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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   2707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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European tech, American tech, and regulation

tl;dr: what do you think about 1) European alternatives to American tech, and 2) European and American tech regulations?

Background

  1. Europeans (citizens, businesses, and governments) heavily rely on American tech. Europe has alternatives in most categories (e.g. phone, CDN) but most have less adoption.
  2. The US has regulations. The EU and its nations have different regulations, notably the Digital Serivces Act and Digital Markets Act. Occasionally a big company gets fined and told to change; they usually appeal, then sometimes still don't pay or change anything. The EU and its nations are widely regarded as having way more, stricter regulations and fines.

Recent events

Online ideas and my opinions

More radical

  • "The EU should ban and block US tech companies": on (pro tech freedom) Hacker News of all sites, which suprised me. Effectively a Great Firewall for the EU. I strongly disagree. More broadly, I believe people should have the freedom to stream propaganda from any nation they want: Russia, China, even Iran. I have no issue with governments directing citizens to their own propaganda and discouraging other sources, even preventing people who are so dumb they may actually believe whatever e.g. the Iran regime says. But this leads to the proposal's more significant, practical issue: way too many Europeans use American tech, and they aren't switching despite seemingly having some national pride and US dislike. European governments internally use Office and other American tools. It's near-term infeasible.
  • "Europe should stop protecting US Intellectual Property, from Cory Doctorow: while I'd love to see the end of IP, like I'd love to see the end of labor, this is also near-term infeasible, so I also strongly disagree. If a European nation "just stops" enforcing the DMCA, tech companies can "just stop" operating there, and remember that practically all of Europe still relies on them. Cory Doctorow has lots of interesting arguments, and I really admire and support his crusade against IP and enshittification, but his views are very extreme and some of his ideas go too far.
    • What I think European nations should do in the near term is provide leniencey for and encourage companies to not over-enforce IP laws; for example, by supporting companies who get sued for not taking down content from a flawed DMCA claim (DMCA takedowns are heavily abused). Likewise, they should defend companies who are wrongly sued for copyright/patent infringement, and ensure, however strictly IP is enforced, it's equally strict on small and big companies.
    • I'd still like to see the end of IP, but it must be done reasonably and with an alternative for deserving IP owners (particularly artists who need to make a living, and not platform owners who restrict users' content). For example, LLMs sidestep existing IP: they can scrape any website, build any app from a description, and generate copyrighted characters for personal use. Maybe European (and American) nations can accept AI companies training on copyrighted data in exchange for keeping this.

Less radical

  • "European nations and/or the EU should encourage and fund European alternatives": strongly agree. In general, I want to see more variety and innovation. In particular, I think everyone using locked-down platforms (social medias, phones, mail, etc.) is really bad, and the way out is not regulation (though some is important/useful) but competition, so companies are pressured to open their platforms or at least stop degrading them.
    • Notably, I don't actually care whether the alternative platforms are European.
    • Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic that governments will help here. And I myself avoid mainstream social media, but still use an iPhone and Mac because they're better.
    • On Mistral. AI is particularly important, so Europe will be at a big disadvantage if they don't get competitive AI and America restricts its own. Mistral makes local models (as opposed to locked-down cloud ones), so I want them to succeed. However, even with full EU backing, they'd be outcompeted by OpenAI and Anthropic, who can release local models themselves, making all their effort and work seem wasted. Except I don't think it would actually be a waste, like how acquiring weapons isn't a waste, when the deterrence from their existense makes them unnecessary.
  • "European nations should relax (tech and general employee) regulations to encourage innovation": agree, there are way too many. But I don't think they should relax them as far as the US. I don't know where to draw the line, and I don't have the motivation or discipline to understand existing regulations (not even getting into how they're applied in practice).

Vaguely, I believe American tech companies should be regulated more, since they seem to be damaging society and have effective monopolies due to network effects. And more importantly I want to see more tech innovation, which I think is hurt by less competition. But I don't exactly know how.

I generally think America and Europe should work together, but here, I think different regulatory frameworks and competing tech services is good.

