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Comment by kapsteur | Hacker News Reader

It's time for EU services to shine.

They haven't shined in 25 years. We will just be forced to use inferior products.

Come on mate, you're likely listening to music via a EU service (Spotify) and you were calling people with a EU service (Skype) before a US corporation bought it and ruined it.

Well this might open a HUUUGE market for Analytics in the EU. We might see some competition rise and a good (better?) product emerge.

Precisely. If demand for European cloud services rises companies WILL spring up to deliver. That's basic economics.

Hell it could be the next Boeing-Airbus saga for all we know. The Chinese certainly don't seem particularly bothered telling the US to go fuck itself.

Ahah, of course during a period of time. Look at DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/traffic they benefited a lot from the changes imposed on their competitors.

DDG uses Bing for most of its searches though, so this is not exactly a good comparison :)

Hetzner is the best hosting provider for dedicated servers (if you care about price). Gridscale is pretty good. The original Skype was a very solid product. Spotify still owns the digital music market.

I once worked in a non-tech company and was tasked with finding new hosting infrastructure for their web apps / sites. I proposed two dedicated servers from Hetzner for about 350 EUR / month. Instead of being happy about the small cost, the CEO rather said "that's too cheap to be any good!" and asked me to specifically to move the apps to AWS because some golf buddy and his company were using that. So now they're paying thousands instead of hundreds. But as long as the CEO is happy. I moved on because at the same time they were extremely stingy with salaries.

Hetzner sucks if you care about support and not being arbitrarily blocked & banned without recourse or explanation.

Can't confirm, have been running stuff on Hetzner for almost 10 years. They will indeed auto-block you if any application is spamming the private subnet - happens e.g. with IPFS running in its default config. But this always comes after warnings and with an exact explanation of what happened (log of IPs the server attempted to connect to, timestamps etc). I always found support responsive, even in the middle of the night. It may be that I was lucky all the time, despite interacting with various support staff in various of their data centers. Or it may be that your issues had other reasons...

I'll take that in exchange for better privacy.

We have IRC and it shines bright!

But seriously: Google just needs to move the problematic part of their EU business into EU and start complying.

If I'm understanding this correctly there is nothing google can actually do. The problem is the US Cloud Act as the linked article mentions, which is in direct violation of article 44 of GDPR.

it is not so easy for Google. The US side will always demand stuff from them. At least for having the ability.

Microsoft once had the right™ offering: Deutsche Telekom running the Azure data center, so it's the same software etc., but legally fully separated. Didn't get many customers (I don't know what kind of restrictions there were)

AFAIK that company only ever had one customer: the German government.

Cloudflare currently uses a similar arrangement with JD Cloud to offer service in China. It'd be pretty funny if they had to use the same approach in Europe.

The Chinese seem to have a better grasp on sovereignty and power than the EU.

It is just as easy as it is to run EU things in the US.

Google can run the same servers and stuff in Europe with European stuff in their own servers. They just disable things not allowed in EU and don't send user data to the US.

Based on the results of GDPR, it'll probably just result in more annoying sites that users will avoid due to all of the pop up banners. Hopefully I'm wrong, I wish there was strong competition from Europe

An optimistic take would be that this forces European companies to think through their analytics/ad needs again, perhaps resulting in less invasive solutions and thus fewer popups/banners and improved privacy.

At least that is what I'm hoping for, however unrealistic it might be.

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