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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU

Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.

CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.

Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?

That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !

CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.

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Is it a risk anyone cares about? There is very little actual switching. In many ways dependence is increasing as everything moves to apps (including the EU's own age verification app) that only run on US controlled devices.

I work in a European government institution. This is definitely a risk we care about, and we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.

> if we had any good ones in Europe

TBF (and the subject of government tech and procurement aside) there are good ones in Europe.

The problem tends to be how much of the US-cloud cool-aid your organisation has drunk.

If you've drunk the whole bottle, i.e. the random alphabet-soup of interdependent microservices, then sure you'll have a tough time finding a like-for-like equivalent.

But if you've still got old-school IT brains in your IT team, then its perfectly feasible to find equivalence in Europe.

Not only that, but you'll probably pay at least 10x less in Europe because you're not paying through the nose for the alphabet-soup of random interdependency.

Also the EU providers price sheets are clear and it is easy to reliably forecast how much you will be paying. As opposed to the US provider's muddy price sheets full of small-print and all sorts of random invented proprietary billing units that are nigh on impossible to reason about.

Are you also going to switch your end user devices, or are you going to remain reliant on Google, Apple and Microsoft? The data flows through those.

Do other institutions care? Some people and some institutions do, but how many?

What about the private sector? Even if you moved all government services entirely away from the US, your economy can still be reliant on American suppliers and communications between the government and the private sector and individuals will too.

> we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.

What is wrong with the options you have in Europe? That comment suggests to me you do not care enough to do anything that takes effort.

> if we had any good ones in Europe

So you basically confirmed that being located in Europe isn't enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112 (subthread with citations of switching)

Wero begs to differ.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com