Canada will suffer greatly, and possibly much more than the US. But appeasing US, in the position of Canada, is akin to trying to reason with a wife beater.
You don't reason. You remove the victim from the hands of the aggressor.
It will cost a lot of money, and the Canadians will suffer greatly. But the alternative is to join America, which Canadians have stated don't want to.
When I worked at AWS, there was GovCloud, and only American citizens residing in American soil and connecting from American soil were able to give support to these customers. So even if you were legally authorised to work in the US and resided in the US, you couldn't work with GovCloud customers.
Or if you are an American temporarily residing in Romania or Canada, then you also can't work with GovCloud customers.
I expect the same situation will happen to you. But I am just speculating.
A European sovereign cloud is desperately needed for highly sensitive government, military, and national security workloads, and these must be thoroughly vetted to ensure compliance.
But for anything else, like personal e-mail or e-commerce? I'm sure there will be a lot of flexibility for non-European contributions, but it will probably be like it currently is: open source projects spanning the globe.
I don't really intend my services to be used by EU Govt's but rather just individuals/businesses even and if the EU govt. actually requires it at that point, I genuinely don't mind travelling to European and living there if things do come out as this (if EU provides me & maybe my family a visa ie) & am willing to cooperate consultancy work with EU govt. or others as well
My focus was on the more of a Eu-alternatives kind of thing. I want my idea of privacy to be aligned and EU seems perfect for that. I want to provide sustainability in an idea & can establish an EU company or partner up with one.
My question is that I would still live in India for the most part starting out & I might be unable to make an EU company in the start too but if I am required, then I will do so
Aside from this, I am willing to use only EU services internally for my product as well as I mentioned.
is there any way that I can still align myself with the EU-alternatives mission?
Might sound a bit strange but I want to come into Eu but I can't because immigration is hard/expenses and I want to come to Europe when I finally figure out things/have a decent product in the first place.
Some people told me to create an EU company which holds an Indian company as a consultancy firm and you can be part of both and manage to establish a Data sharing policy given that I can access EU data from Indian soil so If I can do something about it.
I am not really familiar with EU laws tho so I am interested to hear more from people actually interested.
I think (or maybe hope) that open source is going to be a large part of the European data sovereignty strategy.
America has had decades to privately run and develop their own software alternatives and everything (Windows, Office, Google) is extremely deeply established now and hard to compete against. I mean, can you imagine building a proprietary x86_64 operating system from scratch not based on Linux? And writing the code is just a small part of the work. You also need drivers from manufacturers like Realtek and Nvidia. You need people buying your product. You need marketing.
It's just not going to happen. Open source is the only way forward for EU, in my opinion.
And therefore, I think you will be able to contribute as much as you want to these open source efforts. Even testing and translations are already great initiatives, but if you can also write code, that's even better!
I am a bit more interested on the side of infrastructure though (having the idea in backburner playing with ways of having direct ssh firecracker vm's with docker images)
Usually I try to open source it & release it usually in permissive licenses (Full disclosure to experiment with ideas I use LLM's sometimes)
I don't really want Europe to replace America only now switching to India. Our ideals might match right now but y'know we live in a multi polarized world now and we just have to look for what's great for Europe from European perspective and so on & as an Indian, I appreciate it given that we have points of common interests regarding privacy.
So my point was that I already open source projects. But the reason I feel a lot of issues is that open source project -> actual deployment pipeline is still messy for the average person and this is the idea I was / still am targeting with firecracker vm's where someone can pay for an open source service to be deployed on vps for some time (Alright now a lot of options have come like sprites but i have been talking about from 2-3 months maybe 4 back when no implementation existed and even right now the one click button solution ui/ux I wanted to create still hasn't been created)
Like instead of being bound to your service with tos as a saas, I am hoping to treat each as a vps and the tos which would surround that which would be more permissive.
I was gonna build more on it but then ramflation happened so probably gonna have the idea internally till the bubble bursts or when its good enough (a big chunk of me not open sourcing it is that its really hacky and consists huge LLM help right now especially with gliderlabs/ssh library part & I don't want to create yet another AI slop)
I know hindi (the most widely spoken language in India) and I am down to provide some translations to Open source too
The issue with Open source without any offering is that (i have written about it) is that there is zero funding and incentive. Heck, I am the person who made a post about how to promote open source/fix this issue & After months of thinking, I kind of feel providing EU privacy friendly solution might be the best bet. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430) [Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that]
A lot of it felt like a chicken and egg problem to me. People want better UI/UX but developers build for dev first and there needs to be a real incentive in most cases to have great UI/UX which might include some financial benefits plus open source still has some large issues in funding which is why I thought of the cloud idea as well (I want to establish a railway like pricing model where you get charged for what you use but its still reasonable and there can be a deploy to cloud option and developers who create open source projects gets the funding in first place or have a more flexible way to earn from their project, similar to BYOK but way more user friendly)
Anyways my point is that I feel deeply aligned with EU right now. I just want to ask for some EU laws given I am still living in Indian state right now and just more information about it.
By enforcing basic consumer protections like making sure airlines can't just unilaterally cancel your flight with no compensation? By making sure your image cannot be used by megacorporations for sex ads without permission? By making sure companies who intentionally or unintentionally leak personal information suffer consequences? By making sure European industry is powered by renewable energy? By not treating refugees like cattle? By making sure inmates have a chance to reintegrate into society, unlike the US who treats criminals as a pest? By ensuring American corporations follow European regulations when offering services to European consumers?
Can't think of a single instance where EU "fucked over" US in a manner that US was unfairly taken advantage of, really.
