Summary
Trump has rejected the EU’s “zero-for-zero” tariff offer on cars and industrial goods, demanding instead that the bloc commit to purchasing $350 billion of American energy to offset the trade deficit.
Following his implementation of 20% tariffs on EU goods last week, which triggered significant market downturns, Trump indicated openness to negotiations while emphasizing his “America First” stance.
He also criticized EU product standards as “non-monetary barriers” designed to block American exports.
And so will be almost every EU company/government/institution.
Nah. They have been preparing for this for years. There are ready to use replacement for most of the really important pieces of software. This would be the big push that was always needed to get technological independence from the US.
Horse shit to be frank. Aws and google cloud are huge and companies move slowly, if the top 100 euro companies decided to all get off these platforms now it would take months and months of unplanned intense effort and money
Some of the companies I have been working with were already beginning to leave. The realization that cloud pricing will only go up AND being locked into it made them very wary. Some of the planning was already underway, this may only accelerate those plans.
Great for them, there will be a lot that only just got through their first painful migrations
I agree. However, I also have seen that the pain they went through to get to the cloud helped them consolidate and define what they were managing. So the backing out is turning out to be a bit easier than getting in.
You know how much it costs EU taxpayers and customers to pay for the usage and licensing of US tech? Its absolutely absurd and most companies here are fed up with it. They will take any good alternative if its presented to them in a trustworthy manner.
The move to cloud based stuff was mostly vibes and marketing based. On prem has been shown to be cheaper, more reliable, more secure, more flexible.
If its so expensive, why doesn’t European companies make more competitive alternatives?
They are, but have you tried convincing people to use lemmy? Its the same problem.
I’d imagine american cloud services are actually cheaper (because they are so scaled up or whatever), that’s why everyone uses them. So I don’t know where the argument comes from that they are expensive.
These companies dont treat commercial customers any better than normal users. They undergo the same process of:
lower prices to get customers > buy up competition > lobby politcians to protect their grift > raise prices and lower service quality as much as possible without losing the customer
but has it happened yet? if yes, then why are we still using american stuff? i just don’t buy it.
here is an example: uber was very popular in europe, but they started twisting the knife with prices. alternatives popped up, uber is not so popular anymore.
Yes,I work in retail in IT , absolutely no cloud in use here 😉
The world is as big as your eyes can see huh? The only reality that can possible exist is the current one? There are no people other than yourself? How small minded can a person be?
No i am saying there will be companies that go quickly and the large mass that cannot pivot that quickly, we work and talk to other big retailers, cloud is everywhere.
I’m not no sure. 90%+ of these services are commodities and nobody gives a damn who the provider is from a technical perspective. There’s no physical component, so it’s literally a matter of signing a contract, spinning up a server/service, move the data and point everything to the new service.
And yeah, there are technical issues that come up, and nothing is ever that easy. But think about how fast many, many companies were able to sort that kind stuff out when the had to when COVID hit.
And that’s the thing. Cloud service disruption can be an existential crisis, so why would you leave it in the hands of a hostile foreign power?
There are physical data centres that are not trivial to build and run. As I understand it, these tend to be run by the big US tech companies. So if you switch to EU service companies that are still using AWS, Google Cloud or Azure backends, you haven’t really switched away from US tech companies.
They have been preparing? You sure about that?
Yup. Ignore all the buzzwords in this lol https://euro-stack.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/EuroStack_2025.pdf
The EU has been funding and pushing for locally run tech for a while. Matrix is increasingly becoming the base layer for all public sector communications for example. The biggest thing holding back locally developed stuff is just the easy availability of US based solutions. Take that out of the equation and people will just switch to the next best thing, which is usually not much of a downgrade.
Yes
More likely, they have been discussing about maybe starting official talks about what it would take to prepare, hypothetically.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives to most big tech services that could be setup quickly. I personally ditched Amazon (shop and video… AWS doesn’t depend on me personally) Meta and most of Google without sweating too much. Also, while convenient, none of their consumer tech is critical; we’ve lived without any of it until recently enough, so we could probably adapt to do without it for a while if we had to.
The parts I think (and I’m not an expert by any means) where Europe is completely vulnerable are payment/banking systems and advanced electronics.
On electronics, there’s also China, which isn’t a great alternative to depend on… But if Trump decided to weaponize SWIFT or the major credit cards, could he switch most of our banking system off?
SWIFT is actually European - Belgian in fact, it’s just that the US has an outsized influence through the dollar. Visa and Mastercard has several EU alternatives, the only caveat with them is that each of them only works in their respective countries.
That’s a huge caveat though, I hope it will be solved soon.
I think SEPA mitigates that dependency on Visa/MasterCard. Not being an expert I think the main issue is banks resisting change (and most likely getting kickbacks).
Electronics come from China and Taiwan anyway (i’m considering Intel/AMD CPUs as “advanced electronics” and even on that there are EU-babysteps towards advancing RISC-V).