valley is a wrong example.

Old Nokia is a good example, Acorn, ARM of old.

Except what those people want is exactly a second Silicon Valley, just loyal to them.

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

This is all talk. The EU and European countries are articulating what they know their population and the EU tech sector wants them to do BUT in the end, they will do none of it. Maybe vote a few laws, fund a few cheap FOSS projects that will never truly be applied/ used by EU countries except for a handful of cities, public services. But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.

Talking spaces such as this lemmysub are places where we, the end users and creators can collaborate to pressure them to at least consider things and get out of this Trump/Xi dependency our politicians want for us.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 50 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Can we not? Silicon Valley sucks and imo hasn't done anything innovative for a long time.

[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I don't think that they haven't been innovative. Moreso, there's a deliberate strategy by FAANG/MIC companies to buy (or bury) smaller startups that are innovating.

Then those bigger companies mothball the tech with no plan to sell or market their acquisitions, nor release the IP rights on what they own.

It's not so much that there's no innovation, it's just good old fashioned tech monopoly behavior.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Am American in tech. I would like to come help. Actively trying to get out of this country.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago

"American silicon valley, European silicon valley, all made in Taiwan"

~Some Ukrainian guy probably

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (3 children)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Better enforcment of GDPR and DSA may be enought to effectively ban big US tech without passing any new law.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm an American who has worked in tech for nearly 30 years and I fully support this, so much so that I'm considering moving to Europe to help build it.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (3 children)

How about no??

Silicon Valley is an epicenter for the world's most expensive narcicism. For 5k a ticket you'll get first rate sycophancy, the kind Nero would enjoy. There's probably about as many dead sex workers buried underneath silicon valley as there are indigenous corpses underneath boarding schools.

No joke, Silicon Valley needs to die - in a fire.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Could we perhaps consider ways of making software that doesn't involve killing hookers?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (9 children)

This brings up a point I've been meaning to make for awhile: I don't think Europe has it in them.

The UK actually did some innovating, I mean Alan Turing himself was a Limey, and back in the day they had the likes of Sinclair and Acorn, and they invented the ARM processor, they're one of very few nations to have a processor architecture to their name. Basically the rest of computing innovation happened in the United States, like the industrial revolution before, we took what Britain invented and ran with it. Meanwhile Western Europe has had fuck all influence in the last 50 years of computing. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, sure...by an Englishman. 35 years later, let's take a look at the top 50 visited websites worldwide and see just what Europe has done with their groundbreaking tech.

Of the 50, 30 are American. The top nine: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit and Wikipedia, are American. Tenth is Yahoo Japan followed by Yahoo!. The UK does not place on the list, and only four websites are from the EU: Xvideos and XNXX are French, Xhamster and Stripchat are...What's the adjective for 'from Cyprus?" Cyprian? Cyprese? Cypriot, apparently. "Honorable" mentions to Canada and India for their only entries, Pornhub and Eporner respectively.

Meanwhile, South Korea makes the list twice for Samsung.com and Naver.com, which is apparently their Google; they do everything from search and email to online payments and ISP. I'm pretty sure that if the US is descendant, the future is Asian, not European.

Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Europe has got nothing that even sort of competes with any of them, so for the last few months they've been publishing headlines about another township switching their computers from Windows to Linux. At one point there was announcement that EurOS or whatever they were going to call it was going to be a fork of Fedora...because they forgot SuSe Linux exists. They boldly announced they were switching from getting software directly from Microsoft, to getting it indirectly from IBM. For their x86 computers.

I simply don't think Europeans have it in them; the ones that did moved to the US over the last century and a half.

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