141–150 of 201 posts
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I don’t remember the last time China threatened to invade Denmark? I do remember the last time the USA did. It was hours ago at a NATO summit.
s/China/Taiwan? or Tibet? You are comparing sensational trolls with actual geopolitical history.
Should we casually throw around all places the US invaded too?
Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes. However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.
If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down.
Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.
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> IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either. I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile to…
As it pertains to military, just wait a few years I think.
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Assuming that most Europeans would be loyal to the EU is like assuming that most US Americans are loyal to Donald Trump (or Biden). But in reality a big enough proportion of Europeans see the EU as a hostile foreign influencing force. Or, to put it another way, do you think any Americans use Microsoft or Apple products out of patriotism or fear of being dependent on technology from other nations?
> But in reality a big enough proportion of Europeans see the EU as a hostile foreign influencing force. Yeah, I have to doubt your perceived reality here. Can you name some of these "hostile foreign influences"? The big competitor to Apple is Google, whereas the big competitor to Microsoft is Linux/FOSS IMHO. I'm sorry to be blunt, but in the current political climate I couldn't care less what any Americans are usin…
The name is the European Union. It is the foreign entity to Europeans. If you doubt that there is a big portion of Europeans who aren't pro-EU, then I guess you doubt that there are Americans who aren't pro-Trump?
Anyway, there were referendums in many countries on the subject of joining the EU, and you can look at those and see that not 100% of the population voted yes.
So it is a false assumption that Europeans would by default have any loyalty or goodwill towards the EU, although I'm sure that a big portion of them do. Especially in some countries.
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The main reason is that they are based locally, they charge in EUR, you can get the VAT back, and they are much more affordable than AWS.
I'm still amazed my company is paying £10k per month for AWS when they could have one or two servers on Hetzner do the whole thing.
A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives. And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equi…
> A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. Didn’t even Microsoft say that they can’t guarantee that they can follow these laws? Because the US laws take over. So, legal entities are just some smoke screen. They don’t help if the US government wants access to something.
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There isn't going to be "EU tech" as long as US can access the EU market as freely because for the mainstream anything it doesn't make sense to have a duplication effort for the EU. USA is/was easier to start business and get funding, you can access Europe just as well from there so why bother with the European based stuff if you are targeting a broad market? After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for Europ…
EU population: 450 million + 70m UK USA population: 348 million The problem is that many of europe's top talent moves to USA, and also that American funding for European startups is huge, and many are made to relocate/IPO in USA too.
Companies also move to the US (e.g. Stripe) or are bought big American companies (e.g. Deepmind)
A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives. And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equi…
And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.
> 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…
True. Also: the landing page and all the other corporate boasting are often run by a marketeer or similar, who knows nothing about the technical part. They just have a design, and outsource implementation. So it just ends up somewhere.