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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The USA might as well put up a 'closed for business' by now.

Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS in spite of massive lock-in because the feeling that the USA is a trustworthy partner is completely gone. You can't just 'joke about invading Greenland' and expect everybody to move on as if it didn't happen. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't just local sample bias either, NL used to be pretty laid back when it came to silly details such as hosting providers and such.

How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?

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AWS announced that they'd have an EU 'governed' region with only EU citizens working on it.https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-europea....

I'm not sure if that'd fully alleviate the risk for EU companies & governments, but I'd imagine it alleviates some of it.

Yes, they're panicking. And I'm not sure that this is going to be enough to offset the various concerns.

I agree that it might not be enough, but at the moment there also aren't good EU competitors in the cloud space. Good not in the technical sense, but good as in - people would be comfortable putting their eggs in the basket.

Plus, hiring for AWS / Azure / GCP experience is still much higher than for the smaller EU clouds.

Hetzner is pretty well established and has a good reputation - but they don't offer the same high level services as Amazon.

This isn't about reputation or high level services. Ultimately this is about certification and there are precious few alternatives with sufficient capacity that are certified and not somehow indirectly or directly owned by US entities. And there is a run on the ones that are.

The same way encryption at rest and encryption in transit checks the security box I'd imagine. Great until it can be admitted it isn't.

There was an interview with a high ranking Microsoft lawyer the other week where the lawyer conceded that even if the company would be a European subsidiary and the employees would be European then Microsoft still would have to obey the new US laws. Of course the employees would be bound by European law, let’s see how that pans out.

Interesting, do you have a link to that? I can probably google for it but I'm being lazy. :D

i didn't check if the interview is linked but this thread and article talk about the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061153

thank you, appreciate it!

> Microsoft still would have to obey the new US laws

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone given that it is an American company. Being a multinational corporation like Microsoft or Mercedes Benz means you have to navigate rather complex legal situations, follow not just your home country's laws, but also the laws of the countries that you are operating in.

America is not even pretending to be a lawful nation anymore, so even if the executive had truthfully said the opposite it would be irrelevant.

The real question is where the CEO lives and whether their family and kids are susceptible to being kidnapped by the US govt.

The US uses extradition in countries with treaties and rendition most everywhere else. If you're a US citizen you might be safe in Russia or backwoods Africa,Myanmar etc but most anywhere else you're fucked.

If it’s in any way owned by a US entity, then no, then it’s just smoke and mirrors.

It's all a game of lets pretend.

The fundamental risk for the EU is the Cloud Act. Since that facility is still owned by a company that is owned by a US company, the Cloud Act applies.

Microsoft tried a similar thing in Germany and it failed.

Sadly there are more than enough entities in the EU, including states and other critical sectors, that are more than willing to play pretend too. We've seen it with privacy deals, I fear this will be similar.

I'm sure you're right, but having worked on both sides of the ocean, I can say that EU companies do keep the privacy angle in mind a bit more. I did work on medical devices though, so I might just have been in a bubble.

Medical, financial and insurance are all handling this quite well now, but many other fields are still - hopelessly - lagging behind.

I'd call it realpolitik. The eu doesn't write its own software. This is the downside case of that.

I personally would be open to trying to change that, but I keep looking at the EU and they don't want to. Many countries are actively hostile to entrepreneurs and eg can charge taxes/fees/exit fees on unrealized cap gains. etc.

Yeah EU is not competitive in tech. They missed the boat by.. decades. And the salary of engineers in EU is not good enough to make it attractive either for those who can and want to live abroad.

I’m an EU citizen, and think life generally was better in Belgium. But the salaries being so poor means I’m unlikely to move back.

Honestly, I think it's straightforward to fix. Requirements to attempt to source domestically (or at minimum try hard) plus loosening the rules on firing employees (yes it sucks, but hiring is super risky when it takes 0.5 - 3 years of salary to dispose of an employee, either a bad one or one that isn't the right person for a growing business) would go a long way towards jumpstarting domestic software production.

They don't seem to want to :shrug:

There is an awful lot of software produced in the EU. The problem is that as soon as someone is even moderately successful with something a US (or rather, an SV) based entity will make you an offer you can't refuse.

That's not exactly true. There certainly are areas where US options are clearly the best, but even in cases where a local alternative is viable there is a massive push to use US based services instead, and unsurprisingly the local options then stay small when even their own governments refuse to use them.

That's not enough. The only thing that would be enough would be a change of ownership but that clearly isn't on the table. Yet. But I would not be surprised if AWS/Azure/Google ended up divesting some of their DCs in Europe as a result of the exodus.

how is this better than what the US is doing? at least in the US, they allow non-citizens to build

That doesn't help when every US company is under US jurisdiction.

If the US government decided to invade Greenland and ordered Amazon to cut off all network connections to Denmark, would this region still operate for Danish users?

If it did, and the US ordered Amazon to shut down the region, would it?

If the region kept on operating, and the US ordered Amazon to stop providing software updates, security updates, new license keys, etc. - how long could the region keep running?

