EU considers tariffs on digital services Big Tech
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I think you're forgetting the power of consumers. At work you might not be able to replace Photoshop or Microsoft but at home you certainly can. The more people that become familiar with alternative software the more likely professionally environments are to adopt it.
Why would a company want to pay Adobe or Microsoft if their employees are more adept with free alternatives? Especially if those alternatives gain feature parity with the paid services while the paid services lock parts behind paywalls and subscriptions.
Don't let perfect get in the way of good!
Adobe has a Print Production feature where you can run a Preflight Analysis that identifies all the elements in the PDF. I haven't been able to find a similar feature elsewhere. I'd love to get off Adobe, but that one feature is pretty critical for my workflow.
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Can you not just make sure YouTube gets none of your money by using a front end that strips out all ads and sponsored segments? My kids watch YouTube but they’ve never seen an ad.
Google's been attacking those lately, mostly to success (Piped and Invidious are effectively dead, ViewTube is also dead, and FreeTube's a target now).
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Notice or not any infrastructure change is brutal - even if you go like for like.
I'm not saying I'm against the idea: I loathe all the centralization and robber barons running around in this era. But switches like these rarely go as planned. If haste is required even less so.
Oh I get it. We made the jump from Google Cloud to AWS, and I'm sure there are companies that are even more vendor locked. But a good example of what people can do when they don't have a choice is the new PCI 4.0 roll out that has cost companies millions they wouldn't spend unless made to do so. Will it be a mountain to climb and cost a ton, yeah, but change in the right direction isn't always easy.
I'm with you, it will be hard, and they need a good system for extensions and the like, with a reasonable time line. But this is good change IMO, even if it's painful.
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That is pretty much how the VMware situation shook out.
Yeah, we've got on-prem cloud hosting at a university, and moving away from VMware is an ongoing process. Still. Two, three years after the writing was on the wall. They'd rather pay the Danegeld.
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The purpose of tariffs (in a normal world) is to make it harder for domestic entities to buy international goods. Typically, this will spur growth of a particular sector of industry within a country over time.
The way Trump is using them as a battering ram in an attempt to punish other countries, rather than incentivize steady growth, is why the US market is tanking and likely headed to another recession (or worse).
By retaliating in kind, the EU will be incentivizing their citizens and companies not to buy from the US. This will hurt companies that are based in the US, like Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc., further sending the US economy into freefall and bolstering the European economy, since they aren't trying to punish every single trade partner in existence.
There may be other ways they try to move money around to avoid the tariffs, but governments are aware of how big businesses operate and often try to close those kinds of loopholes. Since this has become a global political issue, I would imagine they'll be keeping a more watchful eye than normal on things.
It becomes very hard to tariff intangible services like those provided by tech, or financial securities.
If the datacenter is in the EU and that EU data center is servicing EU does it get tariffed? I think they should just do shit like requiring certain infrastructure and job investments in the EU or pay higher tax rates on revenue.
Current US tax policy, GILTI and FDII already kinda incentivize offshoring for multinational companies based in the US. Companies that deal largely in intangible good are already outsourcing jobs. EU forcing them to speed up this process puts both Trump and the multinational companies in a double bind.
Neither can really make a move in their best interest without pissing the other off.
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It's not about the providers, it's about the move. Companies will need to migrate their infrastructure to another platform which (let's be honest) likely will not have the bandwidth / rack space / hardware to support the influx of users. Companies will self host? Okay sure: time to spin up internal clusters, train employees, provision additional bandwidth / connections. And naturally - this will all go off without a hitch. Like flipping a switch.
And we need to remember that many of these services rely on each other so one goes down: they take each other out.
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"I really struggle trying to understand the addiction", was my original statement. The two last words are important.
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Can you not just make sure YouTube gets none of your money by using a front end that strips out all ads and sponsored segments? My kids watch YouTube but they’ve never seen an ad.
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Sony shipped literal rootkits with their software years ago.
Jeez, guys... You're a paleontologist or what? That happened centuries ago.
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How about not letting Google have exclusive rights to the drivers for all the phone hardware? I would like to be able to install Linux on any phone I buy. I don't want Google monopolizing phone operating systems. #FOSS #Linux #FuckGoogle #Monopoly #deGoogle
Agree 100%
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Why not force them to unlock root from the start?
Yes, of course, but I think, like I wrote it, it is more likely to happen in reality
but of course, I would prefer from the start as wellLike just hide it in developer settings which as well are hidden. No noob should accidentally go there, but a malicious being may lead a noob there…
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How about not letting Google have exclusive rights to the drivers for all the phone hardware? I would like to be able to install Linux on any phone I buy. I don't want Google monopolizing phone operating systems. #FOSS #Linux #FuckGoogle #Monopoly #deGoogle
How about not letting Google have exclusive rights to the drivers for all the phone hardware?
What exactly do you mean by that? Google is one of the few companies that let you easily unlock their phones so you can do whatever you want with them.
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But you love teams right?! (get the gas can - I'll get the matches)
There is no feature that is simpler than gsuite. So much duplication and needless services and apps.
I hate google and microsoft for making me appreciate their product.
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How about not letting Google have exclusive rights to the drivers for all the phone hardware?
What exactly do you mean by that? Google is one of the few companies that let you easily unlock their phones so you can do whatever you want with them.
Unlock so you can use whatever phone service provider you want but Google controls the Android operating system. If you don't want Android on your phone and would rather use Linux or another FOSS operating system, it's very difficult, because Google doesn't give up control of the drivers for a lot of phones. If you just want to remove Google apps from a phone that comes with Android, you have to jailbreak it which voids the warranty and jailbreaking can't be done to every phone.
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The real money is in AWS, azure,GCP. No one cares about your iPad. Tariff the big 3 hosting providers and see how quickly shit hits the fan.
Bonus: It might make some companies move to non-US hosters, making their data way safer.
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Would probably end the Internet faster than China can cut intercontinental cables. I'm here for it but the fallout would be positively insane.
Of course it would not.
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Don’t just legalise jailbreak (which was never illegal anyway
), but force device manufacturers to unlock root as soon as they end support for the device.Then they will offer shit support to avoid doing so. Simpler and safer to just make unlocking legit from the start.
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Unlock so you can use whatever phone service provider you want but Google controls the Android operating system. If you don't want Android on your phone and would rather use Linux or another FOSS operating system, it's very difficult, because Google doesn't give up control of the drivers for a lot of phones. If you just want to remove Google apps from a phone that comes with Android, you have to jailbreak it which voids the warranty and jailbreaking can't be done to every phone.
No, unlock as in: You can install whatever operating system you want. No need for "jailbreaking" on Google phones. They officially support unlocking the bootloader (and re-locking it later as well!). There are many things not to like about Google, but how they handle their phones when it comes to openness is certainly not one of them. Pretty much all other phone vendors are much worse than that (except for maybe a few small ones like Fairphone).
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