31–40 of 80 posts
I don't think MS has anything to worry about until Europe can ship something other than policy. As much as I'd like them to it's not a place of making things happen, it's a place of trying to make the other places where things are actually built do what they say.
Hmm... If Europe has no industry, how do they pay for American Clouds?
While governments may be interested in moving stuff off Azure/AWS/GCP, in my experience, most businesses don't care enough. It is difficult enough to get them to spend money on the bare minimum needed for security. Yes, they will want 'sovereign data' because it looks good on the annual report, but most would not do it for double the cost. Europe and other parts of the world should reduce their dependency on American…
SAP is German. "Largest non-US software company by revenue", says wikipedia. Doesn't make it suck less, though. Re: investment, there's long been a solid set of EU open source contributors, from Torvalds himself through SUSE etc. I think if we identified the right 100 people and gave them money and a sense of civic mission, the EU could achieve a lot in this area. However, the EU's own anti-subsidy rules trip it up h…
I'd love to see the EU aggressively expand investment in the Linux desktop. I'd absolutely drop my job and jump on FOSS projects if there was financial incentive to do so - I'd even take a hit on compensation to participate.
Same, I'd love if the EU sponsored the development of open source alternatives. I'm tired of the American tech industry and how it's towing the (anti-European) party line - just give me a way to make a living while building competitors!
What would said tech independence actually take? Which American services would be highest priority to replace? In other words, if I were an EU startup, who should I compete with/try to clone?
From a public interest point of view I would say AWS, GCP and Azure
From the likelihood of a business being successful probably less well entrenched services, and ones politicians understand - so probably things directly used by consumers and very visible. Probably SaaS of some kind.
Also, its not just the EU (which is what the article is about). Non EU European countries, and the rest of the world too also have a problem with this dependence. I think the best approach would be broad collaborations on development, with deployment at a national level so every country could have sovereign data centres.
> "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else." Exactly. So long as that is true, the idea that an EU datacenter run by Microsoft can be "sovereign" is nonsense. Having an in-EU owned cloud becomes a national security issue. Tech independence is a long way off though. I wonder if, like the carbon trans…
Forget about access. What happens if Trump, tomorrow, orders Microsoft to cut off some government because they were mean to him or whatnot? How much leverage does a European economy running on American technology hand D.C., and do you really trust us to safeguard that power responsibly?
Microsoft could just bluescreen every Windows device in the USA with a message "Call your legislator at 555-9999 and tell them to repeal the CHUM Act"
The EU absolutely should try to stand up their own tech infrastructure. Entire supply chain. chips, software, everything. Absolutely needs to happen eventually.
The problem with the EU is singlular; there has been loads of anti-microsoft folks attempting to beat them for basically forever. Unsuccessfully. They dont have anyone who can; if they did they could just me like hey XYZ here's a trillion $, make us independent.
All the EU really has is regulation. Which by itself will prevent investment from ever giving them independence. The irony that their future of independence depends on extreme deregulation.
This should be very clear to everyone involved. IMO, the plan should be to disallow US cloud providers this side of the pond.
These days internet services are essential infrastructure. Much like you don't want a hostile foreign nation controlling your water supply or electricity, you also don't want them controlling your internet.
What would said tech independence actually take? Which American services would be highest priority to replace? In other words, if I were an EU startup, who should I compete with/try to clone?
Thankfully, it seems that a movement from inside governments is really starting, with more and more project funding demanding e.g. avoiding vendor lock-in. This helped push one of my projects from MSSQL to Postgres. One step at a time...
What would said tech independence actually take? Which American services would be highest priority to replace? In other words, if I were an EU startup, who should I compete with/try to clone?
First order of business should be to detach the governments from Microsoft. Probably the hardest part of this whole tangle is that the governing bodies are so bound to MS that any move can hit back twice as hard. It's easier to legislate the consumer side, since it's not directly affecting the efficiency and budgets of the organizations making the legislation. Thankfully, it seems that a movement from inside governme…
I'd envision building a plug-in replacement to facilitate switching.