27 ms·

I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (l

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ballenf 5y ago
  > we fragment and destroy the entire Internet I would call fragmenting these things rebuilding the internet. Not sure how consolidating everyone on a few Mailchimp type services is in anyone's interest.
  • brahadeesh 5y ago
    Exactly. If this make European startups build their own ecosystem and provides me with an alternative for the services I use but don't track me, I'm going to switch - simple as. I see this as a win for the internet.
    • mediascreen 5y ago
      Why limit it to the EU? Shouldn't every country have their own AWS, Azure and Google Cloud? I think we underestimate just how difficult it is just to replicate existing services, let alone keep up with the innovation. It's like the Argentinian effort to stimulate its own computer manufacturing by banning Apple products.
      • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
        It'd help if the United States wasn't allowed to aggressively brain drain most of the rest of the world.
        • visarga 5y ago
          That's nice for countries and bad for people.
        • crehn 5y ago
          It’d help if the rest of the world tried to aggressively prevent brain drain by making the respective countries more attractive for work.
          • pvarangot 5y ago
            Or by making getting citizenship something that's attainable in my lifetime. Everyone complains about the US immigration system and of course it's not great but when I came here I kinda knew what the path forward was and how long stuff will take, for a lot of European countries there's no way to ever get citizenship and the path to permanent residency changes every three or four years.
            • maccolgan 5y ago
              Why are you importing New World thinking to the Old World?
            • rendall 5y ago
              In what European country specifically is there no way to ever get citizenship?
              • dmitriid 5y ago
                I guess Switzerland. Pretty much every other country offers you citizenship after a time.
    • native_samples 5y ago
      Unfortunately, you will find that they'll "track" you just the same, but provide worse service due to smaller economies of scale.
    • esyir 5y ago
      Sounds like protectionism when they can't compete. The EU isn't exactly a shining star for tech development, probably because the culture there kneecaps it every step of the way.
  • xanaxagoras 5y ago
    Here here. Good riddance.
    • xdennis 5y ago
      *Hear, hear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear
      • xanaxagoras 5y ago
        Thanks!
  • mediascreen 5y ago
    I already get a lot of "We are sorry, but for legal reasons we are prevented from providing this service where you live" when I'm accessing American websites. Recent European judgements seems to make it illegal to embed content from YouTube or Vimeo for example. I don't see how dividing services up by region will help me anyway. I'd rather be able to choose from a few (I imagine there are more than a few at the moment) international Mailchimps than one in EU.
    • chaostheory 5y ago
      I feel that the whole point of this is to mimic China’s achievement of driving out foreign competition through legislation. It’s similar to the UK’s pornography laws being more about surveillance and censorship rather than protecting children.
      • foxfluff 5y ago
        If you flip the scenario around in your mind.. how would you feel if virtually every site or service you visit scoops up your data and sends it to [China|Russia|...] and hosts all your private data on servers operated by the [Chinese|Russians|...] and are subject to [Chinese|Russian|...] rule and disregard whatever laws your country has enacted? How would you feel if you couldn't opt out without virtually opting out of the entire internet, including all the services your friends and family and local associations & companies use for messaging? That's how the internet has been. That's how I feel about US tech giants getting all my data. They write their privacy policy, they dictate their terms, they follow US laws. I have absolutely no choice or voice or vote, unless one considers "yo dawg just build your own internet" a realistic choice. I don't feel like the purpose is to drive out foreign competition. I feel like the purpose is to enforce privacy as a right, and I fully support it. I also fully support the right to transmit data across borders as long as the destination country also respects my privacy and rights instead of treating me as an alien and potential terrorist. Is that too much to ask for? And in general, is following the rules of the country you offer a service in too much to ask for? Local laws apply to brick and mortar business; if Walmart wants to come to my neighborhood, sure go ahead, but please respect our laws. I don't see why internet companies should be above the law either. GDPR is replacing rules dictated by US corporations with democratically established rules written by our representatives. It's unfortunate that there's now a clash between US laws and EU laws, but it's not the end of the world.
