12 ms·

European Cloud Project Draws Backlash from U.S. Tech Giants

116 points by aloknnikhil 7y ago

ptah 7y ago
Europeans must be on the right track if the monopolists are complaining
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Did the definition of monopoly change while I wasn't looking? There are no cloud monopolists; there are major players, but nobody has a monopoly.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - rad_gruchalski 7y ago
    Correct. The right term to use here is oligopoly.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      And considering that they all meet up at conferences and the like, we might even want to toy with the term "cartel". But yeah, calling them monopolies is altogether incorrect.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        They are very obviously competing with each other. Every industry has conferences that all the big players go to, it doesn't mean they're illegally cooperating.
  - lovich 7y ago
    A strict definition of a monopoly says there is only one seller, but in reality monopoly power is a spectrum. When someone calls a company a monopoly they are claiming that they have the power to unilaterally set prices beyond what a competitive market would bear. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/monopoly-power.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/monopoly-power....
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
toyg 7y ago
Christmas draws backlash from turkeys. News at 11. The sad bit is that, had these "giants" fought a bit more all those US legislative atrocities like the PATRIOT Act, maybe, just maybe, there would not have been a need for this.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  There would still be a need for it, you can't be dependent on others for critical infrastructure. Especially nowadays. I think it's fair to say that right now the world is going through a "realignment". That generates the proper ratio of insecurities and pragmatic realities necessary for the people of the world to reassess the methods by which they've traditionally solved their problems.
- buboard 7y ago
  or like net neutrality, which in the end didn't change anything.
  - MereInterest 7y ago
    Net neutrality is about maintaining the possibilities of newcomers arising. Saying that removing net neutrality didn't change anything is like saying that removing elections doesn't change anything. In either case, it inappropriately freezes the status quo in place.
curt15 7y ago
Any chance this project benefits nextcloud?
lnsp 7y ago
> Some European companies that use large American cloud providers say those services are more competitively priced than cloud services in Europe, WSJ Pro previously reported. Gaia-X could lower transaction costs by standardizing contracts and processes between cloud providers and customers, the German Economy Ministry said. I mean Hetzner for example is very competitive price-wise, but they are missing a lot of the platform functionality AWS and Azure provide.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction. Which is fine; there's definitely a market for what they do.
  - krn 7y ago
    > Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction. Hetzner Cloud is more about IaaS than PaaS, and competes directly with DigitalOcean after the introduction of dedicated vCPU, block storage, and private networks. It's still missing object storage, though. OVH Public Cloud, on the other hand, is trying to become the AWS / GCP / Azure of Europe – and with unmetered bandwidth is many times cheaper than they are – but at the moment it's still much better as IaaS rather than PaaS.
- reacharavindh 7y ago
  Came here to say just that. Hetzner is very much competitive with AWS, and GCP for IAAS - both technology and pricing wise. There are other European companies vying for a slice of the DigitalOcean like market here - I personally use upcloud fpr my personal hosting needs, and it’s been solid. Those complaining here that it is biased against USA and tariff free trade needs to comprehend the presence of US Cloud Act. If USA truly wants to compete fairly, it needs to obey the local laws and get that shit law out first.
- ryuukk_ 7y ago
  Check both Scaleway and OVH
cloudyo 7y ago
... and as a EU project private alternative to the likes of Dropbox, there's Duple, an app that gives you your full private Dropbox at home. Self-hosted, E2EE, and works just like a Dropbox (currently in beta): https://www.duple.io/en/ https://www.duple.io/en/
- fulafel 7y ago
  "E2EE coming soon"
- iagovar 7y ago
  It actually looks very cool, I'm going to try it. What would be the business model?
- OldSchoolJohnny 7y ago
  How does it protect your data if your house burns down?
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    Dropbox isn't a backup anyways. Have an offsite backup that is encrypted. Could be the cloud, could be a hard drive you keep at your parents' house.
  - magashna 7y ago
    Not how does it, how do you. You should spread the data to an offsite or secondary location.
    - deanCommie 7y ago
      So, a backup solution where part of the instructions is..."another backup solution" Come on.
      - magashna 7y ago
        Uh, yeah? A common rule in IT is 3-2-1 backups. 3 copies 2 different devices or medias 1 offsite If your data isn't that important, then don't. https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/data_backup_options.pdf https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/dat...
mcv 7y ago
Data has become incredibly important. A see a lot of people call data the new gold, or the new oil. I once read that some European nations stored their gold in the US, and are now having trouble getting it back. Oil is another valuable commodity where the US has always tried to stay in control over. With data, I guess it makes sense that European countries finally want a bit more sovereignty over it.
- pieix 7y ago
  Could you provide a citation for the claim that European countries have had a hard time repatriating gold held in the US?
  - mcv 7y ago
