Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
The US officially giving tech execs military ranks is… interesting. One of the stronger reasons to avoid companies like Huawei, was that the CCP had direct military ties / agents working within Huawei. The argument in favour of US tech companies in comparison, was that while they may have agreements with the US military, they were at arms length. Now they aren’t, and the rationale seems to be attempting to shift to “just trust us”, while they openly start major wars/conflicts and support genocidal actions in the middle east.
idk. If I were involved in the decision making for any critical area, I’d avoid the hell out of foreign controlled anything in my regular stacks at this point. Even if it means you have some efficiency hits until there may be an in-country provider available. It wouldn’t matter who the other country is at this point, as the US going awol is something most wouldn’t have ‘bet’ on like a decade ago, but here we are.
I’m pretty sure all three of those companies host server farms in Europe. I doubt they would give them up just to fluff Trump.
Just some stupid doom bait.
If it would get to cable cutting between US and Europe then we have much bigger problems than slow web apps. If Europe would ever get to that it definitely has enough cloud providers for essential services. Around 90% of all bandwidth is entertainment.
who said slow web apps. EU hosting providers could step in probably, but where is exactly all the data stored currently? even assuming that most orgs do proper, working backups, restoring them and setting up their systems for the new providers would still tame a lot of time
where is exactly all the data stored currently?
Hopefully in the EU, as the EU-US DPF is garbage and should be repealed just like the previous “Privacy Shield” attempts.
Time for EU to start a new web, WWWUS. World-Wide-Without-…
WWWEU… Pronounced as “Wii U”. 💅
Misleading title. It’s really about cloud services. And Europe is already working on making itself independent of American cloud services.
Thanks for sparing me the clickbait
latam is doomed
This sounds a lot like, “build your own servers and topple another US industry.”
Another short-term decision by America could lead to more long-term loss of wealth and influence.
“Stop shooting ourselves in the feet!”
So many decisions being made are very isolationist, and that never works well for the one shutting everyone else out. But who looks at history, right?
Honestly, as an American living in Silicon Valley, I would be overjoyed if Europe became the primary kickstarter for open source alternatives to the existing US corporate infrastructure, that bends to the knees of the Federal government. Even here at home, myself and some of my co-workers aren’t too keen on the existing status quo tools because there are too many caveats - from rent seeking subscriptions to the inability to verify if something is tampered with.
In the same way Valve saw how having all their eggs in the Windows basket led them to dive head first into linux development, I hope the EU’s realization of the risks in the US tech sector lead it to developing unified, well funded OSS alternatives. I would certainly install them.
Ya ok but this isn’t a doomsday thing, we used to build our own servers before and lots of people know how to do it still.
All AWS and the like do is remove the hardware for the consumer and add some APIs.
Doesn’t sound as scary to me as the article paints. The only hard part would be the migration 😅
Yeah. That’s literally the whole point of “the cloud” it can be anywhere.
The EU has lots of places with available renewable energy.
Hook up a couple servers to some dams. With “free” electricity it’ll be almost impossible to not end up being cheaper than Amazon in the long run.
Like, I’m struggling to see how this would be a bad thing long term. Relying on American corporations just isn’t a rational choice anymore
Hook up a couple servers to some dams.
As someone who works in IT, I love the optimism of making it sound this simple. Things that I expect to take 10 minutes can end up taking weeks, because there’s always a surprising answer to “How complicated could it be?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t work the way we’ve thought because” is a phrase I’ve had to say too often for that level of optimism.
Wouldn’t want to be that PM!
If the USA switches off cloud services for the EU, that’s a short-term problem. Really bad short term, but after a month or so everything is back up and running.
For big entities sure. But SMEs without dedicated IT and relying on the likes of squarespace would have a really bad time.
They’d just migrate to some EU alternative: https://alternativeto.net/software/squarespace/?origin=eu
Might not be super easy and they might not get the same results, bit if there’s no squarespace it will do.
Sure, as long as someone’s taught them about backups, and they have them, and they’re up to date.
All that would do is get Jeff Bezos to hire a hitman to take out Trump.
I’m not hearing a problem here
I know an Italian guy who might be down
I hope this means people finally start to see the danger of centralization.
I mean, there are servers in European countries, couldn’t they just nationalize the servers and continue as usual?
The servers would stop working the moment the US “pulls the plug.” Nationalization would not secure service, that would only secure non-functional hardware
The hardware is here. The entire hecking infrastructure is here. Making it work might not be as easy as flipping a switch, but it is definitely not impossible lol
The hardware isn’t the hard part, but I get your point
Given the permissive and, well, stupid business practices that the U.S. allows, I’m sure a shell corporation there, an ownership transfer there, and you’ve got a de facto foreign owned company that’s every bit as answerable to the corporation, although not necessarily the U.S. government. I’m sure the shareholders won’t care so long as the stock price still goes up.
Those sorts of changes could presumably be executed much faster than working through the court challenges of nationalizing companies, or of building new facilities/swapping to new providers.
Not that I’m advocating sticking with what would still ostensibly be U.S.-backed tech.
I live in the U.S., and I ply my trade in tech and tech-adjacent sectors. I wouldn’t prefer it if the country I live in becomes a technological backwater and is passed on by the world, but I also am sort of reaching a point where I think perhaps FAFO.would probably take a month or two
For one, servers running Amazon’s ECS/EKS can switch to self-managed Kubernetes.
Even if Trump is bluffing as usual, European governments and local councils should get the hint that the tech hegemony Google Amazon Apple and Microsoft is going to be used as an arm of the US government.
Time to switch! Wololo
oh no
If we get tot get point Trump is cutting off the world’s internet, I’d be more concerned about the nukes about to fly.
Oh, yes please!
It would be disastrous at first, but Europe would recover much stronger than before.
We would have to do a lot to catch up but the seeds are there and they cannot grow because they are in the shadow of the US industry.
The US giants have money and userbase to outperform anything Europe has at the moment and when they cannot outperform some company, they buy it. If Trump ever tries to cut US Tech off, European companies would grow rapidly to fill the void.
I would love to get some of these data centers off our power grid.
Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google…
Do it! What are you waiting for? Do it!
