As a Dane, this has been frightening for years. I hope our government thinks of open source solutions, instead of just a european company over a US one.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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As a unitedstatesian engineer, reading stories about escaping the infuriating (and now, very obviously caustic and manipulative) US monopoly on tech infrastructure companies makes me want to move to the EU and help break the monopoly on that shit. There are other things that make me want to move too, but the opportunity to build some real alternatives that diminish US hegemony over… well, everything, is frankly more than a bit enticing.
Please feel free to help right now. You can still move to the EU if you want to but if you take for example NLNet they fund open source work for anybody anywhere in the World, you "just" have to propose something that is new and needed with a focus on the Internet.
instead of just a european company over a US one
even this is an improvement
I don't really get why and how lobbies are even allowed.
I always thought the correct word to describe it was "corruption" and that it was illegal.
Welcome to capitalism, where stuff like this is only illegal in socialist countries.
Like... Denmark? Where it's legal?
Of course, our socialist ruling party in Norway recently had several former ministers join various lobbies lately, so there's that too. Not illegal, though.
Denmark is capitalist, so yeah of course I'd be legal.
The US is capitalistic. Most of Europe is some variation of social democratic, with us up in the Nordics more socialist than further down on the continent.
Yes, capitalistic values increasingly and intrusively are corroding functioning societies towards a more US style dysfunction, but we are still far from as lost a case, so there is still hope.
And lobbyism has been regularly discussed in the last decade and will hopefully at least get stronger regulation sooner rather than later for several of us, so there is hope for that part at least.
I see you subscribe to the "socialism is when the government does stuff" school of thought, I disagree with that and think Denmark is social democratic and therefore capitalist.
Social Democracy is a method of operating the government.
Capitalism is a way of operating the economy.
Much of Europe's governments are classified as a Social Democracy and they also use the capitalist economic system.
Thank you. This is the way. Differentiations hard to see from the outside, apparently.
Welcome to Lemmy, where 'socialist countries' means nations that follow Marxist-Leninism and not a form of modern utopian socialism better known as social democracy that took bits and pieces of Marxist-Leninism under a capitalist umbrella.
So not like Denmark, but like China or Vietnam.
That's an extreme USian way of viewing it. Not saying you're wrong, 'cause I've observed the same. But @FauxLiving@lemmy.world worded reality really well in a comment just above.
The USian way of viewing socialism is "centre-right liberalism + religious democratics + social liberalism + social democracy + democratic socialism + marxist leninism" = socialism
Exactly, and socialism and communism are two words meaning the same.
No, they do not.
They are two economic systems predicted by Karl Marx to be superseding capitalism,
with communism superseding socialism.
Socialism is what China currently is.
Communism is thought to be like star trek.
No one needs to use currency for their survival.
There's no large gap between the rich and the poor.
Government plays a small to non-existent role.
I know that, but that doesn't stop the USians using them as being the same.
Corruption is when you get a million for something. Lobbying is when you do it for a promise to be on the board of directors in the future.
It's lobbying in the West and Euro subsidies embezzlement in the East.
I'd choose the second option tbh. I'd rather yoink some funds than take a bribe.
Why is it that hard to break away from big tech? Start with Microsoft - their software gets worse every year... At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they're just selling copilot slop
Because they literally wrote the book on lock-in https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/InformationRules and they tried with all their might to stop free software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists so beside the money and power they have been strategically at it for decades. Dependency is deep in the product.
The worst part is that people still buy their shit instead of laughing them out of existence.
All I can say is Nothing new on the western front. Same shit all the time.
As someone of middle age that's been thinking of a career change away from all my BofH open source tech roots, and maybe going back to school, I've been very disheartened to see how married a lot of curriculums in public universities are to specific companies. Maybe it was always like this and I didn't notice, I can imagine if you did an engineering program in the 80's you'd have Boeing employees as professors, but fuck me if I'm going to go to Adobe art school.
Fire them.
"Here in Denmark, we want homegrown European corporate-driven mass surveillance of all civilians."
Glances at ChatControl
That's why we need to decentralise communication everywhere.
Good luck trying to surveil all of XMPP. It just does not work. The server operators could be forced, but the client developers would just not release an update with a backdoor and instead just stop developing their clients.
I never understood the obsession to use Facebook Messenger in Denmark. First time someone asked me whether I "use messenger", I said "Yes, three different ones" and the person was bewildered while I was confused.
This is an important area where everyone can start:
- Find an XMPP provider
- Install app, create account
- Move conversations over
- Delete Facebook account at some point
Free conversations from big tech, use something that does not depend on a single provider. Monopolies are bad, not just if they're from the US. Try to use something from Europe that isn't based on monopolies.
Here's a flyer from the Digital Independence Day that has recently been proclaimed by the Chaos Computer Club and several other German organisations: https://shop.digitalcourage.de/files/xmpp-folder-engl-druck.pdf