    My comment is based on some articles from years ago about Germany and maybe other countries having trouble getting their gold back from the US. Googling a bit now results in a couple of articles that say that Germany did eventually get their gold back, but there were some hiccups and delays that made people wonder whether the gold was even there at all. https://bmg-group.com/germanys-gold-reserves-u-s-paper-claims/ https://bmg-group.com/germanys-gold-reserves-u-s-paper-claim... https://www.rt.com/business/445133-germany-access-gold-us-fed/ https://www.rt.com/business/445133-germany-access-gold-us-fe... https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-Gold-Back-From-The-Fed-And-It-s-A-Big-Deal.html https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-Gold-... Turns out everything is fine, but a couple of years ago, people were worried about this. It looks like only Germany was involved and no other countries.
  - sinkelfink 7y ago
    There was major foot-dragging when Germany wanted its gold back. Leading to the obvious conclusion that the gold wasn't there at all, and Germany was just holding worthless paper that did nothing more than point to a line entry in an account book somewhere. > “Why would it take 7 years, unless there was a possible issue in getting it together, to return 300 tons? It could be done certainly in several weeks or even months – but 7 years?” Lanci questioned. “In my trading days, I’ve taken delivery of gold and silver and I’m aware of the physical logistical limitations. The time requested to deliver the 300 tonnes seems excessive – whether it be 5 or 7 years.”
big_chungus 7y ago
Lots of support from the usual HN "tariffs bad" crowd that shows up when America restricts trade. But now, producing your own stuff _can_ be important strategically? It seems pre-existing opinions of the actor in question are tainting opinions of the activity.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  Eh? I mean "in general, tariffs are bad" is not incompatible with "some industries/facilities are strategically important and must be supported". Very few people are calling for totally free markets with no tariffs or government support _at all_, but a lot of people would see them as a necessary evil that should be minimised.
hugh4life 7y ago
Dependency leads you to getting screwed over in negotiations... from American IT to Chinese manufacturing. Autarchy is not a serious option but you've got to have options for exiting lopsided relationships.
buboard 7y ago
I m on board as long as the EU governments don't have "special rights" to the data stored in those servers under all kinds of excuses. In many ways, having your data stored on the other side of the earth offers some privacy/security benefits. The right thing to campaign for is to move data AWAY from all kinds of clouds / hoarders and back into private silos, away from all kinds of grabby governments.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Well of course the EU governments will have special rights. You'll still have to obey EU law after all. But at least there's an extra step before American law enforcement can access that data. So consider, for most people, it's good enough protection. Because we're not worth the extra step.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Yep. This scenario was, in some ways, inevitable. It took nations a little while to catch up to the power that separation of data from a person's physical location via the cloud put in the hands of people and corporations, but they're catching up. At the end of the day, most users in a few years won't have a choice of no country's government being able to access their cloud state; they may have a choice over which country.
  - mcv 7y ago
    What's more, EU law says that personal data can't just be shared with companies or governments. No easy backdoors to your data. I'm no lawyer, but I'd expect that any government, US, EU or otherwise, will have to provide a warrant. Final decision will be with a European judge, not an American one. That means quite a bit.
    - buboard 7y ago
      > EU law says that personal data can't just be shared with companies or governments Do you mean without consent? because otherwise the governments themselves will share data if asked.
c3534l 7y ago
> European Union countries are concerned about depending on technology providers that must comply with the U.S. Cloud Act, WSJ Pro Cybersecurity reported in October. The 2018 law requires American firms to provide law enforcement with customers’ personal data on request, even when the servers containing the information are abroad. I don't blame them. What a horribly short-sighted law.
stevespang 7y ago
"Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. criticized the initiative announced this week, called Gaia-X, saying the project will restrict data services along national borders". Actually, MS and Amazon are merely worried about how the European cloud will actually preserve their citizens privacy - - and how our US Cloud Co's will start loosing the ability to continue to VIOLATE Europeans privacy . . .
Barrin92 7y ago
Many people have pointed to privacy and data issues, but there's also the plain reality that the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years, so having key data stored in the US becomes an increasingly geopolitical risk even for European allies. I think these mercantilist plays we're seeing from the US are going to cause a lot of long term harm to the tech companies. For national security reasons alone you cannot rely on US cloud infrastructure if the man or woman in the white house is likely to pull the plug at any moment.
- chance_state 7y ago
  >the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years Are there specific examples you're referring to? Because this is how geopolitics and diplomacy has worked since the dawn of civilization. This isn't something unique to Big Bad USA.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    The entity list program against Chinese companies, the pressure on Europe to reject Huawei infrastructure (and accompanying threats in particular when it comes to natsec data sharing), the attack on the German car industry, on French agriculture, the list has been getting pretty long. And while it's true that this has been the state of affairs for most of civilisation, it wasn't for the last ~70 years. Up until recently, the US was willing to underpin global free-trade without using economic politics as leverage for short-term or one-sided political goals. Which is precisely why US tech companies have become the first choice in much of Europe and indeed around the world. Now the question is being posed if that is still a good decision. Without this interference, Europe would not think about investing billions and billions into its own cloud infrastructure, and China would not be ditching Android. It could have been smooth sailing for US companies for a long time. If this continues I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the US and Europe.
