What if EU gives a year to American cloud providers to sell their companies to a European owner?
It's important to learn from the best. Considering the election meddling efforts from agents directly from within the US government who are also owner of large media and AI companies the only reasonable outcome would be either sell those companies to EU owners or guarantee exclusion from EU markets for national security reasons.
"...The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will provide customers the capability to meet stringent operational autonomy and data residency requirements within the European Union (EU), with infrastructure wholly located within the EU and operated independently from existing Regions. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will allow customers to keep all customer data and the metadata they create (such as the roles, permissions, resource labels, and configurations they use to run AWS) in the EU..."
EU tried hard to guarantee open markets through rules based security but this is now out of fashion. Instead, the new game is to close your markets to foreigners and say its for national security reasons.
This might be bad for the citizens as it is limiting and breaking the global humanity ideal and I hate it that this is happening but EU must be really stupid to have the only open market then get ridiculed for not having "global" tech companies.
As it appears, the world going forward would be like the Chinese "tech" will be for 1.4B people, the US "tech" will be to 330M people and the EU "tech" will be for 450M people.
At this time, because you can access the EU market form US you can just form your business in US and hire people from EU to do the work. If EU imposes limits, suddenly it makes sense to invest in EU.
If you think about it, EU+UK+Asia taxpayers educate most of the "US talent". Very few of the people who invented the tech are US educated, the US educated ones tend to be the money guy or the entrepreneur free riding on foreign tax money.
Time to end the EU subsidies to US companies or maybe impose tariffs to make up for it. US is being very bad for EU, doing very nasty stuff.
True, India is also a "tech" giant already. For them getting rid of foreigners is a piece of cake even if their average citizen is much poorer. The very large population is also an advantage.
I don't know about countries like Brazil etc. but I am sure that they will notice the benefits of having local companies too.
> EU must be really stupid to have the only open market then get ridiculed for not having "global" tech companies
I'm not sure how these are related. The EU has far less money than the US for speculative, big payoff investments, to my knowledge. That's why there's less chance of creating new companies (and new markets) compared to the US.
"Tech" is now mature, doesn't need much speculative capital to create the alternatives for US tech giants. Protection will do it, for example banning Google Maps can immediately enable its replacements to take over.
Moreover, EU actually has plenty of capital as savings per capita are significantly higher than US. They lack a nice fluid market for it as Europe is much more fragmented than the USA. Recently they announced the creation of a new regime to address that(something like a virtual country with simplified regulations).
The goal of such regulation would be to reduce the amount of influence US tech billionaires can exert over the EU. Any regulation would be written with that in mind, so an opco which would still be controlled from the US is not in line with that goal. At the very least, regulation could enforce that any opcos (more joint ventures at that point) would be at least 51% owned and operated by EU entities.
I get your comparison to the TikTok ban, but not even noyb is questioning the legality of transfers outside the EU to countries in general, whether pursuant to an European Commission adequacy decision or pursuant to Standard Contractual Clauses.
The problem is specifically that US law and policy will make both of those options unviable to guarantee the rights GDPR requires with respect to transfers to the US, once noyb gets the EU courts to state this clearly enough and invalidate the Commission’s adequacy decision for businesses which participate in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. (In the meantime, EU companies are allowed to rely on that decision.)
There are several non-EU countries with adequacy decisions whose validity nobody is questioning, including Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. Many more countries can adequately be handled through Standard Contractual Clauses. The problem is very US-specific.
I mean look, the details may vary but the core holds. The businesspeople running EUs communications are directly involved with the openly hostile US government and directly try to influence politics and create rage with the European public.
The current open markets model is not working, time to copy from the success stories: Ban foreign ones or force them to become local.
The current politicians are still in denial but as things deteriorate things will have to happen. Unlike US, European politics are not just two parties having about the same support.
Things can get very spicy very quickly. You think the anti-establishment ones are pro-American? The most pro-American politicians are those in power or those who recently lost power to the anti-establishment.
Pretty much non of the anti-establishent are pro-American(with the exception of UK with Farage) and with Musk targeting Farage I'm sure they took a note on how transactional their relationship with the US anti-establishment is.
