European Alternatives (european-alternatives.eu)

It's a cool project but it is 'niche'.

I think the purpose of the site is more about the alternatives to 'large players', platforms and infrastructure companies. Still Constantin Graf should have clarified out of politeness but possibly he's busy or doesn't have time to respond to every email.

However I'd point out there is a market for European 'Product Hunt' that would include more of these smaller projects.

Same here.

Open-source security framework (1). Applied 16 August 2025. Company registered in Switzerland (EFTA). No reply.

However, European Alternatives is a personal (sole proprietorship) website and has nothing to do with Europe, despite the name and style, which are slightly misleading as they mimic official EU website aesthetics.

1. GitHub: https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno

I have been working on https://1launch.eu for the past two months. Very MVP stage. I don't plan to be in the same niche as european-alternatives, but it is very much inspired by this. It is largely meant to be a ProductHunt / AngelList for Europe with a couple of key features especially for the European market (like instant translation into all 24 languages of the EU to launch in the whole European market in one go). If you want to launch on the platform or want to be involved in a different way, send me an email on hackernews@1launch.eu

Same here. I created and submitted a European open-source Snapchat alternative, but it's been in “Waiting for Review” status for quite some time now.

Webpage: https://twonly.eu/en

Github: https://github.com/twonlyapp/twonly-app

I've seen the same thing, the site accepts submissions but there's no one to either approve or reject them.

Unfortunately they did really well at SEO at one time, and more active alternatives appear far below in the search results.

I think the biggest issue is that your product is not from a company generating money (and taxes). IMO as an european, I think we should aim for open source, not corporate software, but free and open source software is generating way less jobs and taxes money.

You probably need to include EN16931, XRechnung, Factur-X, ZUGFeRD, … and how they all called, the new standard for electronic invoices.

Same, can’t get https://mailpace.com listed, no idea why

Unless you do Peppol... it's not intresting at all.

> template=stripe

Maybe this was enough to not include it?

Gradually moving over from Teams to Hetzner + Nextcloud over the past year. The chat app is the blocker (Nextcloud Talk is not quite there yet). But we've moved over files, docs, calendar, photos, etc.

Unfortunately Hetzner volumes have pretty low iops for databases

Me too.

Just moved all my hosting and dbs from a US company to Hertzner after 15 years of good service. Moving domains now.

What EU based registrars would you recommend?

Wero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.

I wish GNU Taler would become more concrete.

https://www.taler.net

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

The digital Euro has not been implemented yet. Some analysts are skeptical but this is the EUs answer for Visa/Mastercard.

The big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well. If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks)

Wero is coming and it should work across Europe

France has the CB network for example which I believe still dominates most credit card transactions although it's declining as more and more cards are not co-branded anymore.

It merged with Mastercard almost two decades back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_%28credit_card%29

Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.

Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...

More importantly, perhaps, are some exercises where a A SRE team creates likely problem (US/China/…) does bad things with DNS/BGP/…, submarine cables, starlink, GPS/GALILEO, Kessler effect etc, and SRE team B tries to keep the national infrastructure together. This may be happening already, but I have my doubts

It is a sad reality. The US has recently threatened to annex Denmark and Canada. Some of us are suddenly keenly aware that the US is in a position to take control of most of our computers and phones via software updates.

Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/

The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.

What are global alternatives? Every company is connected to some country, there are no global alternatives. I live in EU and want to use EU services mainly because I want this part of the world to prosper. I want to leave my money and incentivise innovation in this part of the world because this is where I live and I want a better life here for me and my kids. And alternatives are always good, especially that they’re not closed. People in the US can use services from EU companies as well :) why not?

> Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? [...] Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab [...]

While I agree with your sentiment, European and nationalistic are two contradicting positions, unlike the other three mentioned superpowers.

This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.

It is not "nationalistic" to prefer things that are made in Europe. Europe is not a nation and very few people feel anything close to national pride about it. I like that we have European alternatives instead of German, French, Swedish, etc, alternatives.

First of all, US is at the edge of a dictatorship. If US falls completely, Europe will likely too, but untangling ourselves from US is an attempt to prevent that.

