How Trump's second term just made digital sovereignty a European priority
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* In the UK the NHS and a number of other government services use AWS heavily.
* A lot of businesses all over the world use AWS, Cloudflare, Google Drive and other "cloud" and similar services. Some of these are quite hard to move off. This includes critical businesses such as banks.
* I believe most Windows users now really on MS accounts to login to their PCs
* The vast majority of mobile devices rely on Google or Apple for updates and software installation, as do almost all desktops (a few Linux and BSD users aside).
* American companies dominate payment systems.
Any one of these gives US companies a huge amount of control. The most effort to put alternatives in place have been made by countries that are hostile to the US - such as Russia and China - not an attractive alternative.
Governments moving to sovereign services is not enough - if the US can cripple your private sector you are finished anyway.
There is no easy, quick or cheap solution.
But I think the thing you have to consider, and the thing US companies should fear, is if the Tariffs make this a case for a serious commitment. If I'm in the EU right now, I'm looking at all of my dependencies on US, and I'm wondering how many jobs I can create by investing in separating myself from these services ASAP. And given that the US is about to be crippled in their buying power of any silicon I would fully expect to be able to build out Data Centers in the very near future on the relatively cheap because the competition just got hamstrung in the market.
Additionally, you can turn up software pretty quickly and just iterate on it with a small number of developers. The problem they have to solve isn't "how do I write software?" The problem they have to solve is "how do I deploy that software." And the US just gift-wrapped them cheap DataCenters by starting a trade war with the major chip manufacturers.
Which ones? I can't name a single American one that "dominates". Maybe that's just my perspective but the American payment systems feel decades behind.
At least in the NL we have iDeal and through EPI (European Payments Initiative) it should become the standard in the EU https://ideal.nl/en/epi-successfully-completes-acquisition-o...
Then there's Klarna as well, which I think is pretty big in the EU.
And now you have Apple & Google Pay for people using their smartphone
You add PayPal to that and... you cover the companies that are the most widespread overall in Europe
Each country has its own set of local systems, but, overall, the most commons are americans
There is also Maestro (owned by Mastercard), but most banks have already switched away to Visa/Mastercard.
After looking to see what it is about, I can tell you that even though I have accounts in three of the "Founding Shareholders", I never heard of it, they never pushed it to me and I only saw references to Wero in one of their app, but I had to look closely for it.
So I have doubts regarding you statement about "it should become the standard in the EU"
* There's no existing infrastructure. OVH and Hetzner are great for smaller projects and businesses, but no serious enterprises and governments are using them, as far as I know. There's no real alternatives to Android, iOS and Windows. (Sorry, folks; not the year of the Linux desktop quite yet.)
* It's expensive and time-consuming. The on-prem to cloud migration took decades for most (and is still ongoing for many!); even if a viable alternative existed right now, migrating from AWS to a domestic cloud service is a 5+ year project that distracts from other initiatives.
* Compounding on the above, business leaders still largely expect this to be a one-time event, believing there's low likelihood this policy would last past 2028. You're not going to see much beyond research and planning for at least 4 years, before anyone commits to investing hundreds of millions in a massive tech migration.
* Besides all that, where do you actually move to, specifically? You can say "the EU," but given the rise of populism in the region, are you confident enough to bet $500m that there won't be a "Gexit", "Frexit" or "Swexit"? Is every country in the EU going to make their own Amazon-scale cloud provider and Windows-scale operating system? Seems unrealistic.
The most realistic outcome is that MS, Meta, and Alphabet all continue to push region-specific data residency for their cloud platforms and OS'es, so customers are more insulated against foreign policy changes... and charge European customers more for the trouble.
There were some French government stuff running on OVH, because some of them were knocked out by the OVH fire.
There are a lot of big businesses that run traditional data centres or their own cloud.
> t's expensive and time-consuming. The on-prem to cloud migration took decades for most (and is still ongoing for many!); even if a viable alternative existed right now, migrating from AWS to a domestic cloud service is a 5+ year project that distracts from other initiatives.
Entirely true, partly because AWS is designed for lockin! I realise there are other issues.
