They could apply Chinese policy and require foreign cloud corporations to have locally owned partners that will own the technology produced locally.
Of course, the question is very much how the courts will see ^
This feels like a misunderstanding of the situation. China used that tactic in cases where the Chinese people didn't know how to how to build or do a thing, and it would have taken a long time to rediscover. Saudi Arabia uses the same tactic for the same reasons.
Europe is full of people who know how to build a big cloud. It's not easy, and there's certainly learning-by-doing required, but as the author observes many of the people who work on the US clouds are from Europe or India or still live there. The knowledge transfer has been happening continuously since the start and in both directions.
The reason Europe hasn't produced a competitor on the scale of AWS is simply because that business model is the exclusive preserve of already large tech companies. AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud are all the products of huge firms that already had tens of thousands of software engineers and (with the exception of AWS) pre-existing very profitable businesses. They could afford to sink vast sums of treasure into buildouts well ahead of demand, and subsidize their clouds using the other businesses until they had been able to catch up with Amazon. In addition, they all had large pre-existing tech ecosystems to leverage.
European countries have failed to produce tech companies on that scale for all sorts of well analyzed reasons. Moaning about cloud specifically is of no use, it's just a symptom not a cause. The causes meanwhile are the usual grab bag of uncompetitive compensation (a symptom of being poor, it's a feedback loop), bad laws that retard innovation and yet which never get fixed (due to the prevalence of governments that are explicitly suspicious of companies being successful), and finally the culture of US firms which is very globalist, collaborative and internally open, making them pleasant places to work for the people in Europe who have the right skills.
Look at it this way - would a skilled engineer rather work on AWS, having global impact under a global brand selling to every kind of customer imaginable and justifying its existence through technical innovation, or on an explicitly parochial "Eurocloud" whose highest dream is merely cloning what AWS was ten years ago, and which exists for no better reason than some domestic politicians being unwilling to resolve their differences with one specific US administration?
It's just a fundamentally unappealing proposition even if pay was good, therefore, it won't happen.
This may be the way to go. It seems common in countries like China, India, Brazil, ME / Gulf countries.
Tariffs are a trade disabler, so in general a loose-loose proposition.
Tariffs are the exact opposite of subsidies; though a tariff applied globally to all imports of a class is, I guess, sonewhat similar to a subsidy to domestic products of that class.
Subsidies give money to selected market participants.
Tariffs take money from selected market participants.
They are, exactly, opposites.
They are similar in that they are government interventions in the marketplace, which under simplistic ideal-market assumptions have net costs which must be born somewhere, but at that level every possible government action is "the same thing".
> Both increase prices for the the consumer it’s just they end up having to pay for the subsidy indirectly through taxes and such instead of having to pay a higher price.
No, they don't. "The consumer", "current taxpayers", and "future taxpayers" are different-but-overlapping groups of people.