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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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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