> Compounding on the above, business leaders still largely expect this to be a one-time event, believing there's low likelihood this policy would last past 2028. You're not going to see much beyond research and planning for at least 4 years, before anyone commits to investing hundreds of millions in a massive tech migration
I would argue governments should push for this anyway. it is a weakness to rely on foreign suppliers.
> Besides all that, where do you actually move to, specifically? You can say "the EU," but given the rise of populism in the region, are you confident enough to bet $500m that there won't be a "Gexit", "Frexit" or "Swexit"? Is every country in the EU going to make their own Amazon-scale cloud provider
The big ones probably can. The smaller ones can band together and agree to what is shared. e.g. operators can share the software that runs them, but have data centres in each country that are controlled purely locally.
> and Windows-scale operating system?
The OS does not have to be per country if it does not do things like requiring cloud services for logins or built in cloud storage, or if it has those then only those bits need to be in country (location and control).
For both the last you can cooperate with countries that you can deal with on a reasonably equal basis - pretty much anyone other than the two super powers.
The real question whether any migration to cloud was really necessary, or even a cost saving in the end.
Cloud could be considered a brain drain, in a sense.
If there were a tariff-induced mass migration off AWS/GCP/Azure by enterprises, it would be to a competing cloud vendor, not back to on-prem.
Evidence for that?
Long answer: There's no movement among major businesses to move off cloud providers, only putting more stuff onto. Every "we moved our stuff back on-prem and saved tons of money!" post I see on HN is from companies with miniscule (<$10k/month) cloud spend anyway.
For transparency, I have some bias since I worked at AWS. But the biggest competitors we saw while I was there were other cloud providers, not people moving back on-prem.
Otherwise FULL ACK
For example I can't tell if they have serverless offerings (particularly FaaS)
Their public facing website is very similar to OVH or Scaleway
Their Terraform provider is... not reassuring
I guess from your username that you may have more intel about them, so I'm interested!
But I think, also the EU customers and businesses reaching for such a cloud product are also responsible to make it work. So if you are working for a bigger company, why not find a solution together with the service providers based in the EU. Otherwise we get a hen and egg problem here.
I don't work for a big company but work for/advise multiple companies of various sizes.
For clients already on a public cloud, there's no way they'll want to make a new migration if 80% is not just adapting Terraform code to the new provider.
For those thinking about going on a public cloud, they are still (for now) prioritizing costs and stability; they don't want to invest in a project where they'll have to bear part of the partner's R&D costs; in this case they'd rather invest in their own on-prem/private cloud setup.
I think the only thing that could really change the hen&egg problem (completely agree with you on this) is EU putting tariffs on US tech services. If the three US public clouds cost 30% more one morning, companies will start thinking about working with other partners. But then it's going to be a FFA with everyone trying to migrate to EU clouds with a very limited supply and I don't see how it could end well...
I would argue several countries and the EU as a whole is seriously committed to it, but this commitment comes with usual European caveats: it will be slow and expensive. But it is happenning.
https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/EN/202...
> American companies dominate payment systems.
I think SEPA dominates payment systems and anything else is only a layer above than can be replaced. And there are several widely used country-specific systems that are not American.
> Governments moving to sovereign services is not enough - if the US can cripple your private sector you are finished anyway.
Moving government services is a necessary first step.
> There is no easy, quick or cheap solution.
Yes.
TFA is about how it became a priority since January, so that's hardly surprising. Presumably now that it is a priority the commitment level will be changing.
Well, not really
For example in Poland you have Blik which is really robust
... and yet American companies dominate payment systems in Europe. And in Poland too. Having a choice doesn't mean that the leading option is not dominating the other ones.
I have started moving some personal stuff to Codeberg and statichost.eu.
I might try OnlyOffice. I've never really gelled with LibreOffice due to the UI.
My organisation has recently gone all in on MS intune/O365. Its been happening gradually but accelerated recently. I think some heavy taffies might make us look at it again, but probably not.
It would take an EU directive pushing "open source or EU sourced" down our govt's collective throats, and a few decades, to actually implement.
Instead I suspect it'll lead to many loud initiatives, a few €B to the usual players, and a quiet promise to Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and others to not to worry.
russia/china are rushing to stand up their own as well.
Each sphere of influence will need to operate their own.
