What EU governments are doing goes a lot further than mere lackluster gpdr and other privacy law enforcement. They are forcing citizens to give their private information to US firms, nothing less.

> IMHO it requires conscious choices by European citizens to choose more carefully which online services they dedicate their time and money to. Or expect unintended consequences.

You mean, European citizens "need to" expect to, and pay for, basic internet services like search, mail, ... and, let's be honest, pay for worse services than are available free.

Imho proton is about the best available, it's just mail and office, and it's 5 euros per month for just mail and basic office, essentially Google's free tier.

Obviously, this will never happen. So either the government makes such services, and makes them well enough to seriously compete or implements a "great firewall of Europe" Chinese/Russian style and forces the change.

Instead, governments are introducing dependency after dependency on FANG companies. Is there any place left in the EU where you can even do your taxes without identifying through Google/Android or Apple/IOS on Chinese made hardware? Any at all? How about all of Europe? There was a row in the Netherlands about efforts to force homeless people to pay for cell phones ... and the government is refusing to back down. It's just incredible.

Even if the EU kicked out the FANGs with a "great firewall of EU", to force people to pay, it would decimate the gig economy and show that EU unemployment, especially among young people, is really double or perhaps even more the figure it appears to be. Plus I don't think it would work. Too many people would choose to simply stop interacting with the government under such a situation. And while the government can deal with 1 or 1000 people not doing their taxes, they cannot hope to deal with 10% not doing their taxes.

The only solution is that all European governments force themselves to ONLY work through "sovereign" channels not dependent on American companies. Right now they are all doing the opposite, and in fact not just encouraging EU citizens to give their information to FANGs, but actively forcing them to do so.

And you're right. This can only end in disaster. But it's slightly cheaper now. And the disaster is tomorrow.

Didn't Charlie Munger say "you young people ... tomorrow's politicians will make you wish Trump had eternal life"? If it's not Trump, sooner or later someone will blow up relations with the EU, and even within the EU, on either side.

You've said a lot so excuse myself if I don't address all your points or address them enough.

>proton

Yes, probably 'good enough' at the scale they have as an alternative.

>Obviously, this will never happen.

Hard sell for sure vs the status quo.

>Obviously, this will never happen. So either the government makes such services, and makes them well enough to seriously compete or implements a "great firewall of Europe" Chinese/Russian style and forces the change.

Consumer change of habits but obviously having alternatives count.

>Is there any place left in the EU

Is definitely a problem wrt dependency. Also outages from Cloudflare etc suggest further dependency and its all about convenience.

>The only solution is that all European governments force themselves to ONLY work through "sovereign" channels not dependent on American companies.

They don't. The US companies have gradually pushed the envelope and unfortunately EU reaction has resulted in time wasting cookie modals etc for front end users. There is surely a measure of lost EU business opportunity vs what is actually happening, a wholesale copyright and privacy override. Google was bad enough before AI but now it's just wholesale stealing of everyone's everything.

> either the government makes such services, and makes them well enough to seriously compete

Europeans have already made open source versions of quite a few things as side projects without any funding. The issue is a lack of transparency (by American standards) that hides just how hideously incompetent and outrageous (even by American standards) member state governments are. (PACER is a big reason how Americans know what Europeans are ignorant about.) I do believe an EU member state could otherwise create any service that American companies already proved are desirable, make it free for nationals and residents and require payment for others, and use EUDI as the login and verification, probably for quite cheap.

Same for age verification. Their official shitty "open source" reference app uses Google/Apple device attestation. Laughable situation with anything to do with tech these days.

wow, you all are having some crazy nationalistic thing going on it seems.

best of luck