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'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'
(www.tilburguniversity.edu)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
564 points (98.0% liked)
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Open source and socialised software across the EU please, not predatory big tech companies.
what does "socialised software" mean?
Owned and operated by community at large, with the goal of bringing value for people, not for bringing people's money to shareholders
ok, so this is about how you run software, i.e. who owns the server hardware, while free software is about how software is developed, right?
I'm not sure where you're pulling it all from, I suspect you have some kind of supposed gotcha in mind
no i'm just trying to clarify as i've never encountered the term before
I don't think it's a term, really, more of broad idea applied to this topic
The EU should sponsor various projects or provide tax cuts to companies that contribute labor to projects. They don't have to take over the projects, just help them prosper for everyone.
How will it work ? If there is no profit because of open source and socialised software. Then how will companies hire people. Already there are many open source softwares on the market like linus. Open source will not become big like USA silicon valley.
We already have a gigantic ecosystem of libre solutions to many problems, from entire operating systems to document standards to media codecs to encryption libraries. Open source already won, there's nothing to be proven.
Nothing stops a government, much less a group as powerful as the EU block, to fund libre technology. It's an investment into a safer, more controllable and fair digital ecosystem, that will pay dividends when this same government isn't stuck paying an American company or having data stolen. There's no need for a profit.
Even then, you absolutely can turn a profit with libre software, especially if you have a massive political interest working against your competitors.
What if the government tells a social media site they have to ban people from criticizing them or they'll lose funding?
Open source sure, that's fine. But someone's gotta pay for running the servers and if the government can cut that funding they have influence over it. That's a level of government control over the media that's a little concerning.
Better to have the the government make regulations requiring companies to make it easy to switch to another company. Like changing to another phone company, you can keep the same number (because of regulations) so people can still call you without even knowing you changed companies even if they have a phone from a different manufacturer using a different phone company.
You can do the same with things like social media, just need to have regulations requiring protocols to allow people to change services easily and connect with other services so there's not a network effect making people stay on shit services because it's what all their friends use. People should own their data, own their contacts and companies should compete by providing better services rather than by making it difficult to leave the services they're currently on.
Handing over your date to the government isn't a better solution than handing it over to a private company. The real solution is to ensure people own their data.
Germany and UK have a solution for this problem that works quite well for decades. The organisation that distributes the funds for media is not a part of government and does not takes direct orders, but operates on a strict set of rules that are mutually agreed upon, both by the government and by the media holdings. The funds come from the people who are paying small summ every month. Neither the government nor the corporations can just cut the funds if they don't like it.
Yeah I know about TV licenses, but aren't they incredibly unpopular? And a government could eliminate them and replace them with subsidies (which gives them influence) and many voters might agree with that given the unpopularity of TV licenses.
They are as unpopular as any other taxes, people don't like to give their money away, they'd much prefer to never do it.
And yes, populistic enough government can eliminate whatever public good exists, but you need to be real donald trump about it.
Newspapers predate the internet I've heard, and even European newspapers have online presence now. Why would any of that get worse with a more sovereign EU?
If you're talking social media, then more control is required. This is pretty much the only reason the topic is even brought up at all. I'd much rather have our courts control speech than Nazis.
It's not about a sovereign EU, it's about government controlling the media. There is too much temptation for a politician to use that control to make the media say only good things about them and negative things about the opposition. See Russia for an example of how bad that can get.
Are all of the newspapers controlled by the EU? Do you think it would be better if they were.
Anyway, yeah I'm talking about social media. The primary problem of social media is that it's an oligopoly. Create regulation so people can have choice without being cut of from their friends that are on a shitty platform and people will leave to be on better platforms and companies will have to compete to provide a better product.
Very few people actually like Facebook and Twitter, they just can't leave because they wouldn't be able to communicate with their friends and family if they did. And their friends and family can't leave for the same reason. What if you could go to a Friendica site and still be able to chat with your friends that are still on Facebook and they could see your posts you make and vice versa? How many people would stay on Facebook if there was no longer a barrier to leaving? How many people would put up with Elon Musk's antics on twitter if they could leave and still communicate with the people they like that are still on Twitter?
If there was no major barrier to leaving these sites, they'd have to compete to provide quality moderation, make it easy to find the things you like, improve algorithms so they aren't shoving shit you don't care about into your face, etc. Having a single government entity doing this wouldn't provide this and the site would probably just be constant bickering about what the government should and should not allow on social media.
One of old lines against left is that it's just people who want free stuff.
Left ideologies are not, in fact, about getting more free stuff (and the "bread and circuses" thing originates earlier than right or left liberalism, and is used just as well by right factions, and Rome is generally loved by the right more than by the left, making a funny comparison to Sparta which is more loved by the left, while Athens is again loved more by the right).
Still, see, in a situation where European nations are gradually becoming less and less democratic, without significant resistance utilizing modern technologies for building a dystopia worse than cyberpunk books promised, and the questions in computing revolve around dependence on governments and corporations in all things done with computers, - in this situation you write about "open source and socialized".
Not about using those same technologies for building a direct democracy before "elected representatives" use them to make us serfs or surplus biomass. Not about using them to track all state officials' locations and their finances (if they don't want that, they can pick another job). Not about revision of patent systems benefiting corporations and in practice making any truly free system of communication on the Internet dubiously legal.
No, about "open source" - which is the "circuses" here, for things to be cool and interoperable, and about "socialized" - which is the "bread" here.