What do people think? Am I worrying about nothing?
Having said that, I can’t really see the benefits of the BBC building their own AWS any more than I can for building their own power stations (provided the dependency is abstracted and can easily be swapped for a competitor).
I guess its somewhat similar to the situation with the transmitter masts, which are owned by Canadians and Australians: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arqiva
Foreign subsidies don’t result in a net transfer of wealth if they undercut your otherwise competitive domestic industry, for obvious reasons. It results in a misallocation of capital and the erosion of opportunities that should have otherwise existed domestically.
All countries engage in free market distortion, to varying degrees. That may well be a suboptimal use of their resources, but unfortunately it also hurts countries that don’t respond in kind and who have bought into some simplified economic policy slogans.
I would rather have seen they host it physically within the borders of the country, with a 'good' local hosting/cloud provider.
The added cost is the cost of that kind of 'security'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Primarily the CLOUD Act amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
Most modern countries have backdoor privacy systems, 5 eyes was literally designed for it since they can't spy on their own citizens, they have a group from another allied country do it and give them the info.
I think that if the order is not legal in the UK, AWS doesn't have to comply with a US judge
Do they?
That said, if they do need to move out, it would be manageable - setting up a lambda runner on self-owned hardware is pretty straightforward I believe, and everything else can be otherwise virtualized, so they aren't bound to AWS' infrastructure. In theory.