Obviously, there were always disagreements, but they were mostly limited to local decisions. Europe might have stronger regulations, for example, but that, by and large, did not impact the US directly; it only impacted how US companies were allowed to behave in the European market.
So I don't think anyone saw a huge problem with importing a lot of digital services from the US, particularly since this leveled out some of the US trade deficit. We shipped goods to the US, and the US sold digital services to us.
Nobody expected a US president who effectively behaves in the way you would expect a Russian asset to behave. In hindsight, this was wrong, but I don't think it was obvious that one could or should predict this during Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, or even Trump's first term.
To some it might seem that side was the side of leftism, progresism, wokeism and globalization.
From my pov the EU left those things behind. France is a recent example where they banned the front runner marine le pen from running. This is after a suspicious move to remove democratic options in order to defeat her in the last election?
France also had the ability to warrantlessly do home searches? How about wearing a mortal kombat mask or burka in public? If I were to wear my mandalorian helmet in public, it would cost me $150?
If you wanted to wear a vest and protest in paris you cant do that? they bring in the military and round up those protestors? they use force to end protests that the government doesnt approve of?
How about free trade? Has France ratified CETA with Canada? They overwhelmingly opposed it in their senate?
>Obviously, there were always disagreements, but they were mostly limited to local decisions.
I beat up on France but much of the EU has seemingly abandoned freedom.
>Nobody expected a US president who effectively behaves in the way you would expect a Russian asset to behave. In hindsight, this was wrong, but I don't think it was obvious that one could or should predict this during Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, or even Trump's first term.
I'm not from USA but this Trump = Russian hoax stuff was very well dispelled. He maintained all the sanctions on Russia. His moves recently greatly harm Russia and China.
Some people _really_ like criminals here it seems. If I had my work pay for my father's butler and claim that as 'business expenses', I sure hope they would fire me when they eventually find out years later.
She was convicted of embezzlement and remains ineligible to be a presidential candidate until the appeal is decided, which will likely happen before the campaign in 2027.
"Freedom" should not mean "being able to commit as much crime as I want without any repercussions." However, this is increasingly the definition right-wing politicians use—for themselves. Notably, this definition does not apply to undocumented immigrants, for example.
>I'm not from USA but this Trump = Russian hoax stuff was very well dispelled
I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but it's a fact that multiple Trump companies received funding from Russian sources. However, note that I did not accuse Trump of being a Russian asset. I said he behaves in a way I would expect from a Russian asset. Given that this is Donald Trump, there are various plausible explanations for why he does that.
Resiliency costs money and a damn awful lot of our companies as well as our governments are run by beancounters.
Additionally, "domestic" alternatives to the American hyperscalers tend to be quite a bit more expensive - AWS and Google are large enough to commission custom fleets of servers and other datacenter gear due to their sheer scale, no one but the US giants can match that.
Qwant France EU Hosting
Sure, but the search engine behind is monstly Bing.
Startpage Netherlands EU Hosting
Use Bing and Google
Ecosia Germany EU Hosting
Use Bing, Google Yahoo and Wikipedia
This is not how you build alternative platforms.
The only true Independents search engine are Brave Search and Kagi both from the US.
The EU can't compete, we are lagging behind.
Disclaimer: I work at Brave.
More reglementation, more regulation, more bureaucracy and a lot of talks. Some more officials and "researchers" will be employed to talk about it even more.
For Europe to catch up it will need lots of startups which can grow up and become unicorns. This isn't going to happen because of the mindset, bureaucracy, reglementation, lack of capital and lack of time.
China is in a better position to become independent of US tech than all the EU countries together.
Too early for that forecast, don't you think?
The only thing saving the Irish government from bankruptcy is special (illegal according to EU law) Irish tax deals with MAG7 companies. Facebook. AWS. Microsoft. Oracle. Google. Salesforce.
Ireland was forced to renegotiate those tax deals after the action taken against the "double dutch sandwich" ... and it looks like they decided to just cut out the Netherlands.
Why does that matter? Ireland has veto power over what the EU does, and has already used it to prevent taxation of the internet giants. The EU cannot put serious effort in this, because that veto would just be used again.
One can start by not taking drugs. Then, after some days, one can type "snowden" in a search engine and press Enter. /s