  • personjerry 5y ago
    Perhaps unpopular opinion, but I don't want a fragmented internet, where I have to remember 10 different options for every single service I need to run a startup. Is that really the hill we want to die on? I have enough things to worry about, I don't want to consider 10 different cloud computing options, 10 different database options, 10 different analytics services. I want to just go with the big popular option. Heck I'm willing to bet even if more options come up, the most popular option will be some aggregator site that tells you which one to use.
• jdrc 5y ago
  We knew those consequences from the start, they are just being realized veeery slowly
• doctor_lollipop 5y ago
  > No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace I'm so looking forward to that.
  • cyral 5y ago
    What is the alternative? We are going to go back to 2005 where we send docs over email? Files end up being too large, nobody knows what the latest copy is, etc.
    • silvercove 5y ago
    • tyfon 5y ago
      You can host this on-site :) No need to go cloud everything. I think you can even buy the whole azure pack to run on-site.
    • newaccount74 5y ago
      The EU is big enough that companies like Microsoft will find a way to offer their services legally, and if they wouldn't, it would be a huge opportunity to EU based competitors. It's not like we don't have any software companies in the EU. Also, there's no reason that collaboration tools must be hosted on a US cloud. Especially Microsoft traditionally provided tools for their customers to host their own infrastructure -- it's only a recent phenomenon that everything is hosted by the vendor themselves.
      • kergonath 5y ago
        I think you’re right. Microsoft is perfectly able to split its operations. They’re doing it now in China in a much more drastic fashion, and they seem to have been preparing to do it in Europe for a few years now.
        • nickpp 5y ago
          The fact that US companies may need to treat Europe like China speaks volumes about the road the EU is headed on.
• i5heu 5y ago
  That’s okay. The EU can build it itself when the US player are not able to not send data to their US data centres.
  • jdrc 5y ago
    I don't think it can. Maybe they can buy yandex, but i think europe has drained its talent tothe US. And even if they build it, how will they monetize it?
    • coredev_ 5y ago
      I don't belive that to be true at all - EU have a lot of great SaaS/tech companies that emply a lot of really talented people. What EU need more of however is vc money.
    • mekkkkkk 5y ago
      Europe isn't drained of talent by a long shot. It has surely been tapped to some extent by the bay area exodus, but there's plenty of tech success stories and talented people here still.
      • VirusNewbie 5y ago
        Yeah the talented people are getting paid 3x as much to work for US companies with like two or three exceptions.
    • distances 5y ago
      That's just ridiculous. It's a miniscule portion of the total talent that has left to US, and Europe draws many people in constantly as immigration is easier.
  • YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    Why would EU building it themselves going to happen? Either it could be profitable for company to operate in EU or it is not. Assuming current US companies are efficient enough and if they couldn't be profitable, why could be a same thing built by EU is profitable there. In fact it is opposite as they couldn't track as much as American companies even outside EU.
• colordrops 5y ago
  Europe's future internet without web3 sounds wonderful.
• waffleiron 5y ago
  >I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. Could this not also be said about US regulations such as CLOUD act, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Executive Order 12333. I don't think it's accurate to solely blame the EU when this is in response to legislation that gives/gave the US access to all types of personal data on European citizens.
  • kergonath 5y ago
    > I don't think it's accurate to solely blame the EU when this is in response to legislation that gives/gave the US access to all types of personal data on European citizens. I would argue that the Americans getting better privacy protections and working with other countries instead of forcing American companies to behave illegally abroad would be a much better solution than the Europeans watering down their privacy laws. American companies will set up independent shell companies or subsidiaries to serve European customers anyway. Microsoft and Amazon are never going to voluntary leave a market of 400M customers. Doing so would leave too much room for a competitor to grow and then threaten them. So if fragmenting the web means that Europeans get the same services as Americans, but with better privacy, then I am all for it. Europeans are to blame for the flaws in the GDPR, not for doing their thing without the blessing of the Americans.
