Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I would think the outrageous antics with the Chinese governmnt directly attacking Github and using attacks with extremely wide reaching effects (using Baidu analytics links as a javascript injection attack) would uh... be more likely to damage access to Github.

But ignoring that, it seems to me like increasingly we're wanting distributed (dare I even say: federated) code forges even outside of China as people realize quite how overly and dangerously centralized their infrastructure and company are over Github.



No love (or hate) for China or the US; but from a European perspective it does shock me how much we rely on the USA.

As a bit of a tangent, we recently learned that we couldn't provide service to people living in Crimea, because google cloud block them, because google cloud is beholden to US regulators.

Now, the EU doesn't have any sanctions on Crimea itself (because that would legitimise the annexation), but they have sanctions against Russia instead.

So, we're defacto instituting the will of the US by choosing a US operator- and I think this is true of basically everything we use today. I can't think of a single tech company outside of Spotify that is not owned by the US which is popular in Europe.

Not only do we not "own our data" our digital economy is entirely dependent on the US not being malicious.


Well, what in your mind might be the reasons people of talent leave Europe to come to the US to start their tech empires


Probably because US companies buy European ones.

See Skype, Nokia, Shazam.

China’s doing it too. They bought ARM shortly after Brexit.

I don’t doubt that there is a migratory factor, though I don’t believe it’s primarily due to salary or other compensation as I assume you’re inferring- a cornucopia of tech giants is going to attract talent from the world over.

So a consequence of centralisation is more centralisation.


I thought SoftBank is Japanese, not Chinese? SoftBank bought ARM, not a Chinese company, otherwise it would be a bit weird for ARM (assuming they're Chinese now) to cut ties with Huewai.


Correct.


Okay well why isn’t there a European equivalent to AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure


Yep, much like Japan, Europe somewhat rested on its laurels in the tech boom...

I've heard various explanations - fragmented markets/culture means it's harder to scale.

There's less appetite/precedence for undermining regulation (ask for forgiveness rather than for permission)

Lagging perception towards "IT" sector


SAP is popular in Europe and is not owned by the US.


Fair point, make that two. :)


I remember that incident.

Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9275771


There are three distributed approaches mentioned here https://github.com/axic/mango/issues/6




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: