This is too far from correct for any correction to be anything but a full restatement of the facts. Moving the tech over requires US approval. Listen, the Dutch are not going to risk it. Even if they were, ASML would not risk it because all of their customers wouldn't buy anything from a company that's on the EAR Entity List (which is where they'd end up if they tried this without the US allowing it) without US approval. I don't get why people are saying this stuff. It's like saying "Oh yeah, so you divide by zero and then multiply both sides and ta-da". Like, the whole statement is nonsensical.

To enable the whole thing to work you'd need the US to have shrunk to the equivalent of Canada in influence. I'm not saying that's impossible, but in that scenario, the Dutch might well be trying to keep Russians out of Amsterdam and the Turks out of Germany rather than trying to pull an IP heist on the Americans.

You can buy an e-book on Kindle and Amazon still controls what you do with it, right? ASML's ownership of Cymer is like that, except it's the US instead of Amazon.

Specifically control is related to the Foreign Direct Product Rule, where in which the US claims jurisdiction over any foreign product containing 25% or more of US-origins (Cymer, etc)

> Moving the tech over requires US approval

Of course it does, that's why I wrote about export controls but the context is not current state of the world, but what OP wrote:

> If Uncle Sam pisses off Europa Regina enough, she won't give a damn about licenses.

And in this very different state of the world, export controls are worth the same as paper they were written on.