alt Hacker NewsEurope’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability.
my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
so Denmark moving to cut Microsoft dependence in the name of digital independence is basically the same story. When the US starts looking less like stable infrastructure and more like a chaotic landlord, everyone starts building their own exits.
Replies
So it’s like Europe is ungoogling itself from the US?
> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term be
Digital euro push is beyond the current US administration if that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.
> my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like 2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.
We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to push for politicians.
I don't know how to break this to you, but Europe itself has been the burning building for 20 years. I don't see that changing any time soon. The anti-US stuff is largely flailing, the US is better positioned than Europe for the next 20 years also. They struggle with investment, have almost no large companies left of any merit in tech, have political problems that are similar to the US's, and regulate themselves to death. It would take a political revolution in Europe to fix that, and frankly they don't have it in them.
Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself.
Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.