My guess would be that the OP subscribes to the MAGA worldview, because in their alternative reality, the US-Europe security arrangement was not a mutually beneficial relationship between allies, but a parasitic relationship where the US pays, and Europe reaps the benefits.
Obviously, this worldview is strategically myopic, based on ignoring many things the US was getting out of this arrangement, like US military bases in Europe (also used for power projection to the Middle East), Europeans buying US weapons (big part of why those weapons are so advanced), doing America's bidding in the UN, supporting US military adventures (however misguided) in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
It could be argued that the US role of being the security provider to Europe and others was the main source of their wealth and power. The US had the proverbial goose laying golden eggs, but Trump got angry that they had to shelter that goose, so he kicked her out... no goose would abuse the US like that!
Indeed. I am also tired of Trump pretending trade imbalance is real when he is only counting goods and energy, but he does not count the massive influence of American Big Tech and how Europe basically has zero competition against cloud services, operating systems, office suites, mobile phone manufacturers, computer chips... It all comes from USA, or, lately, China.
If by pissing off you mean "making foreign entities follow European regulations", then, yes. But also, that's exactly what US, China, and Russia do too.
Laws are negotiable between sovereign states representing the business interests of their nations. The EU, not being a nation itself, may not get that part and may have been feeling a little too invincible as a bloc of nations, but they have still basically pissed off most of their larger trading partners and it doesn’t stop there. Qatar is threatening to stop selling LNG over some corporate sustainability directives the EU passed in 2024, since the potential fines amount to 5% of their state energy corporation’s global revenue[1].
Personally I like the way Qatari’s Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi put it[2]:
> “If the case is that I lose 5% of my generated revenue by going to Europe, I will not go to Europe," Al-Kaabi reportedly said in reference to the associated penalties back in December 2024. "I’m not bluffing.”
Now you might be thinking, well who cares? It’s Qatar! Well Qatar also supplies about 12 to 14% of Europe’s LNG imports. Europe could get that gas from elsewhere, but elsewhere kinda includes either America or Russia.
Sure, at some as yet to be determined time in the future, gas may be supplanted by electricity, and even replace it entirely. Right now gas is still king in Europe, and most residential energy use is just heating homes.
Which is why I'm sceptical of past predictions. Infinite typewriters and monkeys, and such.
I've seen "China is collapsing" videos for the past 10 years. They seem to be going rather well over there so far. They're making the best EVs while American and German cat veterans struggle with electrification. Go figure.
Absolutely. And how the CCP essentially controls any company that becomes sufficiently large. Terrible working conditions and all sorts of workplace illnesses due to exposure to chemicals banned in most other countries.
However, China not only has not collapsed, but it is becoming stronger every day.
"they know what they are doing". Individually? Maybe! I hear Meta pays among the highest, if not the single highest salaries of FAANG.
But as a company? Meta has been entirely incapable to innovate since it was renamed. Betting billions on an obviously flawed idea of a Facebook-owned VR universe, then shortly pivoting to a cryptocurrency that ended up being little more than a rugpull, and, after investing billions in expensive AI staff, they're now pulling the plug on that, too
The most successful products like WhatsApp and Instagram were purchased, not internal developments. Nobody cares about Threads and it mostly only exists because Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.
I sure hope Instagram and WhatsApp are bringing in enough money because Meta is running out of things to do, other than milking their current customers dry.
The game they’re playing isn’t to make new products or to make the products they have better. They’re playing the game of making the line go up and as much as I dislike them I have to say that they’re being successful
They could have had their ecosystem if they would have been a little less greedy. I think this was the reason last gen VR wasn't overly successful, despite the advancements. No hackers and enthusiasts were able to do cool stuff with VR hardware because every hardware vendor sucked and nobody was exactly in an nvidia position.
They didn't offer support for devices that were just 1.5 years old. I will never buy any Facebook hardware again, even if the financial loss isn't important to me. It is a matter of respecting the customer.
If you start with enshitification outright, people might just skip your product.
It comes across as boorish, on an article about widespread sexual exploitation including children and 17-strike sex trafficking policies, to write a long rant about whether the trillion dollar company has a long-term business strategy that'll give it more power.
That is quite clearly not what they are asserting, discussing, or even adjacent to conversationally.
It doesn't help when you're exaggerating to make it have some foundation, and obviously so. (they pivoted from VR to crypto? pulled the plug on AI?)
Can people quit with this stupid argument? A thin majority of Americans voted for this during the election. If you follow the polls, the vast majority of American currently don't want this. Just stop with this "dumb Americans" dur dur nonsense. Those of us who have our heads screwed on straight are so sick of being blamed for this. The same thing could happen at any time in any country.
I understand, but it's also a bit rich coming from the US.
When the US applies country level sanctions or goes to war in places like Gaza, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Iran - I don't see much thought given to it really not being the peoples fault.
> The same thing could happen at any time in any country.
This is not true. First of all, this is the SECOND time this clown is elected.
Secondly, 77,302,580 americans voted for trump. That is one in three.
I am sorry you get blamed for this, I know you are not to blame. But you have to see how it looks from the outside, given the incredible effects it has had (most importantly, making millions lose faith in the world. And who knows what more to come.)
To add to this, the thing that really worries me is not that Trump is doing this, but the fact every single US has had the capacity to do this (Trump is proof of it), and the only thing holding back the US from self-immolation and destroying all their partnerships was decorum and being nice, but there were no actual mechanisms, laws, or tools to prevent POTUS from self-appointing himself as King of America, which is extremely worrying for what many people regarded as an advanced democracy.
You don't reason. You remove the victim from the hands of the aggressor.
It will cost a lot of money, and the Canadians will suffer greatly. But the alternative is to join America, which Canadians have stated don't want to.
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