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Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

musings.martyn.berlin

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Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#51

Post by NostraDavid »

> I really dislike the term because it’s laden with all sorts of militaristic and anti-free movement and all sorts of other problematic baggage

Then call it "Digital Sovereignty" instead. That's what we call it in the Netherlands.

> but it’s the term the industry is using

OK, and? Sounds like it is time to push back. It's like talking about "lower" and "higher" education. Just call it practical and theoretical education instead. Much more descriptive; doesn't talk down to people we seriously need in the coming decades.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#52

Post by nickv »

brugidou wrote: post #32
eastbound wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French are second to everything + they strip naked the CEOs they hate (the Air France event and the series of CEOs taken hostage in the 1990ies) = They would never align themselves to build something that makes money. DailyMotion is 1/1000th what Youtube is; Mistral is 1/1000th what OpenAI is, nothing has changed in 20 years. Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.

They did that already see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt or Numergy.

And Minitel, they had networked computers in people's homes in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#53

Post by spockz »

maccard wrote: post #7
petcat wrote: post #2

> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU. I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing. There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doub…

> There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it? Lidl! https://horovits.medium.com/lidl-is-taking-on-aws-the-age-of...

https://stackit.com/en Is the actual cloud.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#54

Post by watwut »

ericmay wrote: post #24
traceroute66 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services into hundreds of abstracted products carefully designed to have circular dependencies between each other ..... And all shipped with price sheets billed in invented unit metrics and more small-print than a packet of prescription drugs that makes it completely impossible to predict how much you're going to pay. I'll take…

> But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services… Maybe it’s the best approach? Maybe it’s more profitable and European companies want to grow their business?

If Europe copy winner takes fraud is allowed and price transparency higwash ideology, then it will also end up with exact copy of current American dysfunction - ultimately including loss of democracy, Trump figure with unchecked power and failing constitution.

Europe can fail on its own, but recreating the exact billionaires are able to scam everything will make it fail faster.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#55

Post by nullorempty »

NostraDavid wrote: post #50
gobdovan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine Netherlands has a reputation in Europe as having the most bland and utilitarian cuisine.

I presume nullorempty got a Kapsalon (fries with Doner Kebab - it's so fucking good) and entered heaven for a few minutes.

No :) but that's on the list. I refer to store items starting with basic ones - bread and butter.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#56

Post by nickv »

politician wrote: post #12
xg15 wrote: post #9

I feel the article is a bit roundabout, but eventually gets to the point: "Sovereignty" is not (mainly) about physical location, it's about which legal entity controls the data and whether or not that entity is subject to US jurisdiction and could be forced to disclose the data to US companies or agencies, in violation of EU law.

Which is mightily funny because in the opening paragraph the article equates "anti-free movement" with "problematic baggage". It's a problem if people can't move freely in and out of Europe, but not data -- that's our red line!

I typically don't have to worry about somebody "sneaking and selling my body for their profit" without me, at least, being aware of it.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#57

Post by r3trohack3r »

adamcharnock wrote: post #47

I see a lot of conversation here about provider feature parity, but my hope is that sovereignty doesn't have to be strictly about the region or company you choose. For me, the strongest form of sovereignty can come at a lower level. That is, running on an open-source stack you can pick up and run somewhere else should you need to. If your data and workloads live on standard Kubernetes with Postgres, object storage an…

> If your data and workloads live on standard Kubernetes with Postgres, object storage and the usual Prometheus/Grafana/Loki, then no single provider (EU or otherwise) actually has you over a barrel.

I’ve heard this refrain most of my career - and believed it at one point. But the bytes themselves are heavy and hard to move.

Multiple projects I’ve worked on in my career would have had to _physically move_ the data (plane, train, semi) if they wanted to migrate - there was no reasonable way to get the data out of the datacenter over network on any reasonable timeframe.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#58

Post by snorremd »

tormeh wrote: post #5
petcat wrote: post #2

> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU. I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing. There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doub…

You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offers compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.

This. I'm presently running serverless containers, serverless jobs, managed container registry, managed database, virtual private network, IAM policies, DNS, managed Grafana and object storage on Scaleway for a project I'm working on. Doesn't get more cloud than that.

Sure, Scaleway still lags behind the big three cloud providers in the US. But the US providers have a lot more money and been around much longer. Scaleway is quickly expanding its feature set though. They've recently introduced managed Clickhouse and OpenSearch among other things.

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#59

Post by nickv »

einpoklum wrote: post #39
ksec wrote: post #34

Is it really "EU" Sovereignty? And not its member's Sovereignty?

Such heresy is detrimental to EU sovereignty... next you're going to remind people that some states are in the EU despite their citizens having opposed going in there. TBH, EU member states can be plenty oppressive when they want to, so - why not just take it to the next level and have all-European overlords?

There's literally an entire section in the Treaty of the EU on the exact criteria to leave the EU. A country has literally _left_ the EU. Nobody is being held hostage to stay in the EU.

"Despite their citizens having opposed going in there." Can you point to a vote to invoke Article 50 that was not honored by the EU? Can you point to a country getting admission into the EU without a vote from their people?

Re: Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)

#60

Post by yubblegum »

nickv wrote: post #52
brugidou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did that already see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt or Numergy.

And Minitel, they had networked computers in people's homes in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel .

And packet switching and arguably a far more capable architecture for internetworking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES

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