Germany opposes French push to tax US big tech in tariff war
Germany opposes French push to tax US big tech in tariff war
In explaining its stance, Germany says the EU had not alternatives to US data centres, cloud, and artificial intelligence services.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/42263710
Some of you may remember Merz‘ passionate speech that opposed the USA in late February and wonder what happened since then. Well, not much happened. Our new chancellor is a Blackrock board member and compulsive liar. His party is deeply corrupt and half of them still dislike him. Do not take any announcement too seriously coming from German diplomats in the next couple years. Our government is a sad joke.
While I have no expectations of progressive policies from Merz, it has to be pointed out that the statement in this article came from the old government.
Our new chancellor is a Blackrock board member
"used to be" not "is"!
Sure, it'd be great if he'd never been on that board but otoh, at least he does not have an outright conflict of interest right now.
The "no-alternative" BS is really tiresome. Of course there are alternatives and plenty of them 🤦♂️
Just a theory: Frankfurt has big AWS data centers, Munich has big Google and MS development locations, I'm sure there's more. You wouldn't want to endanger those locations and jobs, right?
The way i see it, if Amazon want's to close down its data centers, they either have to pay a lot to get the infrastructure out and ship it to a different region. Then a building predestined as a data center is available for a european company. Or they sell the building and infrastructure and a european company can get a fully equipped data center for cheap. Or Amazon just pays proper taxes as it doesn't want to lose access to the EU market.
Yes, you would. Some of the best alternatives are German (like Hetzner) and they don't take off because of US government influence stopping local businesses from accruing profitable contracts both in the private and public sector.
I'd love to see tariffs on US tech Invaders and a moratorium forbidding US companies from buying EU direct competitors for 20y. A cursory look over the meta anti-trust suit should tell you why. Meanwhile MS has killed Nokia, Skype, still owns (and continuously enshitifies) Mojang, just to name a few.
There absolutely are. And many pay out of their nose for crap they don’t need and is overpriced just because everyone is doing it.
The problem is moving to them. The lock in effects of AWS and the like are very real. However it is not going to get easier.
As a german, working in the IT sector for a bit over 25 years I say: The alternatives are there, but the pain isn't hurting enough to finally force us out of the walled gardens.
It took me years to convince the company I work for to ditch big tech, and we are just a small (<50 employees) company.
Can you please explain which tools you have replaced with which alternatives? I would also like to bring this to my company.
Well, its not overly complicated:
On most of the clients we are now running OpenSUSE Leap, but for now we still need to run a few Windows boxes for our ERP system. Luckily, the next update of this system will make it browser based, so the clock for those system is ticking. Another thing that will keep two machines on Windows is the goddamn Datev...
For other tools we are now settled in on this solutions:
- Paperless-NGX as document management solution
- Seafile as cloud storage
- Libreoffice as office suite
- Thunderbird + Firefox as email / browser combo
- Etherpad-lite and Ethercalc for collaborative editing needs
Everything is locally hosted.
I'm rooting for France. You'll never stand up to the USA if you don't stand up to its corporations.
As a german: fuck germany. corrupt pieces of shit.
Over all the complaining going on about the old traffic coalition, I forgot how bad CDU-led governments are :(
The traffic coalition was awesome. It just was thrashed 24/7 in the News, but it was the best government in decades in Germany
Kukies is a Goldman Sachs Men. He and Mr BlackRock Merz are pro Oligarchy and partly copying Trumps style.
Embarrassing
We're all talking big about speaking with one voice when Hungary or Poland go against the grain. How about we set a good example for once? Fucking idiots ...
There's alternatives, and taxes don't prevent use in the first place.