    - bcrosby95 7y ago
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Does anyone have info to share about the tech of Gaia-X? I mean it's probably mostly about cloud services for the public sector, but then it's also open for other users and I've heard vague hints at service repositories and privacy metadata. Public press info is only regurgitated "industry 4.0" fluff. Peter Altmaier (German minister of economics) wanted to talk about details and roadmaps, but fell off the stage and got injured before he could do so.
outside1234 7y ago
I'm surprised they didn't call the project Quaero again just to highlight how hopeless this is from the start. Talk about being five days late and five euros short! ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
somurzakov 7y ago
I believe that european bureacracy can be successful in building aws/azure rival from the ground up. They better support european cloud providers through some industry association, grants, or establish a university based partnership project
- somurzakov 7y ago
  typo, should be read: I don't believe
  - arkitaip 7y ago
    It's fine either way because anyone European citizen surely read the first comment as sarcasm.
jasonvorhe 7y ago
Is there any code for this? Any specific design documents that actually go into detail? All of the PDFs I find don't go beyond the CIO level. Reads like a typical German bureaucracy project: Lots of requirements but nothing that could even remotely be implemented in time.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
They'll have an agreement to provide data anyway so it's not to protect customers
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/m6bEG http://archive.is/m6bEG
kmos 7y ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kennethcorbin/2019/07/17/eu-hits-amazon-with-antitrust-probe/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kennethcorbin/2019/07/17/eu-hit... and then it uses their cloud ;-) https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/european-commission-adopts-new-cloud-strategy-2019-may-28_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/european-commission-adopts-ne...
deanCommie 7y ago
Having just returned from 4 years living in Western Europe, it is laughable how technologically inept the European Union is when it comes to the internet. Europeans are competent and intelligent. Their universities are competitively amongst the best in the world. But there is no entrepreneurial or innovative mindset when it comes to the web. I think the ones that have it move to North America. The ones that are left are disincentivized by a comfortable and productive social environment. All this to say, I don't have much hope for this project's success, and unlike a private enterprise failing and disappearing, this will not fail quietly, but with billions of dollars, and the ones that will suffer are the European Union citizens who will be forced to use inept second tier technology.
- blub 7y ago
  What amazing innovation has been happening on the web? Technically, the last two decades can be summarized as "playing catch-up with mobile and the desktop". The business plan of most web entrepreneurs is to collect then sell user's data while burning VC money and hoping they'll be bought soon.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pergadad 7y ago
  I do agree that there is much less entrepreneurial mindset but there is not less creation. What the creation leads to is different and I'd suggest two main reasons: 1) Europeans are less likely to make it a business - the safety net might play a role but also just different value sets. I'd suggest that on average Europeans are less focused on profit/getting rich and more on just living a decent life e.g. with work-life balance. So they might run things in their spare time but will be more likely to give their creation away than run a for-profit company with it. See e.g. PGP, Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, OpenCloud & Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ... - many leading FOSS and even some hardware projects are European-lead. 2) Startup success is quite a bit more difficult in Europe due to lower investor/VC availability and a smaller market (burden of translation & different legislations, although EU legislation is slowly converging things). Nonetheless you had Skype, Spotify, TransferWise, etc. But those were all mostly bootstrapped - there's no money available that allows annual 8-or-9-digit losses like with the typical examples of Uber, Lyft, WeWork or Lime. So its not that there's nothing creative going on, but fewer try to make it a business and of those fewer succeed - and indeed many of those are then bought by or on their own move to the other side of the Atlantic. Tidbit: actually I've never seen comparison data on startup success rates between countries, just on overall startup numbers.
riffraff 7y ago
I have not heard of this project. While as a european I appreciate the intent, I have zero expectations that this will result in anything other than some pointless spending, on the lines of the "google-killer" quaero[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
DenisM 7y ago
Given the relationship with the US, Russia must have been the first to realize they need their own cloud. I wonder if they built something serious yet? Maybe Yandex? [1] https://cloud.yandex.com/ https://cloud.yandex.com/
irrational 7y ago
In retrospect, I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm an American and I wouldn't trust us as far as I could throw us (and with the rate of obesity we experience, you wouldn't be able to throw us very far). I have no doubt that most government agencies with three letter acronyms can look at any data stored on US cloud servers with impunity.
JohnFen 7y ago
If they build it, can Americans use it? Asking for a friend...
truthwhisperer 7y ago
it is not working sorry for eu
goatinaboat 7y ago
This is very strange: AWS had no problems at all creating a wholly owned sovereign Chinese AWS region. Why can they not do exactly the same thing in France? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/china_cloud_setup/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/china_cloud_setup/