    • estaseuropano 5y ago
      The recent German judgment was also about subsidiaries. If 'Meta Europe ' falls under the cloud act it isn't GDPR compliant.
      • kergonath 5y ago
        It’s a simple shell game. Meta US can very well become a subsidiary of Meta Bahamas, and still get licensing fees for its brands and IP from a nominally independent Meta EU.
    • dudus 5y ago
      Maybe that's true for the Microsofts and Google's of the world. But for smaller companies trying to provide SaaS or PaaS it totally keeps them from entering the market. So in the end it only increases the difficulty to compete in EU and increases the power of these mega corps.
• nerbert 5y ago
  These tools have EU versions of their services with servers in Ireland or other places so that the data does not leave the territory. There will be absolutely no consequence to these regulations.
  • mediascreen 5y ago
    The server locations does not seem to matter as long as American government agencies are able to make the company provide the information. But, companies like AWS claim that they voluntarily bind them selves to to provide much stricter privacy safeguards than the US law requires[0]. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-and-eu-data-transfers-strengthened-commitments-to-protect-customer-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-and-eu-data-transf...
• silvercove 5y ago
• fleddr 5y ago
  Nah, the tools will be adjusted to comply. The EU combined is the largest economic region in the world. With backdrop the other huge one China where doing business has become increasingly difficult and volatile. Tech giants cannot afford to pull out of the EU. Call their bluff, they won't. They can't even if they wanted to, as shareholders will skin them alive.
  • keewee7 5y ago
    >The EU combined is the largest economic region in the world. It's not 2011 anymore. The GDP of the US has surpassed the GDP of the EU.
    • fleddr 5y ago
      Is this with or without money printing? I'm teasing. I accept your new data, but I don't think it fundamentally changes my point.
      • mardifoufs 5y ago
        If we don't count money printing, europe would probably be in an even worse shape. Remember that the interest rates in the big Western European countries have been negative for years with still almost no economic growth, and that was pre-covid! Even the FED isn't technically directly buying US bonds from the market like the ECB does to prop up the debt sales of its weaker members. Even the historically low current FED rates, I think are still higher than the peak of most European central banks rates of the past 5 years. Again, all of that did very little to prop up their economy (which usually indicates it's pretty zombified) so they couldn't even start hiking the rates back in 2018-2019 like the FED did. That means they are now stuck with very few "easy" ways to recover from 2020. I know you are just joking, but the sheer irony of a money printer joke in this context was just too much for me to not react :')
    • M2Ys4U 5y ago
      Being the number 2 (or three if China overtakes) is still not exactly a weak position to be in...
• goodpoint 5y ago
  > European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools I wish!
• mekkkkkk 5y ago
  Shaking up the current situation doesn't seem to be an entirely bad thing. As it stands, the majority of the internet is depending/residing on datacenters provided by a handful of companies. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Building satisfactory alternatives to Office, Workspaces etc. isn't a monumental task by any stretch. With the sudden demand that you predict, they'll spring up like weeds. This might be ham-fisted and crude, but in the end I see a lot of positives.
  • verdverm 5y ago
    If replacing Office / Workspaces is not a monumental task, why are there only two good options? Workspaces is only just becoming a viable replacement for enterprise because pivot tables are hard.
    • mekkkkkk 5y ago
      A big reason is that competing with them on equal footing is a monumental task. You are working against network effects, heavy duty marketing, integrations into other products and a whole army of developers. Developing the product itself isn't the reason.
      • greenyoda 5y ago
        But network effects and marketing are irrelevant for products that can't be used in your country because they violate local laws. If some Google product can't legally be used in the EU, then it has zero network effects there and Google wouldn't waste money marketing it there. Also, the competing EU-based service might be strong competitors to the ones in the U.S., among people like me who are privacy conscious. I don't use Google services, but I'd be happy to consider using GDPR-compliant services based in Europe.