Whichever factions and sentiments gain power in the EU, there's only so much they can do before hitting the major factor that's usually not spelled out explicitly in polite company, but generally understood: the US has nukes and aircraft carriers. We don't - or at least not enough to replace US in the role it plays in Europe's security.
I hope they won't be crazy enough to just bludgeon through that anyway, as past that, hic sunt dracones.
EU+UK has nukes and Aircraft carriers and even though minuscule to US, has the capacity to build more as the US security is no more.
Also, as it was revealed with the war in Ukraine, the Americans spend crazy money on their military but they don't get the best value for it. They failed to provide the Ukraine the necessary ammunition and apparently the costs were multiple times higher with no better outcome compared to the Russian ones.
In addition to that, the warfare changed significantly with the drones and its the Europeans(Ukraine + Turkey) who have the most experience with those - both in use and production.
Mentioning Turkey, it's actually one of the most formidable militaries with very capable military industry complex. Although it has it's differences with EU, it is an EU candidate country and its economy is fully integrated with EU.
Later on when things calm down with Russia, EU-Russia is actually a very fruitful relationship because Russia and EU are perfect match(one has the resources, the other has the technology) and that's why Europeans didn't want to believe that the war is possible.
There are many more reasons not to be pessimistic about Europe too.
"EU-Russia is actually a very fruitful relationship because Russia and EU are perfect match"
And this shows limitations of any political analysis that operates on the concept of EU.
Poland, Finland and Baltics are all in EU, and their relationship with Russia cannot be changed - core interests are completely opposite. The fact that these countries may buy russian gas if they need it doesn't change that.
Turkey and EU have a longstanding relationships with Turkey taking part in many of the EU institutions, like the customs union for example. In many ways Turkey acts as an industrial base for EU, many many EU companies have facilities in Turkey that serve EU.
Turkey is also in the Council of Europe, is in the jurisdiction of European Court of Human Rights(pays a lots of fines, unfortunately), European Border and Coast Guard Agency.
Turkey implemented GDPR compatible privacy laws, it has its infrastructure compatible and integrated with EU etc. Roads, electricity, gas, trains - everything is by the EU standards and integrated within the EU. Environment protection and worker rights are also not that far off. Turkey and EU fell apart only on political level and things like the upholding of the rule of law. In fact, Turkey is one secular government away from being full EU member.
For comparison with US, Turkey exports about $140B to EU and only about $14B to US. No matter the politics, it's EU what matters to Turkey and US is a distant 3rd with being only about %8 of the Turkish exports(Europe is %58).
"That's a few decades away, at best; have to wait through Putin's death, the collapse, the post-collapse warlord era, and the reconstruction."
Why? Germany already pushes for reconciliation, as they were hit the most.
For other countries in Central and Eastern Europe it doesn't matter who rules in Russia, as Russia interests are shaped by much grander forces, and those interests are opposite to those of Finland or Poland.
Let's stop looking at world through Marvel-like glasses. There are countries and nations, each with different interest shaped by the world and geography around them.
I don't see how banning foreign entities or forcing them to become local would help: many of the disruptive entities in Europe are locally owned.
Bolloré owns some major influential right-wing media in France, Axel Springer does the same in Germany (and even in the US - Politico), and so on. Axel Springer is also quite pro-American as well as being right-wing, and Bolloré is quite aligned with the North American right wing, both the anglophone and (in Quebec) francophone varieties. Plus the US Republican Party and the Conservative Party of Canada have major ties to EU member state Hungary and the current Orbán regime, which controls much of the media in that country.
All of these entities feed and profit off of rage, despite being EU-owned.
It seems like Oracle Cloud have tried to do something along these lines, with their "EU Sovereign Cloud". I'm not actually sure if it's open to everyone or by application only tho. https://www.oracle.com/uk/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/
The trend in EU is to tighten up regulation to the point where the achieved goals occurs fairly slow and steady. The goals are also not about ownership (there is no country called Europe, so what would it even mean?), but rather that the data and control remain within the jurisdiction of EU law and then ratified by each country.