116 points by aloknnikhil 7y ago

ptah 7y ago

Europeans must be on the right track if the monopolists are complaining

TulliusCicero 7y ago
Did the definition of monopoly change while I wasn't looking? There are no cloud monopolists; there are major players, but nobody has a monopoly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  Correct. The right term to use here is oligopoly.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    And considering that they all meet up at conferences and the like, we might even want to toy with the term "cartel". But yeah, calling them monopolies is altogether incorrect.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      They are very obviously competing with each other. Every industry has conferences that all the big players go to, it doesn't mean they're illegally cooperating.
- lovich 7y ago
  A strict definition of a monopoly says there is only one seller, but in reality monopoly power is a spectrum. When someone calls a company a monopoly they are claiming that they have the power to unilaterally set prices beyond what a competitive market would bear. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/monopoly-power.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/monopoly-power....
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

toyg 7y ago

Christmas draws backlash from turkeys. News at 11. The sad bit is that, had these "giants" fought a bit more all those US legislative atrocities like the PATRIOT Act, maybe, just maybe, there would not have been a need for this.

bilbo0s 7y ago
There would still be a need for it, you can't be dependent on others for critical infrastructure. Especially nowadays. I think it's fair to say that right now the world is going through a "realignment". That generates the proper ratio of insecurities and pragmatic realities necessary for the people of the world to reassess the methods by which they've traditionally solved their problems.
buboard 7y ago
or like net neutrality, which in the end didn't change anything.
- MereInterest 7y ago
  Net neutrality is about maintaining the possibilities of newcomers arising. Saying that removing net neutrality didn't change anything is like saying that removing elections doesn't change anything. In either case, it inappropriately freezes the status quo in place.

curt15 7y ago

Any chance this project benefits nextcloud?

lnsp 7y ago

> Some European companies that use large American cloud providers say those services are more competitively priced than cloud services in Europe, WSJ Pro previously reported. Gaia-X could lower transaction costs by standardizing contracts and processes between cloud providers and customers, the German Economy Ministry said. I mean Hetzner for example is very competitive price-wise, but they are missing a lot of the platform functionality AWS and Azure provide.