You can't 'just' invade Greenland. You'd be invading the EU.

"B....b....but Trump can't do that!"

How many times have we heard that? He owns the party, the courts, the legislature, and the guns.

Then change the parameters slightly and imagine the US using the threat of cutting off Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple services to Denmark as incentive to transfer Greenland to US control.

That would be great if they did that.

So you understand that an "EU 'governed' [Amazon] region with only EU citizens working on it" isn't actually independent from the US, much less sovereign to either the EU or Denmark, right?

> Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS

Lots of talk, but how much action?

People are still building things that depend on American cloud, American controlled OSes (especially for mobile), American supplied hardware, American cloud services (especially AI) and the moves away are tiny by contrast.

Plenty of action. This has gone way beyond 'mild discomfort but we'll just pretend it is all ok'. The last 6 months have seen a massive change in attitude.

some examples of action?

https://windowsforum.com/threads/european-governments-shift-...

Directly from the Windows Forum.

https://www.slashgear.com/1888658/microsoft-office-alternati...

Government's in Denmark, Germany, Spain (on the state level )

A couple more links for companies, but I trust the above is enough? The trend is definitely there and picking up speed.

Edit: a couple of days ago there was a post on HN about SAP spending 20b on cloud https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/sap_sovereign_cloud/

So over the last 15 years the solid examples of moves that have been committed to are:

1. Denmark’s Ministry for Digital Affairs

2. Two Danish cities

3. One German state

4. The Italian Ministry of defence

5. One Spanish region

They also say French education ministry advised schools to move off the free versions of the "free versions" of MS Office 365 and Google Docs. They do not say anything about how many schools followed the advice, or what they moved to (a paid version of the same? another American supplier?).

Not much for a whole continent.

There will be a lot of resistance to any change. There will be a lot of people like this making the same arguments made here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/debate_for_microsoft_...

Microsoft has successfully had such decisions reversed in the past:

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...

This is exactly the same as what was being said during the first Trump term though.

Yes. But things really are different now. I think there was some expectation of checks and balances kicking in if things went really crazy and they didn't. So the trust factor is in the freezer right now, pretty much all over Europe. Yes, people still trade, yes, there is still traffic back and forth. But it is now because you have to, not because you want to. Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.

We were told that things really were different then too. And they were different by definition because they weren't the same, but that is not really evidence of anything. We were promised he colluded with Putin to hack the election and would become a dictator, that WWIII would be started, economy would be ruined, international trade would be stopped, undesirable citizens would be put into camps, etc. He really did not need courts or legislature on your side for that if you can control the military and a sizable portion of the country is on your side too. So that all turned out to be another cry wolf situation.

Things are different now too because they are not the same, sure. I don't know that people who got it quite wrong are the ones to trust when it comes to predictions of trading and economics this time around.

> Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.

No doubt a lot of people have changed their minds about visiting US due to Trump -

"Overseas arrivals fell 3.4% in June compared to a year ago, bringing the YTD decline to 1.2%."

But I don't think those kinds of swings are much evidence for larger trade and investment and data sovereignty etc issues.

Everybody, EU, UK, China, Japan, India, Australia, well really just about all countries -- have made a lot of noise and care a lot about relying on US tech, having US companies and by extension the US government control their data, etc. This isn't something they've just started to try fixing in 2016 "because Trump", or in 2025 "because this time he means it". It's been much longer than that. With the exception of probably only China, nobody has been able to make a great deal of progress on it.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out economically. It's like a repeat of Covid but only for the USA, and I expect it to negatively impact large corporations more than small businesses.

> How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?

What does this mean? Like “the nationalists” would start taking away domain names of people they don’t like or something?

Greenland wasn’t a joke. Nothing that is said is a joke. It’s all real. If there isn’t push back of a substantial amount it will happen. With some pushback or indication that effort will be required personally on the part of the president then it gets delayed or conveniently forgotten.

Who is a trust worthy partner? If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other. It hasn’t been a century since they tried to genocide each other

They dislike each other but my understanding is that, at least in the EU, they view each other as stable and trustworthy. No jokes about invasions, no deporting (or worse, imprisoning) legal immigrants, in general no caprice. Meanwhile the US simply cannot be counted on to be the historically stable and trustworthy partner that had defined us over the past 75-odd years.

> Who is a trust worthy partner?

Until very recently the USA was the preferred technology partner for many EU ventures and was seen as a trustworthy ally because of mutual history since 1945.

> If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other.

A lot more than what? And what exactly did Europe do in recent times that would give American citizens that feeling?

> It hasn’t been a century since they tried to genocide each other

This is a complete nonsense statement.

I believe the OP meant that European countries dislike one another, and the genocide refers to the Holocaust.

When you want to put aside your feelings and discuss facts I'll be around.

From my experience, anti-Trump Americans are still embraced and appreciated by Europeans. That doesn’t mean they can trust the US gov’t and probably won’t be able to again for a few decades.

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