The results so far has been that most large companies has local legal presence within Europe, EU data centers, EU specific contracts with customers, and recently EU specific features in applications. It basically salami-tactics. Part of this strategy is also to use the court system to enforce specific aspects, like how part of GDPR is just now getting enforced after a case in March in 2024 by EDPS. The case initiated in 2021, GDPR was written 2016, so it also illustrate the pace. In the time between 2016 and now there are multiple new regulations, and those will also take time before they are fully enforced.
I don't know about the hidden intentions but it appears that its time to switch the cutting style from salami to ribeye or arms and legs.
>here is no country called Europe, so what would it even mean?
Soon there will be, they are creating the 28th regime which is essentially a virtual country with a jurisdiction designed for speedy bureaucracy. I hope they do a good job with the implementation of the idea.
> but rather that the data and control remain within the jurisdiction of EU law
The fundamental problem is that EU and US law are incompatible. FISA allows the US to access any data from any US company no matter where it is located. It doesn't matter that the data is located in the EU, on a European server, manager by the European division of a company. As long as there exists a US parent company, FISA can compel the data. And that is fundamentally against the GDPR.
In my main job we provide SaaS services. We get more and more requests for "EU located" services.
A new trend I see is that some customers even rule out using EU located servers that are owned/run by US companies (such as the AWS Dublin or Franfurt locations).
Also EU daughter companies of US tech giants are still legally EU companies (owned by US companies) legally they have to strictly comply with EU law and it matters shit what US law says (from the EU legislative POV) so this puts them into a huge problem spot.
An EU company, even if it is owned by a US company, would not be subject to the Cloud Act and so should not find itself on the spot. The Cloud Act applies to whoever owns the data on the server, not to whoever owns the server.
Here's the situation it was designed to deal with. You've got a US company that has some documents. Law enforcement gets a subpoena requiring the company to turn over copies of those documents.
If the company has used some third party cloud storage provider to store those documents it has to retrieve them. It does this using the exact same procedure it would use if it was retrieving the documents for its own use. To the cloud storage provider this is just a routine data retrieval of a customer's data by the customer.
As far as I know if someone outside the EU buys cloud storage from an EU cloud storage provider, stores some files there, and later retrieves those files the EU provider will not get in trouble if that customer later did something with the files that would not be legal in the EU.
I'd be surprised if most countries don't have something equivalent. For example when German prosecutors were investigating VW after VW's emissions test cheating came to light if they had used whatever the German equivalent of a subpoena is to ask for copies of the emission system source code, would VW have been able to say "Sorry, we've got those in a private Github repository which happens to be hosted outside of the EU, so we can't get them for you"?
I suspect that the only reason the US actually had to have something like the Cloud Act and others don't is because only in the US could you have actually had a chance to succeed in saying that you cannot be compelled to turn over a document that you control and can legally retrieve at any time just because you happen to have it currently stored somewhere that the compelling government does not have jurisdiction over.
At present, no, of course not. No company maintains surplus capacity sufficient to absorb its competitors' business if they withdraw from or are excluded from the market. You'd assume in practice there'd have to be a transition period, during which the likes of Hetzner would be... busy.
(More likely, there's another round of negotiation, and some new bandaid solution is produced; not like it's the first time. No-one, or almost no-one, really _wants_ this to break down entirely; the fallout would be widespread.)
It does seem reasonable to expect that the rate of companies moving stuff out of US-based infrastructure providers will increase, though; the whole thing is very fragile.
You've got to imagine there are limits, tho. I note that Trump backed off most tariffs, at least for now, when the markets got unhappy (I mean, you could believe it was due to symbolic troop movements if you wanted, I suppose?) And cloud services to Europe are _big_ business; it would not be a small market shock.
If there were to be a major migration from AWS and Azure to the likes of Hetzner, OVH and friends, also, that would likely be _permanently_ lost business for US megacorps; no-one does that sort of migration unless they really have to, so it's improbable that anyone would move back if and when the situation was resolved.
I thought he only backed off the Canadian tariffs, and only because there were retaliatory tariffs plus some symbolic concession? The China ones and the de minimis change are still in place.
Bezos turning up at the inauguration and directing the WaPo to not endorse Harris are strong hints that Amazon is probably going to be fine, but I would say that nothing is certain when dealing with someone who's deliberately unpredictable and willing to threaten allies.
Those were completely inevitable, though; the game theory behind all this stuff essentially requires them.