European leaders fundamentally have no issue with Americans dominating tech and were happy to have their entire digital infrastructures rely on US companies. If the Trump admin could give them some sort of nod behind the scenes that all of this is just a big show and they're not actually going to break NATO or invade or w/e insane shit they're saying I guarantee you a sizeable amount would just say hey no worries then let's keep the status quo going.

But that's not what's happening. It's a clear and obvious security risk to their sovereignty. If the government can't guarantee that to its citizens then what even is its purpose? The Trump admin has already tried to use American tech dominance as leverage.

Ask yourself this question, what if there was a foreign tech competitor that managed to scale up to be basically a better cheaper AWS. Would the US government ever allow it to encroach its market to the point that AWS or Azure did in Europe? Look at what happened to tiktok if you want to see what approach they'd likely take.

So how exactly would you envision an objective and neutral provider in a world of geopolitical competition?

No,not sad, centralisation is always problematic even if well meaning. The presence of diverse alternatives is a feature, not a bug.

As long as they're actual alternatives of course, rather than just another monopoly but at a smaller scale.

I think the opposite as you. These global companies often act as a nation with laws unto themselves. Most of them don't actually have real support that can do anything unless you make a lucky Twitter post or something. Having a local company that is realistically beholden to local laws and local politicians that you can actually potentially go and talk to if needed is a major feature.

The European alternatives are not restricted to Europe.

> Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach

It's not even that. We euros were more than willing to look the other way (see the umpteen attempts to reconcile our privacy-friendly legislation with the free-for-all of American services, ongoing for decades) in the name of convenience and fundamentally shared values. The turning point was really in 2024/2025, when those shared values were summarily swept away on the other side of the Atlantic.

Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.

Competition is always good. It's sad that there's been so little alternatives in the past. I'm glad that this is now slowly changing.

What we should work towards, though, is interoperability and open source solutions.

> Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free?

We should not; we must. But at the same time we need to recognise that we are powerless to affect the American government, which can go rogue at any moment. So from a pure risk analysis, we also need to have local alternatives. I regret this state of affairs, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the US threatening its nominal allies.

Nothing against global standards and similar. But even "global alternatives" are usually rooted somewhere locally, and that starts to matter more and more, it seems.

I'm really not sad about having alternative and choices, especially it also leads to reduce corporate overlordship.

Hearing from our customers they are abandoning US products. Really surprising how many times I hear it tbh.

an European energy sector (mainstream or industrial) HN would be great btw

ps: congrats on your success

They should add EU membership as alternative to CUSMA. I really like the idea!

Whoa, was unaware of this! Thanks!

journalduhacker.net (in french)

techposts.eu i reckon

Its founder lives in europe so there's that.

Perhaps Lemmy may count based on distributed ActivityPub protocol with some servers in Europe.

The irony is that European alternatives are still in English, when no European country (since the departure of the U.K. from Europe) actually uses that language.

Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?

Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.

I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.

Hardware vendors is a different issue

European cloud sovereignty starts with European hardware. Without European bare-metal, the rest is just branding.

They accept suggestions - https://european-alternatives.eu/register

FWIW Free Pascal and Lazarus communities and developers are largely European and there isn't a single company behind them. Though at the same time there are also several devs from outside EU so i do not think it can be called a "EU alternative" - which is the case for most FLOSS projects actually.

Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.

For consumers, these computers look interesting: https://starlabs.systems/

- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.

Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.

Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.

> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads

I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.

The EUPL is a fine license, especially if your goal is wide compatibility with other copyleft licenses. However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft, which could be surprising if you just read the main text.

Also, the GPL is not as short and has more explicit wording for how it behaves in common situations (like the P2P copying stuff, for example), and it allows certain additional restrictions and exceptions (like what the LGPL is). It's just more well thought-out in my opinion.

Edit: Reading it again, I also just remembered that the EUPL's warranty disclaimer is a lot weaker than usual licenses, and weirdly also asserts the program is a “work in progress”.

I've been looking at mail providers too, and it's starting to look there are no real alternatives. Not just in Europe, but worldwide. I've been a happy user of Fastmail for quite some time now, and it's sad the the current geopolitical situation pressures me into migrating away.

The alternative that's looking best to me so far is Kolab Now. I don't see a lot of user reviews of it on Reddit though, or anywhere else, so it seems to not be very popular at first sight. That's perhaps not a good sign.

In any case I'm planning on trying it out for a while, with a domain I don't use it all that often, before deciding to migrate to it.

