Financial Times, 2 January 2026
Some quotes below:
Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned.
Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure.
“We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”
The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.
[…]
Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.
He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.
It could be similar to when European countries jointly set up the planemaker Airbus, he said: “Everybody was supporting the Airbus initiatives decades ago. We need the same initiative on [an] EU level in the cyber domain.”
That is mainly a legal problem.
EG you could have a combined Reddit/Lemmy client that fetches messages from both. You create a Lemmy community that complements a Reddit community. The client fetches posts/comments from both and combines them in your interface.
That’s illegal even in the US (case law). In the EU it’s hyper-illegal because you go up against copyright, database rights, and GDPR.
The EU has actually picked up on the importance of interoperability and mandates it in the DSA, but I have no idea how that is supposed to work, given all the other regulations.
Cory Doctorow has been screaming about this anti circumvention law stuff for years now but the powers that be dont seem to want a solution.
I was about to mention Cory Doctorow. He has been a force for years. For everyone new to him: His talk at 39c3 some days ago was awesome!
Yes. The problem is that those are very American solutions. In Europe these ideas are just unacceptable. European values, fundamental values, and all that.
The client can’t just fetch them from both but has to publish them on both.
Reddit offers a paid API so it should already be possible.
The price is an issue but I doubt that a competitor can be established like that. It would essentially be another Reddit client.
You don’t need an API. The law says that you need permission.
Another technological possibility is to scrape a subreddit to migrate the discussions to EG Lemmy. That might actually be legal in the US but certainly not in Europe.
Scraping doesn’t solve the network effect issue. Having a ghost town where all the ghosts are mimicking a real town doesn’t give you a real town. You actually need people to come over and join the community.
True. It only makes migration easier, but that’s still something.
Does it make migration easier? I don’t think it does. I think it makes migration harder.
If I switch to Lemmy and join my favourite migrated community (all posts and comments scraped and reposted from my favourite subreddit) and then I try to reply to those messages on Lemmy, nobody is there to reply to me! It’s a ghost town where I’m the only one who’s not a ghost! That sucks, so I leave.
I was thinking about a scenario where the moderators, or some part of the community, decide to migrate. I should have clarified that.
There are other Reddit clients so the permission exists.
Maybe take a look at that link I posted above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventures,_Inc.
I did. They copied Facebook without permissions. The alternative Reddit clients have them so it is not the same.
That’s not quite what the judgment was about. Anyway, I don’t understand what point you are trying to make.
There are legal clients for Reddit from third parties. Building another client cannot be prevented from Reddit.
Adding comments from other social networks would be the only difference that is needed for the initially suggested mixing of social networks. I don’t think that Reddit has the right to prevent that.
So a new network that also shows Reddit comments is possible.
If you need Reddit’s permission to connect to Reddit, then Reddit can grant or deny permission under the condition that you only use approved clients.
It very much has that right in the EU. First, there’s copyright. The US has Fair Use, the EU doesn’t. The EU has a database right, a kind of intellectual property which does not exist in the US. There’s also contract law, ie what it says in the TOS. In the US, you can’t use contract law to override Fair Use. Then there’s the GDPR, which is always a tough call. It might be legal enough for most purposes.