Google has criticized the European Union’s intentions to achieve digital sovereignty through open-source software. The company warned that Brussels’ policies aimed at reducing dependence on American tech companies could harm competitiveness. According to Google, the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs would not contribute to economic growth.
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, warned of a competitive paradox that Europe is facing. According to the Financial Times, he said that creating regulatory barriers would be harmful in a context of rapid technological advancement. His remarks came just days after the European Commission concluded a public consultation assessing the transition to open-source software.
Google’s chief legal officer clarified that he is not opposed to digital sovereignty, but recommended making use of the “best technologies in the world.” Walker suggested that American companies could collaborate with European firms to implement measures ensuring data protection. Local management or servers located in Europe to store information are among the options.
The EU is preparing a technological sovereignty package aimed at eliminating dependence on third-party software, such as Google’s. After reviewing proposals, it concluded that reliance on external suppliers for critical infrastructure entails economic risks and creates vulnerabilities. The strategy focuses not only on regulation but also on adopting open-source software to achieve digital sovereignty.
According to Google, this change would represent a problem for users. Walker argues that the market moves faster than legislation and warns that regulatory friction will only leave European consumers and businesses behind in what he calls “the most competitive technological transition we have ever seen.” As it did with the DMA and other laws, Google is playing on fear. Kent Walker suggested that this initiative would stifle innovation and deny people access to the “best digital tools.”
The promotion of open-source software aims to break dependence on foreign suppliers, especially during a period of instability caused by the Trump administration. The European Union has highlighted the risks of continuing under this system and proposes that public institutions should have full control over their own technology.
According to a study on the impact of open-source software, the European Commission found that it contributes between €65 billion and €95 billion annually to the European Union’s GDP. The executive body estimates that a 10% increase in contributions to open-source software would generate an additional €100 billion in growth for the bloc’s economy.
According to Google, the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs would not contribute to economic growth.
Is Google seriously arguing that the money these nations save can’t be added to their GDPs?
That’s what it sounds like. Or am I confused?Google meant THEIR economic growth.
Don’t worry, Google is trying to confuse you
To an enormous extent are todays data centers, cloud providers, and all the techology the whole world use today based on open source. Without linux, curl, ffmpeg, and so on nothing in todays high tech society would work. Google, as it is today, would not exist if it was for all the open source they leech of.
Well Google contributes a lot to open source, but I get your point.
They mostly do that because they want control and maybe slowly reach their tentacles into projects. Like Chromium and Android are in theory open source, but in practice both are locked down by google and used for their business and mass data harvesting and advertising empire.
Chrome comes from Safari that comes from KHTML, the original KDE web browser. No open source means no Chrome.
Nah, I think they’re saying that their corporate offerings and jobs in a given country would not contribute to GDP, while failing to address that developers and engineers would still be necessary to implement these open source applications, though Google won’t get to siphon money out of those economies. It’s purposely convoluted, basically Google throwing a temper tantrum.
Nah that’s it. Their logic is seemingly if you don’t give the money to Google it’s not contributing to economic growth.
Two economists are walking down the street and pass by a pile of dog shit. One of them (a sadist) turns to the other and says “I’ll pay you $1000 if you eat that dog shit”.
The other performs an internal utility calculation and eats the dog shit.
Continuing their walk, the second economist sees another pile of dog shit and makes the same offer to the first. The first economist also agrees, and eats the dog shit. They walk on.
After a while the second economist says to the first “I can’t help thinking we’re worse off than when we started this walk. We both have the same amount of money we started with, but we both had to eat shit.”
The first economist replies “Worse off?! We’ve just engaged in 2000 dollars worth of trade!”.
Look, by certain ways of calculating GDP growth and trade, it’s probably true that if the money isn’t being spent on software licenses and so on, it means there’s less economic activity going on.
The whole point of open source / free software is that you’re not locked into someone’s proprietary software ecosystem. You don’t have to continue paying license fees. So, if the governments simply stop paying for software licenses, it’s probably true that their GDP will technically shrink. But, that assumes the money won’t be spent on something more useful.
They are saying FOSS isnt companies, google’s value is tied to GDP in some EU countries. If they see less growth so does the GDP.
Yanks are whores who only think of money and kids.
The last line needs a bender meme.
they meant google’s economic growth.
‘Open source means we make no money’
No i think the comment is less direct than that.
For much of government, the underlying objective is to contribute to GDP. For example, funding healthcare means a healthier population who can be more productive.
So by saying “this policy won’t contribute to GDP” its a very general way to say this is not what’s best for your population.
At least I think thats what theyre saying.
As an aside, savings dont directly improve GDP, by definition.
Perhaps they understand economic growth the same way the orange rapist understands tariffs?
Killing parasitic and monopolistic gatekeepers and middlemen is very much contributing to any country’s economic growth.
