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phaser
Nursie
This reads as very naive now. As soon as a critical mass of people got online, and they wanted their governments to apply laws and regulations there, it was going to happen.
This declaration was written from the days when those who were interacting online were making a real effort to do so, who really wanted to be there, who were in a niche, who were observing 'netiquette' and other quaint notions. They were generally educated, generally technologists by profession or interest, and in those circumstances it's easy to see the utopia you have created and declare it good, with no need for regulation.
It's a little like when you have a small team of skilled, motivated engineers - work gets done to a high standard without the need for onerous processes. But when you start recruiting and growing the team wider, and bring in lots of juniors...
> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
That didn't turn out so well IMHO. People got on there and then ... yuck, they did people stuff. Harassed each other, commited fraud, blackmail and extortion, created and exchanged CSAM. Cyberspace has suffered from government and commercial overreach, certainly, and so much regulation has been commercial in nature rather than actually about safety.
But the dream of an internet free from any form of government regulation? Never could have lasted when everyone got on here.
And just look at our civilisation of the mind, in its centralised fortresses with its own aristocracy exerting control over what information gets fed to the masses.
And even on a technical level, in 1996 people still used to leave mail relays open to be neighbourly!
andsoitis
> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.
isodev
Cyberspace promised us we can all work together to create things, like one species coming together to solve problems. Now in 2026, we need to “space” for every little tribe…
aljaz823
It was in no position to make such promises.
ares623
it was true for about 3 years give or take
marssaxman
Yes, all of our 20-year-old selves eventually learned that. No need to rub it in!
stackghost
Indeed. I first encountered the "declaration of independence of cyberspace" a few years after it was written, and at the time I was immediately reminded of the Full Metal Jacket quote that goes something like "you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Marine Corps!"
That is to say the Declaration is pure cringe. The idea that cyberspace could become sovereign unto itself is patently absurd: The user's ass belongs to whichever country they inhabit.
yipbub
Maybe it can be aspirational.
pjc50
Worse, physical reality now also depends on "cyberspace".
This stuff only worked, socially and politically, when it was a niche. Echoing the comment of Nursie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071177 ; as soon as "everyone" is online, online is also real life. People thought it might be a haven for progressive politics, but that didn't outlast the Howard Dean campaign and it turned out that the right-wing could do online politics as well. The medium doesn't care whether your message is pro- or anti-genocide.
The ability of hyper-online memelords to inject bad ideas into the online right policy space has been an absolute disaster for all concerned. US policy is now downstream of Twitter. Let that sink in, as it were.
In a very cyberpunk dystopia way, online warfare is now co-evolved with both kinetic warfare (Ukraine's meme army trying to secure them external support) and urban warfare (following ICE agents around to post video of what they're doing on the Internet is as effective a tactic as legal action).
People forget that the "cyber" of "cyberpunk" and "cyberspace" comes from "cybernetics", meaning systems of control. In the beginning amateurs had control because it wasn't important. Now it turns out that, yes, the question of which country owns the chat client all the government staff are using is a question of national security.
intensiveBoar
As someone who remembers my local ISP come home to install a router and fiddle with cables when I was a child, saw governments block and censor specific parts of it, and had a weeklong ordeal getting PPPoE on my own router to work with my ISP just recently, this seems immediately intuitive and understandable. Frankly I'm surprised it wasn't for some people, at any point.
21asdffdsa12
Missing on the list, but mostly part of it - human retardation. In politics, in private, everywhere.
The surplus binges of the 90s do not make for an accurate sample of human and politics nature.
11mariom
> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
I would say it was… until everybody is connected to the internet all the time. I would love to get back to the internet from… around 2010? Something like that. IRC was still a thing (made a lot of friends there, many of them I know in person now), forums was still live, blogs were still worth to read and write (nowadays I see like most of ppl moved to fb/ln/x to post…).
When it got "crowded" it's stopped being government independent. Back in a day everyone was (pseudo)anonymous, and here - we're thinking about age restrictions, socials requesting ID/face scans… I do not like the ways it's moving.
21asdffdsa12
Its most horrifying if you look at what it usually burns down and fizzles out to. Governments in the middle east- one dominant family, extracting, the rest suffering in silence boxed away in silos, with no chance to move and create ever again - well except for unrest and fundamentalist movements.
wlecometo
we have been living in the US sovereignty until now, if you don't trust me ask, the people behind, The pirate bay, Dmitri Sklyarov or Kim dot com.
