Just three US firms provide 70% of Europe's cloud-computing, leading to fears of overreliance.
  • Taalnazi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    2 days ago

    Absolutely Europe should.

    What You Can Do:
    Shift from … to …:
    Chrome, Edge -> Firefox, Librefox, Tor

    Word, Excel, Powerpoint -> LibreOffice
    Reddit -> Lemmy (you are here)
    Twitter -> Mastodon
    Facebook -> Friendica
    YouTube -> PeerTube

    Gmail, Outlook -> Tuta, Mailbox, Proton
    Visa, Mastercard -> Wero, Monero

    • Humanius@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      I agree with most, but I’m not sure your Visa and Mastercard alternatives are realistic.

      • Wero is only rolled out in a select few countries at this point. On top of that, to my knowledge, you can only use it for online transactions and not in-store purchases.
      • Monero is a crypto-currency. Crypto is not a scalable solution to payment traffic at all.

      Sadly there is no great, widespread alterantives to Visa and Mastercard at the moment, so you are going to have to figure out what solution works wherever you live. This cannot be answered by a blanket replace X with Y list.

      The real solution to breaking the Mastercard and Visa duopoly is the government stepping in and either taking care of it themselves, or fostering European competition. This is not something individuals can solve by simply switching to a non-existant alternative.

      • obsidianfoxxy7870@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        I would feel though that Europe has a lot more of a chance then America at being able to make an alternative.

        I would love to see an open standard for transactions that can come with the same protections or similar that you can get with credit cards for fraud.

        • Humanius@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          2 days ago

          Wero is a good alternative that is in the process of being rolled out.

          However, the main issue is that that rollout is painfully slow, and seemingly is not being accelerated in what is frankly an existential threat to European sovereignty.

      • Taalnazi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        51·
        2 days ago

        You’re completely right; it is true that Wero is only rolled out in a few countries now. But it’s also new and basically going to be a continuation of iDEAL (a nicer name imo) at a European level.

        Monero is indeed crypto and whether it’s scalable, I do not know. But what attracts is that it’s much more decentralised, I feel. It’s like Ethereum in that regard.

        I also agree with you that breaking down the duopoly is necessary and should be done by the European governments. In fact, I think it’s the simplest way to foster extra competition. Break up Visa and Mastercard and introduce a few European competitors.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I think every country or country block should be making sure they have a fallback for the basic internet infrastructure and production methods.