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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

#21

Post by karambahh »

This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far.

It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.

Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?

Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.

Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)

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

#22

Post by cindyllm »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #17
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?

[dead]

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

#24

Post by palata »

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 anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.

Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by blocking their access to that tech (it has happened).

The "sovereignty" part here is a net positive for anyone living in the EU. Net negative for anyone living in the US of course, because being in a dominant position does favour the US.

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

#25

Post by palata »

shellwizard wrote: post #14
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.

> Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.

That's a bit of a feature, I don't think the EU should want TooBigTech monopolies. Doesn't mean that there cannot be successful services in Europe.

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

#26

Post by LucaSiviero »

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products?

Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?

I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.

I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.

Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?

I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?

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

#28

Post by neya »

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...

Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?

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

#30

Post by palata »

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 find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired

I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue.

Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.

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