> plus some symbolic concession
A really utterly meaningless one, though. I'm fairly convinced that pissed-off markets were the major factor.
> I thought he only backed off the Canadian tariffs, and only because there were retaliatory tariffs plus some symbolic concession? The China ones and the de minimis change are still in place.
Also Mexico. I'd suspect most of the Chinese ones aren't long for this world, either.
But this isn't just cloud infra / platform like AWS etc right, but also various SaaS products. e.g. Office 365, gsuite, github etc. Are there even equivalent (enough) versions of all those that are not only hosted but owned by EU companies?
Those are also less _critical_/replaceable, though. Up until recently, most companies didn't use cloud-y office things, they used, typically, Microsoft Office 2xxx (ie the non-cloud version). Microsoft's cloud-y Office solution is only 7 years old; while Google's is older, it wasn't taken particularly seriously for a long time. Many companies (actually I would suspect _most_ companies) _still_ use on-prem Office/Sharepoint Server/Exchange Server setups, and Microsoft still sells this stuff (Office 2024 LTSC is the latest one for enterprise, Office 2024 for consumers).
As for Github, self-hosted or vendor-hosted GitLab would be the obvious solution (self-hosted Github _is_ a thing, but only for large enterprises IIRC); other GitHub-like things are available.
I also suspect that Github in particular, and maybe MS, could, if desired, rework their services such that they didn't actually touch personal data in a form that they could disclose to the US government (which is the core issue here). This could be managed via using a third-party auth service (which typically these sort of services already support for enterprise integrations) and, for the Office-y apps, end-to-end encryption.
Replacing AWS and Azure and friends would in many ways be the big problem, especially if all this were to happen quickly (in practice, there'd almost inevitably be a significant grace period if things broke down). There's a big capacity problem there; all of these sorts of services operate basically at capacity, because economically it makes no sense to do anything else. That said, in the doomsday scenario, Amazon et al would presumably end up selling off a lot of data centres in Europe (restricted to only non-personal-data applications, they'd need fewer).
I agree each thing is not difficult to replace, but replace all SaaS products that are used might be more challenging. Some data out there from a quick google is saying companies use on average 300+ SaaS products. Not all of them are going to be from US companies, but probably a large amount is, so we're looking at probably over a hundred or 2 of products that need to be replaced with local or EU ones across all companies in Europe. That seems like a lot of work and disruption.
Oh, yeah, it’d be a complete nightmare for everyone involved. But it’s likely doable; in particular providers would be _strongly_ incentivised to provide compliant solutions (again, many SaaS providers could manage this by avoiding directly touching PII).
According to [1] "Synergy Research Group data indicated that since early 2017, the collective market share of European cloud players including SAP, Deutsche Telekom, OVHcloud, Telecom Italia, Orange has dropped from 27% to just 13% in their home territory. In the past year alone, their share has dropped around two percentage points. In contrast, Amazon, Google and Microsoft now account for 72% of the regional market."
Doing without would be extremely painful in the short/medium term.
Of course if you could instead force AWS to sell the EU arm of their business, that would be a different matter...
What is the time span until it need to be fully enforced? Regulations are rarely if ever instantaneous. For the industry I work in (___domain name, hosting, email, and similar services), you start to hear about it when they are being drafted, when they are about to be voted on, when they have been voted on, when it get ratified, when they get a date for when they are going to start being enforced, and once they are being enforced there is a generally a grace period of getting into compliance.
For a lot of stuff this is process that takes 10+ years. A fairly large step is the time between a EU regulation being created and when the same law is ratified by each country, and the span between those two events where the government seeks input from the industry on how to implement the regulation.
> I'm guessing the merges originate from everywhere in the world.
That is exactly the issue, when globalisation comes to an end as we are seeing it.
Why do you think many nations are already having their distro?
Naturally they aren't the kind of countries we would like to live on, but apparently we should not source all key infrastructure components from a country that is turning into 1984 as well.
EU should make a own cloud storage (hosted in the EU) giving every citizen 10GB of base storage after applying for it. Cloud is critical infrastructure. Besides, that would lift also the favorability of the EU.
