This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu.

It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech.

We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, so we're phasing you out. It'll take decades to repair the lost trust in US digital services among the governments of Europe.

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moogly an hour ago | parent [-]

I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).

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bluGill 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.

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petcat 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> take a decade

More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.

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dylan604 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

> More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay

And now you know where that $4.7B fine will be spent. Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?

	▲	9dev 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s? Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations, externalising huge chunks of the cost they generate to the rest of the world. OpenAI decided to run the largest social experiment humanity ever undertook without asking any of us. Microsoft is powering up old nuclear power plants to cover for their AI data center consumption. Apple is manufacturing in foreign countries under awful conditions so every American child can own an iPhone. Big Tech made San Francisco unaffordable even for well-compensated software engineers. Facebook actively made children addicted to push more apps. We all, as a society, have to suffer through the effects of reckless greed from American companies (and we didn't even talk about Big Oil or Big Pharma yet!) Just because nobody bothers to put a price tag on it doesn't mean there isn't one. The EU doesn't fine companies as a way to generate revenue, but because they break local laws and cause damages to someone.

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toyg 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Some are more exposed than others.