rsynnott 7y ago
Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction. Which is fine; there's definitely a market for what they do.
- krn 7y ago
  > Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction. Hetzner Cloud is more about IaaS than PaaS, and competes directly with DigitalOcean after the introduction of dedicated vCPU, block storage, and private networks. It's still missing object storage, though. OVH Public Cloud, on the other hand, is trying to become the AWS / GCP / Azure of Europe – and with unmetered bandwidth is many times cheaper than they are – but at the moment it's still much better as IaaS rather than PaaS.
reacharavindh 7y ago
Came here to say just that. Hetzner is very much competitive with AWS, and GCP for IAAS - both technology and pricing wise. There are other European companies vying for a slice of the DigitalOcean like market here - I personally use upcloud fpr my personal hosting needs, and it’s been solid. Those complaining here that it is biased against USA and tariff free trade needs to comprehend the presence of US Cloud Act. If USA truly wants to compete fairly, it needs to obey the local laws and get that shit law out first.
ryuukk_ 7y ago
Check both Scaleway and OVH

cloudyo 7y ago

... and as a EU project private alternative to the likes of Dropbox, there's Duple, an app that gives you your full private Dropbox at home. Self-hosted, E2EE, and works just like a Dropbox (currently in beta): https://www.duple.io/en/ https://www.duple.io/en/

fulafel 7y ago
"E2EE coming soon"
iagovar 7y ago
It actually looks very cool, I'm going to try it. What would be the business model?
OldSchoolJohnny 7y ago
How does it protect your data if your house burns down?
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Dropbox isn't a backup anyways. Have an offsite backup that is encrypted. Could be the cloud, could be a hard drive you keep at your parents' house.
- magashna 7y ago
  Not how does it, how do you. You should spread the data to an offsite or secondary location.
  - deanCommie 7y ago
    So, a backup solution where part of the instructions is..."another backup solution" Come on.
    - magashna 7y ago
      Uh, yeah? A common rule in IT is 3-2-1 backups. 3 copies 2 different devices or medias 1 offsite If your data isn't that important, then don't. https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/data_backup_options.pdf https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/dat...

mcv 7y ago

Data has become incredibly important. A see a lot of people call data the new gold, or the new oil. I once read that some European nations stored their gold in the US, and are now having trouble getting it back. Oil is another valuable commodity where the US has always tried to stay in control over. With data, I guess it makes sense that European countries finally want a bit more sovereignty over it.

pieix 7y ago
Could you provide a citation for the claim that European countries have had a hard time repatriating gold held in the US?
- mcv 7y ago
  My comment is based on some articles from years ago about Germany and maybe other countries having trouble getting their gold back from the US. Googling a bit now results in a couple of articles that say that Germany did eventually get their gold back, but there were some hiccups and delays that made people wonder whether the gold was even there at all. https://bmg-group.com/germanys-gold-reserves-u-s-paper-claims/ https://bmg-group.com/germanys-gold-reserves-u-s-paper-claim... https://www.rt.com/business/445133-germany-access-gold-us-fed/ https://www.rt.com/business/445133-germany-access-gold-us-fe... https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-Gold-Back-From-The-Fed-And-It-s-A-Big-Deal.html https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-Gold-... Turns out everything is fine, but a couple of years ago, people were worried about this. It looks like only Germany was involved and no other countries.
- sinkelfink 7y ago
  There was major foot-dragging when Germany wanted its gold back. Leading to the obvious conclusion that the gold wasn't there at all, and Germany was just holding worthless paper that did nothing more than point to a line entry in an account book somewhere. > “Why would it take 7 years, unless there was a possible issue in getting it together, to return 300 tons? It could be done certainly in several weeks or even months – but 7 years?” Lanci questioned. “In my trading days, I’ve taken delivery of gold and silver and I’m aware of the physical logistical limitations. The time requested to deliver the 300 tonnes seems excessive – whether it be 5 or 7 years.”

big_chungus 7y ago

Lots of support from the usual HN "tariffs bad" crowd that shows up when America restricts trade. But now, producing your own stuff _can_ be important strategically? It seems pre-existing opinions of the actor in question are tainting opinions of the activity.

