The EU thread

[Zanza]

The ECB is working on introducing a digital Euro to break the American dominance in payment processing. Let's see if they can make it work. There have been other such attempts from private actors before that failed.

For digital services there are European alternatives in most cases already, but convenience and  network effects lock people into these American services. EU sovereign cloud is a big topic in IT operations these days as resilience means you cannot rely on American hyperscalers. I do not see a cost efficient alternative yet though and the European capital markets are too weak to fund a massive homegrown competition.

[Sheilbh]

For digital services there are European alternatives in most cases already, but convenience and  network effects lock people into these American services. EU sovereign cloud is a big topic in IT operations these days as resilience means you cannot rely on American hyperscalers. I do not see a cost efficient alternative yet though and the European capital markets are too weak to fund a massive homegrown competition.

This is where I run against the AI boom risks because I think there's actually a relatively good case for building publicly owned cloud infrstructure and data centres both for that and sovereign LLMs (I think Switzerland has done this - I suspect not least because of the needs of Swiss banks to, as best they can, steer clear of American intelligence agencies ). If the capital markets aren't there and it's necessary 21st century infrastructure, then the state should build it (and own it).

On payments I'd not really thought it was that American dominated - China, Russia and other BRICS states have built alternatives. But also I actually thought this was a challenge for Trump trying to do a deal with Russia on sanctions is that, say, Swift is Belgian. But also I thought fintech was an area where Europe was pretty competitive the US (with other payment providers like Adyen being very successful) because the US was a bit more old school on payments - still lots of signing and cheques and consumer fees etc.

Certainly my experience in Europe is that we're closer to Asia on payments with lots of methods and relatively smooth tools etc - although to be honest Germany is an exception in my experience (and I know there's a lot of specific payments complications in Germany because I once worked for a payments firm and it was a global project with a team of global lawyers basically being able to do the same thing - plus Germany which was different ).

Edit: Although I would point out that the data sovereignty is not necessarilly better from a privacy perspective. The restrictions and standards that European states apply around personal data to third countries (around rule of law, "essentially equivalent" protections etc) do not apply to European law enforcement or national security agencies - this is a big sticking point in the EU's recently abandoned attempt at updating the E-Privacy Directive. That directive is best known for cookie banners but is actually important in lots of other ways, it's from 2002 and I think the institutions were in trilogue over an E-Privacy Regulation since 2014 and have now just admitted there's no way to a draft.

I don't know that it's true - and it's too good to check - but I knew a Dutch lawyer who mentioned this and then noted that the law enforcement agencies in the Netherlands alone have more active authorised wiretaps than the FBI. So there is a perverse argument that from a privacy perspective a European citizen's data is never more secure than when it's in a third country

[The Minsky Moment]

Is minitel still in operation?