Countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on U.S. technology firms.
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I’m playing my part… Undoing a large part of a SaaS platform I’ve been building, to detangle it from AWS and reimplement for Scale way/UpCloud. This is a significant personal cost, but I can’t live with myself giving dollars to both Bezos AND a fascist regime every month. Not to mention the direct risk of the US fucking with my business down the track for any old batshit reason. Account closed.
It starts somewhere, and it’s people leaving one by one. Good onya putting your money where your mouth is.
Obviously because once that country collapses or becomes a pariah state and starts fooling with the data for nefarious purposes, all goes almost anything the rest of the world relies on, including website hosting services. So, yeah, decentralization is necessary.
If most US websites are garbage this can’t happen soon enough. You can’t even trust basic search anymore thanks to AI bs. People complain about nobody reading articles when they are ad-filled crap usually written by AI, I’d rather spend my time playing video games.
I was hoping for that for a long time, so… thanks Donald I guess? What a rube.
He has made China, Canada and Europe greater.
He only cares about himself and the money he got from them. The better question is why all those tech billionaires supported him.
because once you’ve reached end-state capitalism, the only realistic way to make sure line continues to go up is either ratfucking public funds or to trigger a crash/credit crunch and by up discounted distressed assets
I was reading an opinion piece about this sort of thing earlier today, “Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam’s clouds and go EU-native”. It opens by saying:
I’m an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn’t trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money.
The US held a unique privilege of being the world’s tech leader, their IT buddy.
Now that we’ve violated everyone’s trust, we will likely never get that position back.
Ding ding ding
And that IS a good thing. It’s great that it happened, I just wish it had happened 2 decades ago and before IT companies yeeted the fworld off a cliff into hell
I have seen a lot of arguments for this being “a good thing“, that I do not see that from you. Nor am I, overall, convinced of that attitude.
This isn’t even a matter of national pride… But everything was rolling, pretty goddamn great until just very recently when Trump decided to fuck it all up because he wanted to be the center of everyone’s attention. This needs to end.
But everything was rolling, pretty goddamn great until…
I beg to disagree there. Each year Big Tech has become more and more aggressive in taking control from us, the consumer. Microsoft with the requirements of TPM in order to install windows 11. Google with they’re delaying open source releases of android, preventing apps from being installed unless it’s non-cfw. All tech companies shoveling AI everywhere. John Deere with their vendor lock-in hardware.
This needed to stop and these companies need to be reminded that “the consumer owns the hardware and that includes functional software (that does not change without the users consent)”.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Government failed it’s people in defending consumer rights and tbh, the EU hasn’t really done a stellar job either. However, this is certainly the" kick in pants" the EU needs (hopefully) to start to create competition against U. S. Big Tech… and the EU certainly understands that it needs to protect these small EU start-ups as they try to find their footing.
So, I hope this results in the EU creating laws to “level the playing field”. Which, I hope, actually spurs innovate and Open Standards (something Big Tech has been working hard on suppressing), which will be good for all of us (regardless, if you’re in the EU, U.S., and beyond).
You’ll notice there is a lot of “hope” in these sentences. I am skeptical, but I can see how this could be “a good thing”.
I mean, privacy had been getting worse for decades before Trump got in office. Mainstream tech has been on a steady decline for years, if not longer, and the privacy invasions being baked into most software have always been horrifying.
Was it all functional? Yeah. Were there a lot of horrifying things under the hood? Also yeah.
As they say: it takes decades to grow a forest, but only one match to burn it down.
There are those who learn from the past mistakes of themselves and others…
and there are those who don’t…
I quote from the good book of YG:
Tbf USA weren’t having their own Hitler until now. Give em a chance
That’s alarmism.
The US held a unique privilege of being the world’s cloud host, but that’s thankfully only a decade or so of bullshit.
And it’s good when trust gets broken in things where trust is wrong.
And sorry, I still see most big things in tech centered around USA. That won’t go away until some jurisdiction becomes safer. Perhaps Brazil stands a chance eventually, LOL.
This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about
You say “we violated”, but its literally one person called Trump.
I think once he is out of office, the western world can work together again. Its just so much to gain from that. The mentality of Trump is from Russia or North Korea.
All his decisions can be reversed by the next president.
2/3 of the voting population didn’t vote against him, btw
doesn’t really seem like “literally one person”
All his decisions can be reversed by the next president.
And then reversed by the next next president. Do you think this kind of trust violation blows over just like that?
The orange Cheeto threatened to annex a fucking European country. And nobody in the US told him otherwise. The Democrats seem to be too busy eating popcorn and waiting for elections.
Speaking as a canadian, I do believe our leaders will attempt to work with any new administration the US votes in. We are too inter-linked to not try. BUT, I think recent events have shown not just our government, but our general populace that we cannot rely on the USA. I don’t think everything will just “go back to normal” like you hope.
American companies have shown that they will happily bend the knee and lick the boots of fascist dictators for money. No one should trust them ever again.