US no, but a lot of people do actually choose to share their personal data with China instead of their own country. The reason being: their own country can use it to persecute them, but what would China possibly do with it?
When I save things to Google Drive, my data could legally be snooped on in three ways:
1. My national government, by court order or sketchy secret court order.
2. Google, who are in the business of tracking and profiling.
3. The US government, by court order or sketchy secret court order.
A person might hope cloud storage provided by a national government would reduce the snooping by two thirds.
Of course, that analysis ignores risks like the service getting hacked, my account getting hacked, and suchlike - which some would say are much bigger risks.
As an enthusiast I of course make encrypted on-site backups, which I then protect by syncing to a cloud provider, and I protect the encryption secrets with a password manager, and protect the password manager and cloud accounts with a U2F key, and protect the U2F key with two spare U2F keys in off-site secure locations.
I can understand, though, that most of the population doesn't want such complexity, and prefers to be able to reset forgotten passwords without losing their data.
Treating your cloud provider as an hostile adversary is a useful security advice, through I would personally prefer to not give a hostile adversary my data in the first place.
I was late to reply but this question is good. Here's the answer why I do not trust my country and trust foreign countries. No offense please, it is just my thoughts and personal opinion after years if being treated well by my own government.
Imagine this: You are a US citizen, and during COVID your kid gets a rash on their ass. You take a photo and send it to the doctor via some google service. Then google flags it, reports you to the police, and now you're in "the game", even though you did nothing wrong and were a responsible parent.
Same thing but if you had used a chinese service like Tencent (i do not know what they have as apps), nobody would care what medical images you're sending. So, who’s actually the bigger risk to your privacy and security?
And this is only the basic use case. Now imagine you're a drug dealer and you want to host your blog post explaining what experiments you did in your basement with different compounds. I guess north korean hosting companies will be your best bet.
And also I am pretty sure the opposite direction works as well, if you want to say that your president looks like a certain animated character, better use some US or EU company that have no business interests in your country.
The average person uses a big cloud provider already and I don't think they particularly care if it's Google Drive, iCloud, or "EU Cloud". All 3 are susceptible to the same searches by the authorities.
If you're concerned about that, you use your own E2EE anyway.
A lot of people here seem to be interpreting "Cloud" as as "public Cloud infrastructure provider". Note that this isn't just a question of AWS, Azure and GCP. It's about any kind of hosted services. So it would also apply to things like Dropbox, Slack, Gmail, WhatsApp, iCloud, etc.
(But it also wouldn't be a ban on personal use of such services, as long as the user consents. It'd "just" be very hard to use those services in business or government.)
Heyyy, I quite liked Symbian OS! And if this means that Linux would finally work on hardware other than Thinkpads from 20 years ago, I say heck yeah (Out of the box I mean, having to become an expert linux afficionado to be able to make its x11/wayland/xwayland clusterfuck to work does not count as working)!
Symbian Belle on C7 and E8 was already quite sweet, for users, and for developers we were finally moving away from Symbian C++, with Qt and PIPS, Eclipse based IDE...
It already is in practice. You can't legally use cloud services for "red" (personal information) or "black" (national security) data in most jurisdictions.
Some organizations that are deeply invested in a given tech provider do it anyway, but this is gradually going away.
One thing is a bit unclear here. US headquartered cloud providers have physical data centers in EU. Would this also prevent EU businesses from using those?
Yes. US law says in no uncertain terms that the us government can demand anything from its companies, including breaking the law in foreign countries. And that was before big tech decided to collude with an administration who doesn’t care about the law.
For US companies to be in the clear, they would have to split their EU subsidiaries in such a way that the US branch could not access their EU operations or ship new patches, and would not have operational oversight.
Technically they also have EU daughter companies operating this services etc. this are legally seen EU companies and have to strictly comply with EU law no matter what US law says.
But US law like cloud act is a broad overreach of US law into other countries.
Which puts them into a tough spot where there parent company has to comply with US law and give US access to their EU daughter company but their daughter company must not allow them such access at all and if they would use technical means to get it anyway it would be legally no different then a cyberattack....
It's not the physical ___location of data that matters, it's the authority and control over the infrastructure and the data it holds.
In other words, if a US authority has any say on what's running/hosted in data centers in EU, it's a no go for more and more businesses and administrations.