They are suggesting that going to open source solutions won’t result in new industry in their countries (i.e. that Google won’t be opening offices and data centers and such there).
It’s a pretty bogus statement anyways, but it’s not COMPLETELY senseless.
I think he’s arguing that not using the most advanced technologies (eg. what Google and Microsoft offer) would be detrimental to worker productivity in the EU.
Of course, in reality, if all those countries start investing in FOSS, they could easily replace the Office suit, SharePoint, the Power platform, etc. I know several programmers who’d gladly devote their time to FOSS full-time if they could. I’ve even met one who simply refuses to work to create anything proprietary.
When corporations or conservatives talk about “the economy”, simply replace it with “rich people’s bank accounts” and it makes sense again.
They are trying to gaslight you into still believing in the trickle-down-theory, against decades of evidence.
And all mainstream media as well as centrist parties (including the US Democrats) join in.
The company warned that Brussels’ policies aimed at reducing dependence on American tech companies could harm competitiveness.
Just what I’d expect a monopoly to say.
Fuck you. Alphabet.
Increased competition from open source alternatives harms competitiveness? By forcing them to compete and maybe actually innovate?
They mean it would harm their competitiveness.
As in, “We’d be less competitive if you switch to a competitor” (in this case FOSS).
I’ve reached the point in my life where I find this more arousing than booba
But not vagne?
But also:
Google is still up 100% from where it was may last year, even taking that drop into account.
maybe Google, but Microslop and Amazon;
Ohh, beautiful!
Maybe we should short the shit out of these arseholes as they go down.
“well yes you actually need to stay dependent on us to be competitive” -fucking ridiculous
When companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. are starting to squirm and whimper. You know you are on the right path. So I take this as a sign that the EU is heading in the right direction.
That’s my take as well
“Drug dealer criticizes drug user’s plan to quit.”
Removed by mod
Crapitalists.
Excellent, thank you 😁!
- Shift over to open source.
- Invest 25–50% of what you currently pay for proprietary software into helping maintain and enhance open source software.
- Enjoy the economic benefits well maintained free software brings to every aspect of your digital infrastructure at no extra cost.
Open source will innovate so much faster if properly funded, without the shackles of copyright and companies holding advancements secret and not releasing innovations on purpose as long as they hold on edge on “competition”. Competition is only important because of proprietary capitalism, remove capitalism and directly reward the workers and innovation happens for innovation’s sake.
Can’t wait for this to be proven in practice, and to be able to apply that more widely to society. Godspeed Europe
How can I compete, it isn’t like I can just look at your code and copy it into something better
Exactly, copyright and priority technology means everyone that wants to innovate must first reinvent the wheel and waste enormous energy doing work that’s already been done.
Look at Google photos, since they killed Picasa and exclusively offered it as a proprietary SAAS, they completely stopped innovating for over a decade. Look at immich in comparison, it’s already a better offering and it has only been released as stable for less than a year.
Phil salin wrote a hit peice on software patents, well said
For number 2, require that the people doing the open source work live and pay taxes in the EU. That way you’re keeping the money in the union, and you’re investing in local knowledge and skills.
As opposed to proprietary software where you’re basically handing dollars over to American companies (or to supposedly “Irish” companies that just so happen to be named almost identically to American companies, but somehow are magically based out of Ireland and don’t pay proper taxes anywhere).
For number 2, require that the people doing the open source work live and pay taxes in the EU.
I get what you’re saying but for larger projects that may not be viable.
Heck Mr Torvalds is an American living in the US (not that he’d need financial support) and not all muricans are dumbasses, just the majority.So, don’t fund the larger projects. Fund the smaller ones, they’re the ones that probably need support anyhow.
Besides, I would bet that if you asked Mr. Torvalds, he’d have a list of kernel contributors who live in the EU and would love to be paid for their work.
MoRe OpTiOnS iS bAd FoR cOmPeTiTiOn
competition is bad for competition
checks out
translation: having more competitors harms our chance of winning against them
Thanks for confirming we’re on the right track, google.
You guys don’t see what they’re scared shitless about? It’s the fear of an EU-based true open source Android fork/competitor.
Also when they say FOSS will not contribute to “economic growth”, they mean Alphabet’s. Greedy pigs.
Oh yeah. They’re shit scared.
Their bottom line is about to collapse out from under them due to their sheer stupidity.
Oh no, they’re just genuinely concerned European companies won’t be able to be competitive and to put them out of business! Bless them.
Like, which idiot would even entertain the idea that google has our best interest in mind.
Also, Google criticizing others for using FOSS is the height of irony. But one that tracks very well with what they did to FOSS.
Funny considering how much of Google was built on open software.
Exactly. Open source is fine when it suits them but not fine when it doesn’t.
This is why GNU GPL is very importand.