They don't, but you shouldn't feel too bad as fastmail is australian, ie not american, which (at least personally) is where we're trying to divest.

Gandi.net offers mail with custom domain and unlimited aliases. You need to have your domain registered with them though.

Here's one case from August 2025:

----

Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.

All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.

"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.

He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.

https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...

To me, a very non-subjective reason is that the money I'm paying for these services will go to people and companies that share the same values and the taxes on the said money will be used for our common defense instead of being used to attack us.

If you're European and reading the news at any point in the last year+, you understand how critical a weakness being dependent on US companies for your IT infra is.

There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.

European companies operate under stricter privacy laws. GDPR is applicable world wide but has serious teeth and enforcement within Europe. Small US companies with no presence in Europe can effectively ignore it. However if an American were to choose a European service this benefit is effectively passed on to them. They can view what data any company has on them or ask them to delete it.

I can appreciate some don't care about their data especially in this world of people pouring their lives in to social media but some people do care.

America could feasibly use cloud and other service provision as an economic weapon. Your company could die as a result.

And a second non-subjective and very important reason is that at any moment the US government might decide that the data we entrusted their corporations with is no longer ours and we need to part with it. It will be used for AI training. Also, this is because we didn't say thank you or something like that...

> their buddy’s startup

That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.

Legal one? Cloud Act is not compatible with GDPR.

You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m.

Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.

I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.

I suspect China or Russia don't have higher salaries, they still manage to build their own alternatives. And Airbus builds better planes than Boeing with European salaries.

I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.

Not true. Plenty of European products are better. Consumer example: Spotify is better than Apple Music. Business example: Attio is better than every American CRM at SME/early stage startup stage.

Biggest problem has been talent going to US.

This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.

The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.

It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.

Assuming that people are solely motivated by money, which most aren't. You can't pay me enough to put my children into a school system that has "active shooter" drills. After a certain point money stops being a motivation, that point is well within the average EU tech salary band (perhaps excluding places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and that general area).

But why? What's unsustainable about an email service, for example, run by competent European engineers at European salaries?

High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.

The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.

Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.

Over what period of time do you predict economic downfall for European tech because of salaries?

Please explain your working. These last 40 years or more there has been a cliff of money, but Europeans continue to live and work in europe.

You have to have an incredibly narrow definition of "only good people work for more money and only poor/ineffective people work for less" to say people who don't chase the millions in a US company are somehow failures.

I might get lower salary, but if I break my leg I pay nothing and I am paid during my leave.

This talking point went out the window After America threatened to invade Greenland.

After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.

I wouldn't want US salaries with US costs of living.

Also working for companies located in Ireland[0] or Switzerland you can have your US salary, it's just that the pool of jobs is limited.

[0] Provided it's a company in the first of Ireland's two economies.

It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.

Personally it's not all about money. I even moved to a lower wage country in Europe for better quality of life.

Having enough is what I care about and things are a lot cheaper here too. Not to mention free healthcare, social security. I don't need a car and a public transport pass is 25€ a month. That alone saves me so much money. The time till the next metro train counts down in seconds here.

When I had a car in the past it would cost me hundreds per month and it was such a headache.

I'd never move to the US even if I could make 3x as much. In fact I got an offer from a FAANG once (with the whole H1B managed by some agency I think) but I declined. I only applied because they advertised it as a local job but then when the offer came it was in California. Nope.

It very much is sustainable. See China, Russia, Korea and Japan, all varying degrees of being much less dependent on US tech than the EU is.

Why not?

I had offers from companies across the pond, and likely could make about 2x-3x what I make here.

What for? I live a comfortable life here.

The actions of the current US administration seem to have provoked intense negative reactions, or perhaps caused long simmering resentment to boil over. I hope some of this energy goes towards cultivating a more entrepreneurial, less risk-averse culture in Europe.

As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.

The higher US salaries are a bug, not a feature, in this context.

Before we closed our office in Mountain View years ago, every time we went over there:

- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.

- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society

- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.

- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.

- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.

You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.

Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:

- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people. - China - Iran - New Zealand - Australia - Canada ...

Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.

Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.

Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.

Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.

You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.

Hertzner?

Interesting, do you also provide the actual audit for ISO 27001 as part of your service? That’s why I went with Oneleet, but a EU-based solution would be attractive.