Worth noting that there is a European company (I believe headquartered in Sweden) whose mission is to build an EU-first cloud to compete with the large US offerings.
Evroc[1] is their name and I’ve been following them for a few years now. They raised a large amount in 2023 [2] and looks like they’ve just broken ground on land to build a data center just last week [3]
Very curious on how this will work for them and I plan on following their journey very closely. Any EU-based cloud engineers should apply to join!
Hi! Sorry I didn’t mean to offend. I just thought it was a cool project I wanted to share. I didn’t mean to disparage or put down any other company or offering
I suspect that this is going to fall into the "nothing ever happens" bucket.
What they're implying is that it is illegal for US companies to comply with EU law.
This is significantly different than the EU enforcing the GDPR extraterritorially since that's basically just an increased cost of doing business in Europe and is apparently worth it.
But if the US companies have to choose between complying with US extraterritorial law or EU extraterritorial law they're going to have to choose the US, for obvious reasons.
It doesn't seem to me that convenient legal subsidiary structures or data physicality setups are gonna work here.
The effect of US companies withdrawing cloud services would be devastating to the EU. Imagine if you could no longer access your gmail or outlook account, your apple or google photos disappear , whatsapp shuts down, all you companies documents are no longer accessible on Office365 or G drive.
The results would be indistinguishable from a massive cyber attack and would take decades to recover from.
There's just no way the EU would inflict a wound of this magnitude on itself.
Indeed. The EU will search for a way to keep allowing citizen data on American intelligence agencies, because there simply is no alternative politically affordable. It would take American SWAT teams regularly raiding the streets of Belgium and Paris, in plain daylight, and equivocally arresting French/Belgian cafe owners for having abortions (and thus violating Mississippi state laws), for the EU to do the right thing.
> The results would be indistinguishable from a massive cyber attack and would take decades to recover from.
It would be painful, yes, but it wouldn't "take decades to recover from", not even years. These services, technically, aren't so difficult to recreate, if you have a big enough market.
Very naive. The services are potentially replaceable, the data is not.
That's not even considering the political backlash. How do you explain to your population that their digital lives have been permanently deleted because of a trans-national legal spat they don't care about?
Outing myself as European here, but we've had a lot better results with privately owned businesses that are not 100% beholden to grow for their shareholders.
FYI, there is already a type of deployment called "sovereign cloud" where data exports are controlled by the country and already under works by major providers.
Hetzner is not US-headquartered, so I'd say it should not be possible for the US government to make Hetzner turn out data from its EU locations.
They will most certainly be able to make the US subsidiary of Hetzner turn out any kind of data it technically has access to. But if Hetzner is not entirely stupid (and they are usually pretty smart) they set up their internal networks such that the US admins cannot access data located in the EU.
The problem with EU subsidiaries of Amazon and Microsoft is that the principal corporation is located in the US and subject to US jurisdiction, and that eventually, the owning company is always able to make a subsidiary comply with its demands, so it's virtually impossible to set up an impenetrable barrier between them. It's the other way round with Hetzner. A subsidiary can't command the owning company around, not even if the US government wants it to.
Honestly most non lobbyist people here in the EU has been expecting this to fall apart sooner or later, even without Trump.
Some companies have gone further and not only are assuming data transfer to the EU will become illegal but also that European daughter companies (e.g. MS) might become illegal for some use-cases (e.g. lawyer documents).
EU holds all the cards here. Aws and azure have everything to lose. Europe has competitors but the offerings are fragmented between different companies. If they come together then yes they can have replacement for most users. Most users don't need bleeding edge features. Painful but can be done. Definitely not impossible.
> Thousands of EU businesses, government agencies or schools rely on these provisions. Without the TADPF, they would need to stop using US cloud providers like Apple, Google, Microsoft or Amazon instantly.
They will just write up a new deal, which will be legal until it is declared illegal by a court after half a decade of litigation. Rinse, repeat. This has been going on for ages already.
This would be incredibly funny to follow. Fax machines and mainframes would make an impressive return, as Europe moves even more towards a more relaxed pace.