        • mekkkkkk 5y ago
          I think you misread the comment thread. You are just restating my point. I agree with you. I was talking about the current (previous?) situation, where US and EU companies are on equal footing on the european market.
• iofiiiiiiiii 5y ago
  Microsoft will be storing EU users' data in the EU: https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2021/05/06/eu-data-boundary/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2021/05/06/eu-data-boun... Will this enable them to comply with the requirements?
  • mekkkkkk 5y ago
    Microsoft has done the leg work for this already. They currently have a completely contained Azure environment in Germany. I think it was deployed to ensure compliance with german/EU health data protocols. I have first hand experience of this, migrating between their global PaaS and the contained German one. The bulkheads are quite air-tight (much to my personal detriment).
    • zeeZ 5y ago
      They also had a completely separate o365 offering called Microsoft Cloud Germany that failed due to lack of interest (and the fact that it was years behind the global platform, I say), which was finally shut down last year, with everyone who renewed their contract automatically being migrated off. They're working on it, but still not everything is entirely regional.
      • zeeZ 5y ago
        https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/o365-data-locations?view=o365-worldwide#germany https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/o3...
  • estaseuropano 5y ago
    Not if they have to provide this data under the cloud act.
• gherkinnn 5y ago
  It’s justified to keep that in mind. The EU is absolutely capable of myopically binding itself in red tape and stumbling in to second order problems. It is also silly to tolerate techs incessant fuckery.
• keewee7 5y ago
  The activist MEPs in the EU who have pushed for these regulations are overwhelmingly (German) socialists. I support their work to protect the privacy of EU citizens. But I'm also aware that their goal is to replace Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc. with state-owned European enterprises. European state enterprises can be surprisingly efficient. However keep the Germans out of it. German government IT is still in the Middle Ages. Let countries like Denmark and Estonia build the future of European IT.
  • rvense 5y ago
    Danish governmental IT has more than its fair share of scandals.
• watwut 5y ago
  > No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. For quite a lot of business data, the "do not export data out of region" thing is nothing new. Which is why it is not actually unusual to be able to select where the servers are located. That being said, if this made Microsoft Teams impossible to use, it would made a lot of us happy. That thing is crap.
• estaseuropano 5y ago
  You can use all these, but you cannot send your own visitors' data to M365.
• wongarsu 5y ago
  > like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc [...] No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but imho AWS, GCP and Azure are popular with startups because of their generous free credits, not because they are good tools for startups. As a startup you are typically better served by a DigitalOcean-level of complexity, and there are plenty of such offers in the EU (Hetzner Cloud, Gridscale, OVH, etc) For Mailchimp you have plenty of competition, some of it in the EU (SendInBlue and Mailjet come to mind). For payment processing there are also plenty of offers, Adyen is probably the biggest European alternative but there are countless smaller ones. Microsoft Office 365 can be replaced by (shocker) Microsoft Office (the offline version). But most of your documents probably don't even contain PII and would be fine in Office 365 or Google Workplace. The exception is obviously email, but the market is flooded with E-Mail services from any country you like (and your preferred Hoster probably offers an email package too). So I'm not really sure what part of the ecosystem we are missing here? European companies often have the smaller advertising budget and mindshare, but it isn't like they don't exist.
  • brianwawok 5y ago
    > As a startup you are typically better served by a DigitalOcean-level of complexity, and there are plenty of such offers in the EU (Hetzner Cloud, Gridscale, OVH, etc) As an actual startup founder who started as a 1 man startup, strongly disagree. Spent maybe $200 a month on Google Cloud, got an actual production ready cluster. Scaled up to Millions in revenue, never had to deal with any Linux Server admin BS. More time on business, less time on Linux Sysadmin.
    • openplatypus 5y ago
      OVH gave us home. Enrolled us to Startup Program. Gave us support and hefty credit. Managed K8s. Openstack. When we started paying for it, it was still cheaper than AWS. Just because AWS is the default, does not mean you should use it.
      • brianwawok 5y ago
        When I started, no other providers had the K8s features I needed. Still prefer Google, as they are the OG for k8s.