I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this.

It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway? I think you would consider other factors first.

A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.

It depends where you live. There's no one company that's implented in all European countries. All countries have a shop similar to Amazon (often with fewer sponsored products and less drop shipping garbage). There are also a few specialized shops (for books, sports, electronics...). Since 2020 I only buy Amazon if they're significantly cheaper than other sellers. That's about 10% of my purchases.

In DE probably Otto.de is the closest you get (?).

In NL I remember Bol was quite good.

For clothes Zalando is a big one.

Beyond that it gets fragmented into companies serving only a few markets. Alza, Cool Blue, and Media Markt are some that come to my mind.

There's galaxus.com

Lol. What the heck are you using Amazon for? Stop buying shit man. Go outside.

On https://european-alternatives.eu/about the listing criteria state:

> The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country or in the UK.

but

> For hosting providers: It is not allowed that a hosting provider is simply a sub-hosting provider of a company that is not based in an EU or EFTA member country.

https://european-alternatives.eu/about

It's all clarified here. If you think it's missing some great companies add them!

"French server", what is that? Usually we judge customer service on the company, not the nationality of the hardware, care to share exactly where you had a bad experience?

I like it. No fake smiles, no tip required. They can be a bit grumpy but French food is amazing which makes up for it.

Have you tried Hetzner

OVH? I hate the dashboard, but the support seems fine to me.

Most of it is entirely unreasonable and being posted by Americans with vested interests who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech - think Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this".

It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.

Be the change you want to see in this world.

Do you have a license to ask these questions?

Have you considered discussing TFA instead of tropes so worn and boring even you yourself can't be bothered to write them out?

People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.

People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Can you imagine, knowing so little of the rest of the world, you call this nationalism without irony.

Sir, please read up on Wikipedia what the EU is. What Europe is. Also, this is a very mild response to a "American first" new world order.

Buy local is a well known and used tactic globally in many places big and small. Another observation, saying it is nationalistic is odd given it involves multiple nationalities. US has protectionist policy EU has it, there is nothing new here. The odd thing is that it triggers the person for it being so small.

To clarify empowering the EU is literally the opposite of Nationalism or are you discussing the recent surge of 'American Exceptionalism' of the current US administration?

> Ugh, back to nationalism.

That’s a bit of a negative way to think about things. We’ve tried globalism, I don’t think it works. It’s utopian.

Small and distributed, this is the way. Not large and centralised. Stop over complicating things. If people just looked after themselves, their family, and their neighbours (in that order) the rest would figure itself out. This is how love works, it’s personal and intimate. I wish people would just stop trying to meddle with the world and let people be.

>One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years.

You're at 2 out of 3, while Biden was mid at best and your senate has been horrendous for a very long time.

>But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.

It's been ten years of Trumpism. This wasn't a flip of a dime. The opinion flipped after we were threatened with annexation. These aren't jokes.

> When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.

I hope you understand now that not even half of Democrats support these things, let alone most of the population, of any country in the world

> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years.

That's what we thought the first time. And it did happen, a sane person did get elected a few years later, but then another few years later Trump got elected again. And it's pretty clear that he and his crew are rapidly turning the USA into a fascist authoritarian hellhole, and they show all signs of not being willing to step back from power. It's a real tragedy both for USA's own people, especially the ones that Trump doesn't like, but also for people in other countries.

That has real consequences. Here is, with thanks to user malauxyeux for neatly summarizing, a case that should anyone start thinking real hard of the consequences of using American services:

Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.

All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.

"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.

He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.

https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...

(link to malauxyeux's comment where I found this summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738790)

> Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights

A huge proportion of your electorate is actually not only fine with the current direction, but actively cheer on this.

> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."

This sounds a lot worse than you imagine. We will be always one election away of anothe asshole that will want to leveraged the US relative strength to cause harm. Better to not keep strengthening it.

> 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?

I almost choked at this.

The US has a long history of fucking over other countries.

The only thing that changed is that it just decided to be more direct about it, even with former allies.

I actually prefer it this way.

Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.

A few friends and I have thought similarly, although we focused on Apple first and the Google/Office suite second. We wrote our thoughts here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ and the alternatives here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html

I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?

> EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon

This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen".

I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.