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Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

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Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#11

Post by embedding-shape »

> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate.

This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.

I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.

> For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.

Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#12

Post by cube2222 »

rukshn wrote: post #2

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pit…

I think the reason for this is that if you're targeting folks for whom Europe-sovereignty resonates as an important factor, those will also care about sovereignty and self-sufficiency in general, and thus just skip your SaaS and go right for (semi) self-hosting.

While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters.

You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#14

Post by shellwizard »

rukshn wrote: post #2

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pit…

There are not many big vendors that are EU first apart from SAP, SuSE and a handful more. Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#15

Post by Pragmata »

rukshn wrote: post #2

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pit…

Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#16

Post by embedding-shape »

rmoriz wrote: post #4

Mail (SMTP) is even worse.

Here in Spain it seems better. We don't have tons of alternatives for web services, so lots end up on the typical clouds, but email hosting it seems every region has at least one ajuntament that runs their very own email servers. Helps that the country politically and socially is a bit decentralized since the beginning of the republic, but I was (pleasantly) surprised how many local governments here actually manage their own emails.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#17

Post by rrr_oh_man »

embedding-shape wrote: post #11

> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate. This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the o…

> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...

Yes, it's INFURIATING. I hate, hate, hate this. :(

Can we start flagging shit like this, please?

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#19

Post by embedding-shape »

Pragmata wrote: post #15
rukshn wrote: post #2

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pit…

Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.

If the location of something is a part of what you use to decide what to use, then if it's in the EU which is your preferred location, it no longer is "an inferior option", it might end up your only option.

But clearly you don't care, so understandably that choice doesn't make sense for you, that's all fine and good. But still you have to understand other people/organizations than you might have different requirements? Or is that a very foreign concept?

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