Would never use a cloud service simply because "its European", it's got to be better and cheaper than AWS.
Some people give it lip service in America for political points but they don't understand it on a fundamental level - most of them would turn around and complain about why google street view doesn't work in Germany.
I say this as someone who has bounced around between both sides of the pond
Obviously, the government would love to just pilfer around in the computers of private citizens and businesses without "filling out forms", but that's not a good reason to give it to them.
They don’t get to ‘pilver around the computers of private citizens’ though. Only those citizens directly affected by an existing hack (I read it as being under control of the hacker).
If I had the choice between just a nefarious hacker, and both the nefarious hacker and the NL security services having access to my PC I’d choose the latter.
Meanwhile Denmark: “It’s time to fill out your yearly tax declaration! Actually, you don’t have to bother! We already pulled your data from EVERYWHERE…”.
Still you need to put in everything again, each year.
But all three major clouds offer several European data centers so it's really not such a big deal.
"Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025"
https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable...
"The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030. Amazon said in a statement that it would roll this goal into a broader Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon across all its operations by 2040. That's a decade later than the 50% goal, which was called "Shipment Zero" at the time." [0]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-u...
Also worth noting that this is a target. And targets can always shift eg 2040, 2050, etc
Just make a green colored logo and website?
you either grow your own economy or become a vassal to someone else who does.
if europe keeps stagnating and america keeps posting 4% gdp growth, a day will come when the EU can pass as many laws as they like and it won't matter. it'll be like some shitpoor latin american country against united fruit.
The Chinese did it by just taking all the IP they could get as a requirement to sell in their nation
The Europeans did it by requiring companies to abide by their new law or pay out fines(basically a quasitax)
The capitalistic system is an addict to access to markets. Governments setup their various Guardrails to ensure that it can't entirely (i lack a nice word for this verb) their society and peoples.
the way things are going, there will eventually be an american company with a market cap greater than the GDP of France or Germany. at that point, they'll be making the real rules.
There's a lot of power in that.
USA GDP: $26.8 trillion
EU GDP: $17.1 trillion
There's a massive impoverished underclass in the US, who are not going to be able to drive much consumption.
GDP is an incredibly reductive measure.
This map speaks volumes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
This works only because EU is a relatively big and wealthy economy. If, say, Chile or Botswana tried to do the same, US companies would be like “lol, bye”. If, or when the Europe becomes just as poor as these relative to US, the incentive for US companies to stay in Europe and pay these ridiculous fines, will simply not be there, and so they will leave.
Thus, if Europe’s strategy is to impose more and more strict regulations and taxes on US companies, it must return to growing in wealth in power. Otherwise, this strategy will backfire: not only Europe will stay poor, but also the highly productive companies will exit it.
Have californians started thinking of Europe as poor?
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#differences-in-li...
and we can expect the new weight loss drugs to make a noticeable dent in that (at the cost of who-knows-what side effects, but they can't be as big a killer as obesity)