• tilolebo 5y ago
  We already had a good sneak peek in Germany, when schools closed last year for some weeks due to the pandemic. Popular video conferencing solutions weren't allowed due to privacy issues. The official "Lernraum" platform that have been used for this did not work most of the time. I understand where these laws come from, but it's sad that there often is no European alternative
• josefx 5y ago
  > No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. I think you are overestimating the problem. Before Facebook decided that it wanted the European market we had hundreds of similar services. We will have local replacements the moment these US companies with their near unlimited war chests finally fuck off and give European companies room to breathe again.
• xdennis 5y ago
  On the contrary, it only forces those providers to have a European presence. We're not fragmenting the internet by looking after our own interests. This wouldn't be an issue if Americans viewed rights (and in this case privacy rights) as belonging to human being as opposed to Americans citizens. The US's policy is what led to this: > Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield
  • gxs 5y ago
    This is a great response to OPs comment. At the end of the day we should be doing what is good for the People and somehow its always assumed that they will/should be the ones impacted when policies like these are enacted. But Europe has leverage here - I don't think Amazon would want to miss out on a giant market base out of some moral principle and there are probably other levers to be pulled here to encourage that. Anyway, not adding much to your comment other than kudos.
  • VikingCoder 5y ago
    You are absolutely fragmenting the internet. We had PII on Azure. We wanted to do business in France. We had to fork our services, and run a full stack on a crappy provider in France. They charged a lot more, would take weeks of vacation with zero support for us. It was a freaking nightmare. EDIT: I love the responses I'm getting. People are in absolute denial that this does in fact fragment the internet. You may believe that's a good thing, and that's a rational discussion we can have. But don't lie to yourself, or to me, that this doesn't fragment the internet.
    • 0des 5y ago
      désolé!
      • benreesman 5y ago
• kennu 5y ago
  AWS has always had a very clear region system which let's you decide the location where you store your data and run your services. Most popular region here in the EU being eu-west-1 (Ireland), which usually gets new features and updates first. Once you choose a region for your application, it takes some effort to store data outside of it.
• RIMR 5y ago
  It's sad but predictable that the top response amounts to "Forcing companies to act ethically and legally would just push them into the USA". That's not exactly a great argument here, given that this French court has objectively made the right legal decision here in terms of EU privacy law, and the rights of their citizens.
• parasense 5y ago
  > It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe And even then it seems risky the EU will deem the business model entirely in violation of privacy laws. It's very chilling When the EU finally completes their utopian/dystopian ideas of privacy from foreign Internet services, the great firewall of Europe, perhaps then EU regulators will look inward and do the same things? But for now it all has the appearance of disfavoring International Internet services, as if to encourage regional tech companies to advance. Which seems reasonable, Europe seems to have lost most of it's Tech companies, and that's a problem that needs to be fixed. It's just weird to go about the problem by claiming International companies are in violation.
  • tempnow987 5y ago
    What's funny is I don't think of the EU was that high on the privacy list? Doesn't govt slurp up data on its citizens in terms of national health care systems, databases on identity, easy access to online records etc? Is there even a trial by jury in the EU? I thought they had a type of prosecutor / judge that could go rooting around anywhere they want pretty much unchecked.
    • withinboredom 5y ago
      It’s not about what you collect. It’s about consent and transparency. I can log into my government website and literally see anything about myself that is known to the government. If you get arrested, your name isn’t released to the press so you can continue your life afterwards. If you go to jail, and apply for a job afterwards, they do a background check. If the job has nothing to do with what you got arrested for, it comes back clean. These are all sensible things. When I grew up in the US, I had absolutely no privacy or expectation of privacy with the digital world. I don’t miss it.
  • zwaps 5y ago
    The point is though that a EU citizen has zero privacy rights when data is transferred to the US. Zero. Not US level protection, not EU level protection - just fair game. For that simple reason the EU has to step in. There is no other way.