rsynnott 7y ago
Eh? I mean "in general, tariffs are bad" is not incompatible with "some industries/facilities are strategically important and must be supported". Very few people are calling for totally free markets with no tariffs or government support _at all_, but a lot of people would see them as a necessary evil that should be minimised.

hugh4life 7y ago

Dependency leads you to getting screwed over in negotiations... from American IT to Chinese manufacturing. Autarchy is not a serious option but you've got to have options for exiting lopsided relationships.

buboard 7y ago

I m on board as long as the EU governments don't have "special rights" to the data stored in those servers under all kinds of excuses. In many ways, having your data stored on the other side of the earth offers some privacy/security benefits. The right thing to campaign for is to move data AWAY from all kinds of clouds / hoarders and back into private silos, away from all kinds of grabby governments.

bilbo0s 7y ago
Well of course the EU governments will have special rights. You'll still have to obey EU law after all. But at least there's an extra step before American law enforcement can access that data. So consider, for most people, it's good enough protection. Because we're not worth the extra step.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Yep. This scenario was, in some ways, inevitable. It took nations a little while to catch up to the power that separation of data from a person's physical location via the cloud put in the hands of people and corporations, but they're catching up. At the end of the day, most users in a few years won't have a choice of no country's government being able to access their cloud state; they may have a choice over which country.
- mcv 7y ago
  What's more, EU law says that personal data can't just be shared with companies or governments. No easy backdoors to your data. I'm no lawyer, but I'd expect that any government, US, EU or otherwise, will have to provide a warrant. Final decision will be with a European judge, not an American one. That means quite a bit.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > EU law says that personal data can't just be shared with companies or governments Do you mean without consent? because otherwise the governments themselves will share data if asked.

c3534l 7y ago

> European Union countries are concerned about depending on technology providers that must comply with the U.S. Cloud Act, WSJ Pro Cybersecurity reported in October. The 2018 law requires American firms to provide law enforcement with customers’ personal data on request, even when the servers containing the information are abroad. I don't blame them. What a horribly short-sighted law.

stevespang 7y ago

"Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. criticized the initiative announced this week, called Gaia-X, saying the project will restrict data services along national borders". Actually, MS and Amazon are merely worried about how the European cloud will actually preserve their citizens privacy - - and how our US Cloud Co's will start loosing the ability to continue to VIOLATE Europeans privacy . . .

Barrin92 7y ago

Many people have pointed to privacy and data issues, but there's also the plain reality that the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years, so having key data stored in the US becomes an increasingly geopolitical risk even for European allies. I think these mercantilist plays we're seeing from the US are going to cause a lot of long term harm to the tech companies. For national security reasons alone you cannot rely on US cloud infrastructure if the man or woman in the white house is likely to pull the plug at any moment.

chance_state 7y ago
>the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for political ends over the recent few years Are there specific examples you're referring to? Because this is how geopolitics and diplomacy has worked since the dawn of civilization. This isn't something unique to Big Bad USA.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  The entity list program against Chinese companies, the pressure on Europe to reject Huawei infrastructure (and accompanying threats in particular when it comes to natsec data sharing), the attack on the German car industry, on French agriculture, the list has been getting pretty long. And while it's true that this has been the state of affairs for most of civilisation, it wasn't for the last ~70 years. Up until recently, the US was willing to underpin global free-trade without using economic politics as leverage for short-term or one-sided political goals. Which is precisely why US tech companies have become the first choice in much of Europe and indeed around the world. Now the question is being posed if that is still a good decision. Without this interference, Europe would not think about investing billions and billions into its own cloud infrastructure, and China would not be ditching Android. It could have been smooth sailing for US companies for a long time. If this continues I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the US and Europe.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Does anyone have info to share about the tech of Gaia-X? I mean it's probably mostly about cloud services for the public sector, but then it's also open for other users and I've heard vague hints at service repositories and privacy metadata. Public press info is only regurgitated "industry 4.0" fluff. Peter Altmaier (German minister of economics) wanted to talk about details and roadmaps, but fell off the stage and got injured before he could do so.