Here the GNU GPL comes to the rescue. The programmer shows the boss that this proprietary software product would be copyright infringement, and the boss realizes that he has only two choices: release the new code as free software, or not at all. Almost always he lets the programmer do as he intended all along, and the code goes into the next release. ref
To me it feels like there’s two Googles. The one that was run by Page and Brin was awesome, pretty much everyone in the industry wanted to work there.
Then they put someone else in charge to maximise shareholder revenue, and it went to shit soon after.
Public companies will always become so. They were only good because they were in the growth phase, the internet is not in the growth phase any longer, a few corporations control the gates to any industry, internet or what have you, and are squeezing everyone else.
Our wages go down every year in value as real inflation is higher than the cpi, while investors increase their margins at our expense. And we are too dumb to know it, trusting them, even now.
the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs would not contribute to economic growth.
Wrong.
creating regulatory barriers would be harmful in a context of rapid technological advancement
Wrong.
Walker suggested that American companies could collaborate with European firms
What does he not understand about digital sovereignty?
According to Google, this change would represent a problem for users
No, for Google. Also, wrong.
that the market moves faster than legislation and warns, that regulatory friction will only leave European consumers and businesses behind in what he calls “the most competitive technological transition we have ever seen.”
If that’s the price to avoid technofaschism… And, again, wrong.
Tl;dr: stop wanking, Walker.
I don’t know if he believes his own made up BS here, but these are some really idiotic statements. I’m glad the EU is taking steps to not use infrastructure created by a fascist government. At this point I don’t think there’s a reason to distinguish FANG (and their friends) from the government seeing how buddy buddy they all are with each other.
This is like a “no shit Google doesn’t want this” which makes moving over to the Euro style even better. Everyone opposed to what huge tech corporations are doing (should be everyone) should see this as a sign that you should make the change.
He doesn’t.
They lie and thieve.
Remember, whenever you see a patently weak argument like this from a trillion dollar corporation, they’re not saying it because they think anyone will believe it. They’re saying it to give the corrupt politicians in their pocket some way to pull a straight face when voting in the corporation’s favour.
We saw already tech paying off the US to bully europe into backing off of their previous demands and controls on tech. Europe has bad leadership, they backed off, and surrendered all last year to the US administration, there is no reason to think they won’t this time after google pays them off to do it again.
Europe is too busy trying to bring in the trojan horses of age checks and chatcontrol behind the gates to worry about protecting from tech, but rather to cooperate with tech to subjugate their citizens to secret social scores to determine winners and losers in life, with peter thiel and his ilk doing the deciding. The UK is already most of the way there, and the rest of europe is trying to follow, over and over and over. They only need to win once, the defenders of liberal democracy need to win every time.
Europe needs real leadership pushing popular reform. They will fall to fascists in league with the US that will fix their elections too on their current course of status quo mainstream politics with the far right as the only real reform option.
We give them reform, or nazis will, those are the only two choices, and the starmers and macrons of the world still don’t know it or don’t care.
Fuck you, Google.
The leopard of consequences is hungry for tech oligarch faces.
Eat, you majestic creature. And godspeed.
Walker suggested that American companies could collaborate with European firms to implement measures ensuring data protection
No, this is fundamentally impossible. The US has the Cloud Act. As long as that exists, this is a nonstarter.
The US can change their laws to not have a global wiretap and secret backdoor warrant program, then this would be possible.
The US can change their laws to not have a global wiretap and secret backdoor warrant program, then this would be possible.
Even if they did, they can change them right back whenever they want and the thing with data is that, once it’s out there somewhere, there’s no way of knowing for sure it hasn’t been copied and archived.
Not just from recent events but from the Snowden Revelations and the decades of 4-eyes operations even before that, we’re well beyond the point of it being possible to trust US-based and US-registered companies with the data of Europeans, and ditto for those of any other of what are now the 7-eyes countries.
All these craptastic US tech companies originally started on internationally developed free and open source software. They hoover up capital and talent then abuse their market power. Fuck them all.
They all run on Linux - Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. Greg KH who maintains stable is German. So many libraries and core system contributions by Germans like Drepper and Poettering. Youtube ran on mysql for years from Finnish Widenius. Google built a lot of stuff with Python - from Dutch Guido van Rossum and c++ from Danish Stroustrup. All of the video and audio sites rely heavily on ffmpeg, orginally from French Fabrice Bellard. Lots of them also using virtualisation stuff which includes qemu, also from Bellard. So much comp sci research from Europe and UK. Chrome and Safari originated with KDE (German) code. Europe did all the heavy lifting while the US took all the profits. I’m not even European but every country has the same experience. They have no idea how they are viewed.
I’d like to see Google try and run their company without open source. The operating system, programming language, databases, language libraries, network stack, etc. is such a long list of crucial things. Google is being totally nonsensical to suggest open source doesn’t drive a large part of today’s economy.
they have no idea how they’re viewed
No, they don’t.