• lazyeye 5y ago
  I think we are already dealing with the "bizarre consequences" of having our personal information uploaded to servers in a foreign country without consent. Privacy abuse on such a massive scale, never before seen in human history, requires action. And it does not matter how normalised this has become for the people in the valley of the clueless.
• seanhunter 5y ago
  This is entirely untrue. AWS and Azure are most definitely able to offer GDPR-compliant in-region hosting options and I'm sure GCP can to (I just don't know their offering as well).
• belorn 5y ago
  If European startups end up starting companies in the US, and the US companies can't operate in EU, there will either be a massive vacuum to serve the European market ($15 trillion in estimated GDP), or there will be companies that like profits and want to earn some money by providing products in EU. We can create a middle ground. When ever information about a EU citizen that get transferred to the US, a similar information about a US citizen get transferred to the EU as hostage in case there is a data violation. A list of IP-addresses accessing usa.gov in return for a list of IP-addresses that accessed europa.eu. Surely a deal can be made that give both sides equal power.
• EnKopVand 5y ago
  I wouldn’t worry too much about AWS or Azure. When AWS realised how much money the European Public Sector spends on the public cloud a good few years back they went from being behind Azure in terms of complaisance to now being ahead. I’m Danish and as we’re a notorious Microsoft country I have the most experience with everything Azure, but the fact that Amazon was so quick to ensure that 100% of the workers who ever come near the services they sell within the EU are EU citizens is something that we still looks somewhat envious toward. It’s actually an area where Microsoft might eventually run into some trouble if they don’t work on their compliance but I can certainly understand how it’s hard when one of their key selling points to Enterprise is that we can call Redmund. I don’t think the EU will get into much trouble over this, however, and I don’t think it will have too much of an impact on our tech industry. I do agree that it’s not likely to help European alternatives to Microsoft or Amazon, but that’s not exactly the point or the legalisation is it? It’s there to prevent EU citizens and our personal information from becoming the primary commodity that is sold between giant companies. Advertisement companies like Google will no doubt struggle with this going forward, but is that really a loss for anyone?
  • wizwit999 5y ago
    > but the fact that Amazon was so quick to ensure that 100% of the workers who ever come near the services they sell within the EU are EU citizens Uh not sure what you're referring to but that's not true. The only airgapped region w/ enforced citizenship was for US citizens in GovCloud.
• pyrale 5y ago
  > I think most successful European entrepreneurs will just end up starting companies in the US instead. If these companies end up banned in Europe, that's not really a problem from Europe's PoV. Europe may end up deciding that US companies not coming is a problem in itself, but that is already the case imo. Honestly, if this policy is actually enforced, it's very hard to imagine how the landscape would shift. Maybe Europe would be brought to its heels, and be forced to remove the law. On the other hand, maybe the US would be forced to renounce their cloud act, which is a large part of Europe's privacy issues with US companies. A third path could be companies reverse-incorporating in some place that would let them keep in business. It's a bit hard to predict honestly.
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  Companies will bend to the whims of regulators in the countries they do business in. Look at US companies in China.
• malermeister 5y ago
  Why is it on Europeans to weaken their privacy regulations and not on Americans to strengthen theirs? Why should we bend to the lowest common denominator instead of lifting everyone up?
• minusSeven 5y ago
  >It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs will just end up starting companies in the US instead. This is what you are wrong about. It would be true if you were from a small country like Sri Lanka or similar but for EU many European companies will smell an opportunity to fill the void.
• dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  > There must be some reasonable middle ground before we fragment and destroy the entire Internet. Elsewhere "fragmentation" is called diversity and competition. It's sad that it has to come about due to regulation, but it's a good outcome nonetheless. The familiarity and precedence of current offerings becomes a kind of Stockholm syndrome for people. More options mean more chance of valuable improvements, and geographical diversity means different mentalities and points of view, instead of more "me too" options.
