Ok I've wanted to ask this question but can't figure out who to ask it to:
Can America cut off our digital subscriptions? Examples that I care about: Steam... That's all I can think about but I guess streaming services? Maybe Spotify?
Can Trump announce a digital embargo and shut Canadians out of their paid for libraries, since it's all just "renting" and never owning anyways?
That would be economical suicide. Every European company would see this as a threat and move away from American cloud services which is all the infrastructure and servers.
It would be an extreme measure, but I have been warning people and emailling my MP/MPP about this issue.
All it would take for our phones to stop working is Apple and Google invalidating one security certificate. They could release backdroored versions of our phone operating systems (I'm sure somebody would be checking the OS checksums somewhere).
US cloud companies being forced to stop allowing canadian credit cards alone would kill most canadian tech.
Google runs their own cloud hosting so I think they would fight that as it would really hurt their business, so I hope trump does try and piss off more people in power.
Well he has backed down and some stuff recently because I'm assuming he knows he needs the tech bros to stay in power. They let him control the narrative. If he alienated them, that would be alienating his main ally in his re election campaign.
Frankly I would love it if something would hurt the credit card industry. The fact that a transactional service charges a % of the transaction itself is insane.
Spotify sucks ass but it's Swedish. Their servers probably run on AWS but almost everything runs on AWS. And they are listed on an American stock exchange (through Luxembourg, probably for tax evasion reasons).
Yeah I didn't mean to single out Spotify or slander or by implying it was American. I just use so few of those sorts of services and was searching for a second example.
Regardless of whether it's possible, that would be untenable. The USA tech bros would lose a ton of money on a giant customer and the rest of the world would boycott even harder, maybe even block american services. Canada's Shopify alone would be enough of a deterrent.
You think? Canada is less than 1/10th the us population right? Keeping orange man happy and securing more tax breaks and free tax payer money for some "investment" or whatever would probably smooth that out....
Other countries backing us up would be nice though and certainly up those numbers...