outside1234 7y ago

I'm surprised they didn't call the project Quaero again just to highlight how hopeless this is from the start. Talk about being five days late and five euros short! ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

somurzakov 7y ago

I believe that european bureacracy can be successful in building aws/azure rival from the ground up. They better support european cloud providers through some industry association, grants, or establish a university based partnership project

somurzakov 7y ago
typo, should be read: I don't believe
- arkitaip 7y ago
  It's fine either way because anyone European citizen surely read the first comment as sarcasm.

jasonvorhe 7y ago

Is there any code for this? Any specific design documents that actually go into detail? All of the PDFs I find don't go beyond the CIO level. Reads like a typical German bureaucracy project: Lots of requirements but nothing that could even remotely be implemented in time.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

They'll have an agreement to provide data anyway so it's not to protect customers

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/m6bEG http://archive.is/m6bEG

kmos 7y ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kennethcorbin/2019/07/17/eu-hits-amazon-with-antitrust-probe/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kennethcorbin/2019/07/17/eu-hit... and then it uses their cloud ;-) https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/european-commission-adopts-new-cloud-strategy-2019-may-28_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/european-commission-adopts-ne...

deanCommie 7y ago

Having just returned from 4 years living in Western Europe, it is laughable how technologically inept the European Union is when it comes to the internet. Europeans are competent and intelligent. Their universities are competitively amongst the best in the world. But there is no entrepreneurial or innovative mindset when it comes to the web. I think the ones that have it move to North America. The ones that are left are disincentivized by a comfortable and productive social environment. All this to say, I don't have much hope for this project's success, and unlike a private enterprise failing and disappearing, this will not fail quietly, but with billions of dollars, and the ones that will suffer are the European Union citizens who will be forced to use inept second tier technology.

blub 7y ago
What amazing innovation has been happening on the web? Technically, the last two decades can be summarized as "playing catch-up with mobile and the desktop". The business plan of most web entrepreneurs is to collect then sell user's data while burning VC money and hoping they'll be bought soon.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pergadad 7y ago
I do agree that there is much less entrepreneurial mindset but there is not less creation. What the creation leads to is different and I'd suggest two main reasons: 1) Europeans are less likely to make it a business - the safety net might play a role but also just different value sets. I'd suggest that on average Europeans are less focused on profit/getting rich and more on just living a decent life e.g. with work-life balance. So they might run things in their spare time but will be more likely to give their creation away than run a for-profit company with it. See e.g. PGP, Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, OpenCloud & Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ... - many leading FOSS and even some hardware projects are European-lead. 2) Startup success is quite a bit more difficult in Europe due to lower investor/VC availability and a smaller market (burden of translation & different legislations, although EU legislation is slowly converging things). Nonetheless you had Skype, Spotify, TransferWise, etc. But those were all mostly bootstrapped - there's no money available that allows annual 8-or-9-digit losses like with the typical examples of Uber, Lyft, WeWork or Lime. So its not that there's nothing creative going on, but fewer try to make it a business and of those fewer succeed - and indeed many of those are then bought by or on their own move to the other side of the Atlantic. Tidbit: actually I've never seen comparison data on startup success rates between countries, just on overall startup numbers.

riffraff 7y ago

I have not heard of this project. While as a european I appreciate the intent, I have zero expectations that this will result in anything other than some pointless spending, on the lines of the "google-killer" quaero[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

DenisM 7y ago

Given the relationship with the US, Russia must have been the first to realize they need their own cloud. I wonder if they built something serious yet? Maybe Yandex? [1] https://cloud.yandex.com/ https://cloud.yandex.com/

irrational 7y ago

In retrospect, I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm an American and I wouldn't trust us as far as I could throw us (and with the rate of obesity we experience, you wouldn't be able to throw us very far). I have no doubt that most government agencies with three letter acronyms can look at any data stored on US cloud servers with impunity.

JohnFen 7y ago

If they build it, can Americans use it? Asking for a friend...

truthwhisperer 7y ago

it is not working sorry for eu

goatinaboat 7y ago

This is very strange: AWS had no problems at all creating a wholly owned sovereign Chinese AWS region. Why can they not do exactly the same thing in France? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/china_cloud_setup/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/china_cloud_setup/