• iammjm 5y ago
  AFAIK, Microsoft moves most of it's cloud services to Europe by the end of this year for their European clients [1] So I guess where's a will there's a way - they just need a "little" nudge. Should be good for datacenter redundancy anyway, no? But: some datacenters are in fact crappier/slower than others - German datacenters take way longer to implement some new features compared to US datacenters or even those in Holland/Irland. But that's due to slower german regulatory processes [1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2021/12/16/eu-data-boundary-for-the-microsoft-cloud-a-progress-report/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2021/12/16/eu-data-boun...
• gigatexal 5y ago
  Or... Or... these co's stop mining/saving data on all EU folks altogether. If they could prove to regulators that the tracking and mining and selling of data does not happen at all for EU folks perhaps these cloud players could still sell services to the EU market.
• srcreigh 5y ago
  The UK market for digital products won't stop existing just because a few UK entrepreneurs move to the US. These regulations are the only way to dismantle US big tech monopolies. The US government won't do anything about it on its own accord because it's too profitable. Other countries need to neuter the influence of US big tech first. Then the US can police their own better to encourage intl competition if they want to.
• Moru 5y ago
  An alternative is to push USA to get similar laws making it equal on both sides.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  > European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US PaaS and IaaS providers all have a presence in the EU or is that still not good enough to pass the regulation that's in place? SaaS I get it, they'd have to create a presence in the EU but I don't think that's a bad thing. They will, at least the big ones you mentioned. And if that's a problem for smaller SaaS providers then the market will have a solution for that emerge over time.
• nomercy400 5y ago
  > most successful European entrepreneurs will just end up starting companies in the US instead. And then they will not be able to serve the european market, nor profit off the european economy. Good luck competing with each other for that US market.
  • boc 5y ago
    More like they build successful companies in the US which then enter the European markets with a massive warchest and dominate any domestic EU startup in the space.
• jmnicolas 5y ago
  > I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. Wait until you see the result of the green revolution: you'll pay your energy 3 times more than now. We'll need decades to recover (if we recover) from this ideological move from people that lives in la la land and have no idea of the consequences of their acts. It already has started with natural gas prices skyrocketing. The Russians are holding us by the balls and our politicians are spitting at their faces...
  • luibelgo 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, where did you get that 3x claim on green energy? And how is that related to Gas?
    • jmnicolas 5y ago
      It was inspired by natural gas prices that went 3x this winter and an article that said we (French citizen) pay our electricity much more than what it cost us to produce because our production is sold on the markets then sold back to us at an inflated price (deepl should offer an OK translation even if it might lose a bit of the humor : https://institutdeslibertes.org/nous-avons-la-meilleure-fonction-publique-au-monde/ https://institutdeslibertes.org/nous-avons-la-meilleure-fonc... ). I don't have data to say how much more will it be expensive, but I know it will be bad enough that we certainly will have protests. You can't just delete nuclear, coal and natural gas power plants and think the invisible hand will provide. There is no secret plan behind: we're gonna crash then our politicians will blame the Russians and / or COVID but certainly not their incompetence. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live in a polluted world more than anybody else, but I also want to take a hot shower daily without it being a luxury expense. We needed to think the transition and do it progressively before. Too late.
• lrvick 5y ago
  I run multiple organizations just fine without any third party proprietary SaaS like those provided by Salesforce, Google, Apple, etc. It is crazy to me so few realize it is really not much, if at all, harder to run a business without involving US surveillance capitalism corporations. Tools like Nextcloud, Matrix, Jitsi, have turn-key SaaS providers or you can self-host them easily as well. Same for many many analytics solutions. I honestly think every company would be better off having more sovereignty in their tech stacks and data, and it is much better for consumers who may not realize they are -also- sharing their data with third parties like Google who use it sell targeted behavior changes to the highest bidder.
• codinger 5y ago
  Sounds like a whole new market opened up for the EU.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  I don't think Google analytics is that essential. It has privacy problems and there are alternatives around. It is just often the lazy choice of developers. They would have to adjust a bit, comes with the job anyway. Not using it doesn't "fragment the internet". I still don't think laws against specific software is helpful though.