— Henry Farrell, Abraham L. NewmanRobin Berjon, a French computer scientist who spoke at the first EuroStack meeting, acknowledges that the project has yet “to get proper financing and institutional backing” and is “more a social movement than anything else.” If these projects succeed, they will be expensive and slow to bring online—and most will almost certainly underperform cutting-edge US equivalents. But Europe’s issues with American platforms are no longer just about ads and cookies; they’re about the very future of its democracies and national security. And in the longer term, the US itself faces a disquieting question. If it no longer provides platforms that the rest of the world wants to use, who will be left—and whose interests will be served—on American networks?
Replicated under Fair Use from The Enshittification of American Power by Henry Farrell, Abraham L. Newman.