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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

#161

Post by inigyou »

judge2020 wrote: post #135
nicce wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe this was the Schrems 2 case from 2020 that declared that the EU US Privacy Shield was insufficient at guaranteeing the privacy of EU citizens due to the CLOUD act, which would require US companies work with the government to potentially spy on EU citizens. I’m not sure what has happened since then or the legal status of this issue.

The US under Biden did something that made it valid again and then the US under Trump made it invalid again. Right now it's illegal for an EU company to store unencrypted personal data with any US company.

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

#162

Post by embedding-shape »

atoav wrote: post #149
jillesvangurp wrote: post #92

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…

Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so. 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 an…

> Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.

I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders. That's why things like Amazon's "EU Cloud" isn't really interesting to anyone in EU and Europe, ultimately there is a US entity that easily folds in favor of the US government, and there isn't much you can do about it unless you stay 100% clear from US entities with your data.

Not that I think our governments in Europe are much better, time and time again they demonstrate they don't care one iota about personal privacy of individuals, so I wouldn't be surprised European companies wouldn't resist even requests.

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

#163

Post by inigyou »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #143
koe123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it pertains to military, just wait a few years I think.

You mean decades; especially if they keep up waffling.

This is funny because "waffen" is the German word for "weapons"

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

#164

Post by embedding-shape »

InTheArena wrote: post #125
koe123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it pertains to military, just wait a few years I think.

The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world. International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.

> The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world.

Name one country with a large military force that done more good than bad with it? Seems to come with the territory that if you have a large military force, you somehow need to use it for something as otherwise it falls into disrepair, and that "something" tends to be trying to spread your culture one way or another.

Come to think of it, seems China is the only country so far (in modern times) that haven't abused their military to enforce their will on smaller countries, basically every other superpower been abusing their military to make the world worse.

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

#165

Post by throw-the-towel »

LucaSiviero wrote: post #26

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 clos…

Neon was actually developed in Europe -- but by Russians, not Europeans. (Source: I interviewed with them around the acquisition.)

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

#166

Post by inigyou »

andy_ppp wrote: post #85
deeddy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm amazed any company pays AWS for servers. I can get if you're paying for a service like media transcoding, but to put it in perspective, AWS normal prices are now about on par with Hetzner's 5x-increased-due-to-the-crisis new price for new servers

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

#167

Post by embedding-shape »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #133
koe123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it pertains to military, just wait a few years I think.

While I applaud the strides the EU is taking to decouple militarily, it's still a long ways away from replacing the security umbrella provided by the US military. The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure (although NATO provides a lot of interoperability between European militaries). It's no knock on Europe's efforts--it's just that the dependency on US military was almost a century in the makin…

> The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure

That's... how EU works, intentionally? It's a decentralized union more or less, we're still independent countries with our own laws and what not, each country have their own command and control structure for their own military, on purpose.

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

#168

Post by inigyou »

LucaSiviero wrote: post #26

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 clos…

What services do you need from Hetzner? It sounds like there's an available business niche here. Serverless?

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

#169

Post by embedding-shape »

betaby wrote: post #159
embedding-shape wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Interesting fact. Is there a list of local government mx servers?

There was a HN submission with a map of email servers for local governments around in Europe (the world?), might have been a Show HN but I'm unable to find it now. It was an interactive map with a ton of local governments around in Europe, might have been bigger in scope too but mostly remember the European map as I was mostly focusing on Spain. Maybe someone else have better luck and could link it here? Might have been a month or two ago maybe.

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

#170

Post by Root_Denied »

dijit wrote: post #120
input_sh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for one thing, China wasn't adamant about annexing territory belonging to a European nation like half a year ago.

their eyes are firmly on Africa. Not being able to stand on our own feet is going to be a major problem because of the implied soft power. It nerfs our ability to ever have a spine on any issue.

China has spent the last couple of decades making inroads into Africa to secure raw materials, not because they want to annex anything on the continent.
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