Cory Doctorow has lots of interesting arguments, and I really admire and support his crusade against IP and enshittification, but his views are very extreme and some of his ideas go too far.

I'd give a different issue: regardless of how good or bad his ideas are, they're clearly unrelated to the actual goals he's claiming to champion. Twitter and YouTube and Discord and almost every company of relevance here are not market leaders due to the strength of their intellectual property; it's trivial to implement one-off examples of their functionality, and building a decent many-to-many implementation is a small business, not a large one. Their strengths come from their scaling capabilities and, to a far greater extent, the absolutely massive network advantages. The division from LibreOffice or GIMP to MSOffice and Photoshop isn't a massive, deep moat of algorithmic design or CPU optimizations, but a shallow one of user interface and user training. Individual people can build cell phones. It's just only a rounding error of people wants that done, to fund it, or to use it once manufactured.

It might be more relevant for specialized software (operating systems, CAD work, simulation software), but notably none of these spaces are things Doctorow focuses on. He talks about iOS in the sense of jailbreaking iPhones, a matter where legal constraints have never been the primary limit. He never mentions Linux, and only mentions Microsoft to say they "bricked" the International Criminal Court's outlook server due to sanctions (real world: cut access to Karim Khan's e-mail account). The ICC's moving to openDesk (also not mentioned, wouldn't have been my first choice)... and having it run by B1 Systems GmbH, a contractor in Germany. A quick google estimates <150 IT staff; having tried OpenDesk, I'd expect <20 full-time staff equivalent for the ICC, mostly tech support.

That is not a moonshot. It's definitely not the moonshot Doctorow's theory would need.

The only place they might be relevant is AI models (hmmm), and then only to the point where there are closed-source, high-capability models that could be cloned and run from EU services. That's not coherent to Doctorow's whole view - "Because even though the AI can't do the 's job, an AI salesman can convince the 's boss to fire them and replace them with an AI that can't do their job", that's the text - but he's not pretending to be coherent so much as tell his readers what he needs to get his goals, so whatever.

((Presumably they only ignore the copyright requests Doctorow dislikes, not artist and writer intellectual property, but to be fair, it's not like anyone without a hundred million dollar business can get an inter_state_ copyright lawsuit, nevermind an international one.))

How's that supposed to work? Okay, the model leaks, quickly. That I can buy, I've been a proponent of the theory that 'the leak always gets through' even if it hasn't always applied in practice. The EU companies are able to clone the graphics cards or ASICs, probably. Can they make them? The current best fab is 18nm, and while they're planning to build a 2nm-ish plant, the current timeline is 2030 and also kinda a joke. Okay, well, over long enough the hardware and training costs get amortized, it's the landscape and inference cost. Is EU power going to be cheap? Regulatory compliance? Legal overhead?

What's the business plan, here? Be annoying?

Mistral makes local models (as opposed to locked-down cloud ones), so I want them to succeed. However, even with full EU backing, they'd be outcompeted by OpenAI and Anthropic, who can release local models themselves, making all their effort and work seem wasted

Mistral's been suffering for a while. It had some sizable influence in low-parameter models a year ago - and to an extent, still has: Cydonia is a Mistral-3.1-24B-derived model that's popular for roleplay, even if it introduces a lot of world consistency issues as context scale - but it's ranged from middling to actively bad since.

One complication here is that there are clear spaces that OpenAI and Anthropic are unlikely to want to explore, that would leave a niche for not-quite-frontier models that don't excel at things like coding but do focus well on other career spaces ... but that is likely to be more regulated in the EU, in ways that impact the ability of providers to provide decent models. And that's particularly overt for Mistral: one of the suspected causes for (some of the many) problems in Mistral 4 was the repeated 'safety' failures in Mistral3 variants. Ideally, they'd be able to avoid regulatory failures without harming core capabilities, but so far the degree models seem to suffer from overcorrection correlates pretty heavily with regulatory exposure.

(Caveat: they could have also just found some local minima. Things are moving so fast in these spaces that they could well turn around quick.)

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