There’s a bit of a problem with that: every single thing Trump has promised has turned out to be a lie. A very obvious lie that has costed this entire country more than we could possibly imagine.
So… How do you square that with what Trump promised before now?
The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed. At some point, companies and governments decided to cramntheir entire critical IT infrastructure into monolithic services. In this case it was the US, but it could have been anyone anywhere. No matter who, it was a bad practice and everyone is now realizing why.
This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.
The internet should have been nationalized under the purview of national postal services globally with private options through telecoms.
Maybe it’s not too late?
The Internet is still distributed, it’s the ownership (and thus also the command and control) that is super inbred. Cloudflare, Google, Aws, they all have hardware distributed in every city.
Correct. And everyone needs to remember the actual problem, not the symptom. Its like leaving one social media platform for another then when it too goes to crap complaining. Oh how can this happen again!?
This is definitely a specific problem with the US too.
My point is that had companies and governments no opted to put all their eggs in one basket, it wouldn’t have mattered as much whether the US morphed into a fascist hellscape or not.
The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed.
The textbook explainer for the existence of the internet was (at least) two fold:
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Provide a high speed communication between research universities for conveying large amounts of digital data
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Devise a system of redundant communication such that any major node going offline would not cripple the international data infrastructure (specifically with an eye towards major natural disasters or nuclear wars).
But the evolution of the system, from a boutique international data exchange for government enterprises to a business-heavy commercial data system to a retail facing SaaS model degraded both original goals.
Data is no longer supposed to be public and freely traded. It is jealously guarded as a commodity controlled by a handful of privatized tech giants. And due to the continuous, voracious digital harvesting performed by these tech giants, more and more of the information needs to be siloed, encrypted, and otherwise shielded. This clogs the vast redundant network with overlarge choke-points designed to filter out unwanted traffic and shield the identity/data of its users.
This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.
The stupidity is a directly result of how the US private sector repurposed tools layout out by the international public sector. Unregulated solicitations and chronic system intrusions by malicious actors aimed at a naive retail user base, combined with the gluttonous privatization of research data, has inverted the core function of the network.
And because of the Tragedy of the Commons, there is no single actor who can fix the problem through their own virtue. You can’t unfuck this chicken with a Meshnet or through voluntary individualistic commitments to ideological principles unbound from the central rules of network communication.
You need the heavy hand of national scale regulators and industry scale redevelopment to re-engineer how the root layers of the internet function if you want to get back to its original design.
Or… if we’re moving in the direction it seems that we’re moving… we’re going to end up with a wholly proprietary loose confederation of Walled Gardens that look more and more like the Anarcho-Capitalist model of civil government (ie, The Network State).
You can’t unfuck this chicken.
100% I am definitely not offering an easy fix, and I hope my comment didn’t read that way. This chicken is…
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I ended five subscriptions to US tech services over the weekend, and I’m working steadily down my list.
So are you moving to other subscriptions, based in another country, that are also at the whim of other corporations?
I think it’s time more people learn how to self-host what’s important to them. At least make sure to keep multiple backups of all of your media.
The problem isn’t necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there’s an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there’s an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.
Putting fun services behind the wall of ‘you must be this technically competent to participate’ isn’t going to fix the broken system.
Could be a great time for small services and modular subscriptions (e.g. block stores or MTAs). I wouldn’t trust many small VPS’ to host an organisation, but it is fine for me personally.
Hopefully enough stable income exists to grow a cottage industry of small infra and protocols lower the barrier to entry/migration.
I would pay for access to an artisanal data center of the finest organic hosts, tenderly shepherded by third generation sysadmins.
I agree in principle. I know how to self-host, and I do self-host some things, but I can’t always afford the upfront investment (especially with today’s hardware costs) and I don’t always have time to keep up with the administration (because I’m a wage slave) so I end up renting some of it. I’m not the only one in this position.
I think there’s a place for rented tech services just as there’s a place for rented housing, but the problem in both cases is regulatory capture by landlords that mean we get stuck renting forever from exploiters. (And with tech there’s the surveillance too, so they’re the landlord that puts a secret camera in your bedroom.) So anyway, I’m trying to at least pick my tech landlords more carefully until I can afford a better solution, and as far as possible I try to make sure my stuff is encrypted before they see it.
Even Americans are trying to bail from a lot of this crap, not just for political reasons but because its shit.
But Tech companies gave Trump BILLIONS of Dollars! HOW could he Lose them SO Many Customers?
Rightly so, US tech is a dumpster fire with 24/7 surveillance.
More worried the US is spying on me than China at this point.
That’s rational. [not sarcasm]
I finally moved my personal dev/blog server to Hetzner and today was the first time in a while that the AWS bill was smaller than what it normally was (I did get rid of everything - EC2, S3 - except for domain registrations since I didn’t want to renew ones that just got renewed yet). Obviously I was still just paying for half the month so next month should be even smaller.
