As Washington renews tariff threats, Europe is weighing retaliation. Hitting US services would hurt the US the most, but it comes with high risks. #EuropeNews
Take cellphones for example: since everything is connected nowadays and people virtually need a cellphone to lead a normal life now, everybody’s balls are in the hands of the US: if the regime decides to squeeze and tells Google and Apple to disable Android and iOS in Europe, it will disrupt the affected countries to an unimaginable extent.
Same thing with EMVCo (Visa and Mastercard): if the regime tells them to suspend payment processing in Europe, the European economies will instantly collapse.
And the weird thing is, I’m Mr. Nobody and I’ve seen this coming for decades. Yet all the world’s leaders without exception decided to look the other way and figured the US would always be the nice guys. How short-sighted…
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. –Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada
That’s nice that he knew. But here’s the thing: the quiet but very real strangehold major US monopolies have on everybody’s lives on Earth reached five-bell alarm levels decades ago, yet nobody seems to be even dimly aware of it.
I now live outside the US, and in all the countries I’ve lived in, I kept thinking “If I was this country’s leader, I would be alarmed that a single US tech monopoly can, at the push of a button, at the whim of their CEO or the US administration, effectively stop my country functioning normally.”
Worse, in many countries, the powers-that-be seem really proud to push the internet and promote online services for essential state services, healthcare, taxes and such. Yet all I see is those countries gleefully putting their collective heads into the US lion’s mouth without even realizing it.
Being more independent from US monopolies isn’t just a nice-to-have that has gotten a bit more pressing lately: it’s been an absolute emergency for decades, and nobody gives a flying fuck. This has always been utterly baffling to me.
There exists a legal mechanism to expropriate the US firms from their EU assets. The hypothetical “the regime says” disconnect is nonsense because the infrastructure is WITHIN the EU so legally, there’s nothing Google or Apple could do if they tried to comply and were told “non”.
Trump does not care for laws. If trump wants to do this, then he does it because he sees europe as an enemy. He wont care about legal terms. He cares about power. And unfortunately he has that power.
It’s more complicated than you think.
Take cellphones for example: since everything is connected nowadays and people virtually need a cellphone to lead a normal life now, everybody’s balls are in the hands of the US: if the regime decides to squeeze and tells Google and Apple to disable Android and iOS in Europe, it will disrupt the affected countries to an unimaginable extent.
Same thing with EMVCo (Visa and Mastercard): if the regime tells them to suspend payment processing in Europe, the European economies will instantly collapse.
And the weird thing is, I’m Mr. Nobody and I’ve seen this coming for decades. Yet all the world’s leaders without exception decided to look the other way and figured the US would always be the nice guys. How short-sighted…
I assume it was not short-sightness for many:
That’s nice that he knew. But here’s the thing: the quiet but very real strangehold major US monopolies have on everybody’s lives on Earth reached five-bell alarm levels decades ago, yet nobody seems to be even dimly aware of it.
I now live outside the US, and in all the countries I’ve lived in, I kept thinking “If I was this country’s leader, I would be alarmed that a single US tech monopoly can, at the push of a button, at the whim of their CEO or the US administration, effectively stop my country functioning normally.”
Worse, in many countries, the powers-that-be seem really proud to push the internet and promote online services for essential state services, healthcare, taxes and such. Yet all I see is those countries gleefully putting their collective heads into the US lion’s mouth without even realizing it.
Being more independent from US monopolies isn’t just a nice-to-have that has gotten a bit more pressing lately: it’s been an absolute emergency for decades, and nobody gives a flying fuck. This has always been utterly baffling to me.
There exists a legal mechanism to expropriate the US firms from their EU assets. The hypothetical “the regime says” disconnect is nonsense because the infrastructure is WITHIN the EU so legally, there’s nothing Google or Apple could do if they tried to comply and were told “non”.
Trump does not care for laws. If trump wants to do this, then he does it because he sees europe as an enemy. He wont care about legal terms. He cares about power. And unfortunately he has that power.