Dutch parliament calls for end to dependence on US software companies
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dutch-parliament-calls-end-reliance-us-software-2025-03-18/
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Uncommon Schoof W
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Translation for the worldwide nation?
Our prime minister schoof is not very popular at the moment and he finally seems to be doing something right 
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This comes from the parlement tho not the government. The government now has to make and present plans to live up the requests of the parlement.
I hope the government takes a proper action.
Man this whole thing makes me wanna consider moving to Netherlands with my friends now, sounds alot of fun here for that [I will have to learn dutch of course :P]
I understand the sentiment behind this but what is the actual alternative? A lack of EU tech giants is not due to the Dutch parliament not passing this law sooner. It’s because Europe lacks a Silicon Valley equivalent tech development industry.
A funny quote from the article:
Bert Hubert, a Dutch technology expert who has advocated for reducing dependency on the U.S., said: "This is only the first step in potentially doing something”
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That’s a feature, not a bug. It hasn’t taken hold of the zeitgeist yet, but people are disenchanted with the tech elite and walled gardens and how exploitative the US has become since Regan and Clinton administrations and beyond.
Being part of two VC companies, the last which had a successful exit, was only due to it being built on open source and open standards therefore gaining public trust.
95% of VCs are rich people gambling a portion of their money away.
SV was cool and innovative until the formulaic business models took over. More and more open source will become desirable as the oligarchy gets cockier. The US market has been on borrowed time for far too long.
Open source is great. But it takes cumulatively trillions of dollars (or Euros) to build the kind of capacity the U.S. tech industry has. Thats what would be needed to actually decouple from U.S. tech. Scale is a requirement.
Speaking of scale, the Netherlands GDP in nominal U.S. dollars is $1.1 Trillion. Just the market cap of Nvidia is $2.8 trillion.
Europes approach to tech has had few successes. ASML is of course an amazing company, but that and SAP are kinda it for Euro tech giants. As much as people seem to hate the industry, without it we couldn’t even be having this discussion here on the internet.
Again I totally understand why Europe would want to move away from US tech giants. I’m horrified by the behavior of my current government as an American. But the reality is it would take decades of sustained investment to pull off.
If you replace scale with efficiency and degrowth then GDP and all that other stuff doesn’t matter. GDP wars and producing more and more and more is a flaw. It will take a lot of work, but we need to address the consumer mindset because there’s no other way.
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Oh you are a de-growther. In that case we will have to end our conversation here as going any further will be a hopeless derail of the thread as our world views are 90 degrees apart.
Hopefully we can have a more productive discussion on another privacy topic in the future. I wish the Netherlands luck on their tech development effort as we need more competition globally in that space.
Even looking at it only from the privacy angle scale is pretty dangerous. Scale is required by and enables surveillance capitalism because that’s how they can track everyone and extract the most value from that data.
On the flip side, communication between different parties requires only that they use the same protocol. There is no need to have a few player of a massive scale, a federation of many smaller players could work as well.
Finally, comparing market cap and GDPs is like comparing apples to oranges.
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Actually, there’s a bunch of European (and rest of the world in general) tech/IT companies with good products and services, innovative stuff and sustainable businesses. They are not worth billions and trillions, but most of them could satisfy users requirements currently serviced by FAANGM and others. And some of those are in PG recommendation lists.
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To be clear, degrowth doesn’t mean primitivism, but yes, I would say what we’re doing now is unsustainable if at the very least, undesirable and that leads me to believe we’re on borrowed time before we change or are forced to.
may I remind about:
There are definetely european companies all round, prominently in France, Germany and Netherlands but there are also products offered by our Favourite country like Switzerland and very few local (I just noticed Viva wallet is greece and sms.to is cypriot, 2 countries together that are close to me) which can definitely help with jurisdiction problem when it comes to say VPSes.
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Bert Hubert, (mentioned in the article) is very busy trying to get this off the ground. It is very interesting to read up on his ideas on how he is trying to get the government to approach this. Especially since this is a project of humongous scale. I highly recommend reading his articles (mostly dutch, but he’s recently been offering english translations as well)
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Yep he is doing a great job lobbying for something good here.
