I'd guess a reasonable start at delivering near-equivalent capabilities, capacity, and reliability from a standing start today, in just Europe, to be about €50b. The shopping list isn't all that tough. Who wants to pony up?
European cloud providers already exist, and companies from industries and countries where data protection is regulated are already happy clients (see Swiss FINMA, and German governments required by law to carefully respect GDPR).
Maybe an influx of business will make us grow the European clouds, but that's ok, we're up to it.
There are reports that they want to sell the US branch to Musk as a contingency if their appeal to the Supreme Court doesn't work. So this whole thing might wind up making things even worse.
I don't think TikTok shutting down is great for its users (of which I am one). There are genuine areas of concern but I have concerns about US based social platforms as well.
It's hard to unpick these thoughts and it's harder to decide what a good outcome would look like.
Looking at a lot of user's feeds, its algo doesn't feel as "rage-baity" as the ones from YT or Insta. Even normal platforms, like FB and Twitter push rage bait to the top. TikTok seems to avoid those pitfalls in a lot of cases.
In general the algorithm seems flexible to me; on TikTok I find it easy to scroll away or flag unwanted content as "do not show again"; and in my experience the algorithm adjusts well to that.
I feel like as an individual user, I'd rather have my social media data siphoned off by a foreign government than my own. On a societal level, having everyone's data siphoned off by a foreign government and being subjected to political influence is undesirable.
it's worse than that: nobody knows! how are we supposed to know if all the investment vendor A made in "reliability" of their appliance will actually work, or if it was just spent wastefully? And oops: past results don't reflect future outcomes, so you can't even really bank on a brand or a reputation: who knows if they just cut all Q/A staff? Welcome to entropy my friends!
It's because buying things allows you to see the price of the thing, which means that will be the first and last thing you evaluate: quality is radically harder to quantify, so we resort to evaluating on the thing that comes in an easy quantity. Sellers are thus always incentivized to figure out how to make the price low, since basically all other factors can't be rigorously evaluated until after the sale...
... not quite. I worked directly with the folks involved on getting more RCA details public. This customer used a single product on GCP, a specific type of VMware hosting, and the "subscription" to that product failed, which turned those resources off. It's more like turning off all their VM's, rather than deleting their entire account, identities, access structures, etc.
The reporting on that was a bid muddy with Google and Unisuper officially saying different things in different places. Regardless, calling it "more like turning off all their VM's" sounds like heavily downplaying the reality. The downtime alone confirms it was way more than that.
From their joint statement [0]:
> when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies.
> an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.
> UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss
Strangely enough on this last point a Google blog post [1] says:
> This incident did not impact: The customer’s data backups stored in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) in the same region.