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shiroiuma
Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.
RobotToaster
Doesn't have to be a different dimension, international waters or space would do.
Semaphor
All this, and no mention of Sealand [0]? An unrecognized micronation in (formerly) international waters, with a hosting company (back then) that allowed almost everything, and its own coup and counter attack by the "legitimate" royals (and then Germany having to negotiate POW release of the coup organizer).
XorNot
Both those places are heavily government controlled.
In fact international waters if you're not flagged and registered to a specific country, then it's open season for anyone to board and seize you.
shiroiuma
Aside from the counterpoints made by the other responders, this still won't work: you need a physical connection to those servers, and you can't just WiFi to servers thousands of kilometers away. So the servers need to be in another dimension, so you can access them without government interference.
wafflemaker
That's the whole plan with the space servers. As soon as we sort out a few problems, we're good to go.
Problems: Solar flare & radiation resistance. Heat dissipation. Energy (more effective solar panels, for things as close to sun as we).
Partially solved - getting to orbit. And as much as we hate musk, SpaceX might solve it once Starships start flying commercially.
If we would separate energy part out and beam it somehow, we could sit in a body's shadow in some Lagrange point equivalent for a given body system and greatly reduce heat dissipation requirements and suspectibility to solar flares.
pseudony
Look at what he does now, you honestly think a person this greedy would ever exercise less than maximum control?
Towaway69
Wait a one minute, who owns those space Servers? The same guy who runs starlink? The one who uses that power to threaten to cut access to those who refuse to do his bidding?
Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.
wald3n
I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?
ruicraveiro
Hardware: Spot on.
There are European or open-source alternatives for just about everything. Beginning with the OS, there's Linux and going all the up in the stack, we've got stuff like Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, and so on.
Some hardware is produced in Europe. Goodram is a nice example. What we do not have is a processor architecture, nor factories. The closest to European is ARM. It is a British company, which is good, but outside the EU, and controlled by a Japanese holding, and fabless. Being fabless is the main issue here. (Edit: The Raspberry Pi is a strategic showcase of the status. It is a non-EU European product, uses a non-EU European ISA, ARM, but the chip implementing that ISA is made by a US company, Broadcom, and the Pi is the closest that we can get in terms of strategic autonomy).
I believe that our over-reliance on x64 is by far our biggest risk. ARM's existence should give us some comfort, but I don't think that it is enough, though. If I were to define a EU strategy for digital sovereignty, one of my cornerstones would be to bet on an ISA architecture and have a strategy to bring to Europe at least one CPU factory. I don't think that starting from scratch would be a viable option. However, betting on an existing open source architecture like RISC-V to make it far more mainstream could be viable. No matter how much we'd invest on RISC-V and how successful it would become, the point wouldn't be to make other blocs dependent on us, but to sever our current dependence on them.
LargoLasskhyfv
There seems to be some progress with https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w... at least.
Maybe Goodram can then assemble their chips into consumer products? :-)
slopinthebag
Mistral Vibe is cheap for what you get - I haven't run into limits yet, and you can use the same API key for the CLI for their API to run Codestral, Mistral large, etc. Le Chat is great as well, especially research mode. Afaik their models are running on Cerebras so you are never waiting for a response.
Obviously Opus and Codex are better for coding, but I dont really use it much to generate actual code so I don't think I'm missing much.
dwedge
Do they? That's surprising. I saw them come up here twice for their OCR model, I tried using it on a 200 PDF that was just printed text without embedded OCR and it failed miserably - got less than tesseract and I ended up with a $5 bill.
I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved
plagiarist
I tried the API on a coding task and it did worse than I would've hoped. Also $5. They still have a ways to go, I think.
I also use their chat pretty frequently, it seems to "misunderstand" me more often than other models. But that's free and it isn't as irritating to rephrase a question as it is backing out code changes.
I like that they have local models available, I plan to try those sometime.
Tinkeringz
They’re 5th off bottom on livebench
atoav
Yet their transcription model is the best out there currently subjectivity.
notrealyme123
Iirc: mistral has American investors, black forest labs hq has been moved to silicon valley.
oytis
That's another problem with the idea of tech sovereignity. Anything succesful, even if it started in Europe, will go global, including literally going to the USA
rhubarbtree
If the political regime in the US continues, that will come to an end. You can see it happening already - London has been a big beneficiary of Trump’s agenda.