Mainframes wouldn't be that bad; give me a mainframe client (we have a few) any day over a 'move fast break things we now use the latest wasm kubernetes micro nano services backplane react liveview fiber cloud' crap that somehow breaks literally every day, even without deploying.
There was at least a lot more sex with ms-dos as your partner wouldn't be very importantly commenting 5 depressed bananas to some shite post about nothing while you try to get them all fired up.
Fully with you on dropping Windows, and I don’t think cloud really has positive ROI vs building or hosting in a lot of cases. There are a lot of good cases though, scaling, access etc.
No, Europe will not go back to the Stone Age. US services will be substituted for somewhat shittier European services. That’s how it goes. On average, everyone will be worse of. The European customer loses, US tech loses, European tech wins.
I’m somewhat surprised about this kind of gleeful condescension in this particular forum, of all places.
I think this is essentially the exact same approach as the "bring back US electronics/heavy industry"-- you subsidise a sector (either directly, via regulation or tariffs). This can have positive outcomes (crisis tolerance, less reliance on international trade), but all those jobs that it brings, are basically paid for fully by additional costs for taxpayers/consumers (and there are also negative side effects on other sectors).
I think this is currently in vogue globally (both sides of the political spectrum), but its important to remember that we had good reaons to stop doing this in the past (or at least scale it down to absolutely vital sectors like agriculture).
Import substitution is one of these ideas that sounds great but seldom works out as intended. Bureaucracies instead of markets now pick winners, and their picks tend to be significantly worse. I really hope they are smart about it and treat this as a measured retaliation against easily substitutable products like twitter, Facebook and gmail, maybe cloud hosting and Amazon marketplace. There is zero chance of any initiative to produce a competitive office suite or operating system, but there will be undoubtedly real pressure to burn billions of taxpayer euros to try exactly that.
I sort of agree, except they are already picking by making Office their IT procurement choice. Choosing to only use documents in .odf format would definitely do something, and they could start funding bugs etc in whatever libraries/office software would bring value to their org.
That makes me think, would Linux, having been made in Finland originally, fall under an export restriction if it came to that? I mean it's open source and thus can no longer be contained but still, interesting thought experiment in what would happen if linux was no longer allowed to be used from one day to the next.
The threat model is that the US government can either a) force the US-based employees of a US company to copy the data from EU to US and hand it to the US authorities, b) if not possible, force the US-based employees to order the EU-based employees in their reporting chain to copy the data from EU to US, or c) if not possible, order the company to circumvent any technical measures they have in place to make such copying of data impossible.
And we will spend 100x times less on infra, nourish our own industry and redirect the money to the improvement of our electrical grid and local subsidies.
I am all for it.
As someone working for the public administration I've long been worried about the decline of skills of IT workers here in Europe. It is especially flagrant in email infrastructure.
Since we are offshoring email to Microsoft for a long time already, we totally forgot how to manage email internally for the few cases when we still need it.
This won't happen, the broligarchs will tap him on the shoulder and remind him who is really in charge and who has the actual money and not junk coins. There will be a diplomatic answer to this soon, it's not a fight he will stand his ground on.
Russia has been struggling to conquer Ukraine in conventional warfare, with limited weapon imports from US/EU. Let's be real here: they don't really stand a chance against the EU.
Trump administration uses ALL levers to achieve goals, so if EU will push too hard against US companies... Canada, Denmark, Mexico examples show - a deal will me made.
It's rather problematic for service providers in the USA: Europe is quite a huge market to lose (as well as a significant source for talents), and other markets may as well follow the switch.
There _are_ working alternatives locally for businesses and administrations, only small because so far, most preferred to procure from the USA.
Now that there is a significant incentive not to do so anymore, maybe europeans providers will get a chance to grow and improve.
Why would that be? There are plenty of local offerings and they're often cheaper, too. They might not be as well marketed or polished, but at the end of the day, most businesses just need some servers, nothing fancy.
The EU company I work for is pretty security conscious and already implements this almost completely (the exception being a few industry specific niche apps). What do you think would be missing?
It's important to learn from the best. Considering the election meddling efforts from agents directly from within the US government who are also owner of large media and AI companies the only reasonable outcome would be either sell those companies to EU owners or guarantee exclusion from EU markets for national security reasons.