21asdffdsa12
Hub and spoke market model of the world. Some realities can not change. could move back to britain-canada though.
schubidubiduba
Basically every company has American investors. But for Mistral, ASML is the biggest, I think, and the french founders also still hold significant amounts.
And Black Forest labs is still headquartered in Freiburg, Germany. They just have a lab in SF.
lejalv
That's why the European way to tech sovereignty is (publicly-funded) free software. Cannot be bought by unlimited VC money from The Valley, and it benefits the rest of the world, which is a tiny drop, and hence a necessary one, in Europe offsetting the damages of colonization, past and present.
oytis
Free software alone doesn't give you tech sovereignty. What matters is who integrates and runs the software.
g-mork
Far more usable (and older AFAIK) site: https://european-alternatives.eu/
culi
Very different sites with very different goals.
I think this post is useful if you are, say, a European that wants to find a nearby tech company to work for or are curious where the tech "scene" is at in Europe
gib444
And correctly named: 'European' instead of 'EU'!
(yes, I see the .eu domain but that's minor)
buovjaga
There are existing sites like https://www.goeuropean.org/
Based on the creator of EU Tech Map having an AI-powered advertising company and the mistakes in the entries, I assume the site was populated using LLMs. For example, LibreOffice is incorrectly listed as being closed source, SaaS and paid: https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice
breppp
It took a minute to load the map points here, and I was sitting thinking this is an attempt at a clever joke
karel-3d
European startups, when they are successful, will eventually end up being bought by Oracle or move to USA. Such is life.
Manheim
The European digital scene isn't a pipeline problem; it's an institutional 'safe harbor' problem. We have world-class publicly funded research and education, and the talent, just look at the startup floor at Vivatech or WebSummit, but European Private Equity and late-stage capital remain structurally locked into 'Old Economy' models.
In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.
marsten
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable companies over startups.
No economy has both: (1) a predictable investment and work environment, and (2) a vibrant technology sector. You make your choices and you live with them.
brabel
Is Spotify US based? They did get listed on the NY Exchange but I think they are still headquartered in Sweden. Not that one example says much but if true, at least one tech giant managed to not succumb to American capital.
gib444
Perhaps attitudes will shift. Trying to type with a straight face: maybe the investors/owners will have a conscience and not sell out to the US
kkfx
EU tech alternative is FLOSS, not copy the model someone else did earlier and better. As an EU Citizen I reject the initiatives of the Commission, which moreover, is not elected but appointed through a mechanism where the will of the people never plays a part, whose goals are the sinicization of the EU and its destruction for partisan interests against ours.
To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
mathverse
There are no european alternatives. These are all european companies but they dont benefit the whole union.
If a germany company gets big it will eat other european markets leaving nothing in those markets and then beg Merz for more immigrants to Germany instead of hiring other europeans.
menaerus
Stop being racist. Immigrants are given the lowest level type of jobs which nobody wants to do anymore. Others are then prospering to better jobs. That's how you keep the economy growing.
gib444
It's not 2015 any more, people aren't buying that any more. Nuance is allowed in the discussion
menaerus
Buying exactly what? Bus and taxi drivers, people working in the supermarkets, in the low cost stores, food chains, delivery services, call agent support, then the workers in the industry plants etc etc
Are you suggesting that locals are doing that type of work?
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jakobnissen
But I can move freely to Germany and get employed there as an EU citizen. Or, my competitors in the job market do, leaving more jobs for men And taxes pain in Germany also goes to the common EU budget. So the success of a German company also benefits me in another EU country.
Isn’t the relationship exactly the same as a company in my country, but another town? I could also gripe that jobs in that other town will not pay my municipality’s taxes.
RobotToaster
The title is wrong as they only included EU/EEA/EFTA/UK companies, at least according to their faq page. Which would exclude multiple balkan countries and some others.
jamesblonde
They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.
mikae1
Was just looking at the map thinking: have the all moved to Gamla stan? :)
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leccy_wizard
The Paris addresses are definitely not correct, some may be, but the cluster near the Seine in the centre doesn't match where offices generally exist
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Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
edit: formatting