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I don't get what's new about this apart from the typical EU related buzzwords. France alone already has OVH and Scaleway, which are actual cloud providers in th

I don't get what's new about this apart from the typical EU related buzzwords. France alone already has OVH and Scaleway, which are actual cloud providers in the "AWS" sense, not just hosting providers. Like I get that this is part of the platform's marketing but I don't see the sovereignty (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.

alexey-salmin 2y ago
> (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this. How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?
input_sh 2y ago
There's no way I could describe it without sounding conspiratorial, so I'm just gonna lean into it: imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile (like Russia-EU relationship already did), how long would it take before all of EU's tech suddenly stopped working? Not saying that's gonna happen or is even likely to happen, but I don't think investing money into bootstraping some sort of a backup is necessarily a bad thing. China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that. None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  > EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went. Or Chinese supply chains during Covid. Change comes rapidly sometimes. It just takes one lunatic president…
    - ivan_gammel 2y ago
      I don’t think comparing energy and IT sectors is correct. „Russian“ scenario is about being forced to have full autonomy in software, and that is happening now. For example, see how fast they started rolling out alternatives to Miro - I know about at least two products in this field. ERP, CAD, office tools, certified Linux distros… Yes, Russia has a focus and policy consistency advantage in IT, but I don’t see why Europe in crisis could not build a comparably efficient task force.
      - 9dev 2y ago
        I think you misunderstood me. I made the comparison to the Russia/Germany situation to point out how quickly a political situation can tear apart even countries interleaved by business relations in critical industries. Germany was completely oblivious to the danger of Russia axing their energy supply, citing the same thought expressed in the grandparent post: ”Surely they wouldn’t do that, it makes no economic sense!“ The EU should therefore not rely on the USA staying a reliable partner just for the sake of the market relations, especially with the possibility of a second Trump term. America is self-centered, unreliable, and politically ruined—you can’t work with populists. All this is to say: Technological sovereignty is the right direction.
    - maeil 2y ago
      > People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went. Those people were completely clueless. I don't have a better way to phrase it. Nordstream 2 was an insane idea the second it was announced.
  - siruncledrew 2y ago
    At a personal level, it feels better to have something of your own to hold on to instead of someone else’s, so I think beaucrats will also respond accordingly. In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that. Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.
- slightwinder 2y ago
  > imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.
- Gravityloss 2y ago
  One historical example: After the second world war, Europe was developing space launch capability (multiple governments and companies in Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats that competed with American ones couldn't get launch opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed its own launcher. EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symphonie https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symp...

alexey-salmin 2y ago

> (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this. How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?

input_sh 2y ago

There's no way I could describe it without sounding conspiratorial, so I'm just gonna lean into it: imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile (like Russia-EU relationship already did), how long would it take before all of EU's tech suddenly stopped working? Not saying that's gonna happen or is even likely to happen, but I don't think investing money into bootstraping some sort of a backup is necessarily a bad thing. China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that. None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.

ivan_gammel 2y ago
> EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.
- 9dev 2y ago
  People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went. Or Chinese supply chains during Covid. Change comes rapidly sometimes. It just takes one lunatic president…
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    I don’t think comparing energy and IT sectors is correct. „Russian“ scenario is about being forced to have full autonomy in software, and that is happening now. For example, see how fast they started rolling out alternatives to Miro - I know about at least two products in this field. ERP, CAD, office tools, certified Linux distros… Yes, Russia has a focus and policy consistency advantage in IT, but I don’t see why Europe in crisis could not build a comparably efficient task force.
    - 9dev 2y ago
      I think you misunderstood me. I made the comparison to the Russia/Germany situation to point out how quickly a political situation can tear apart even countries interleaved by business relations in critical industries. Germany was completely oblivious to the danger of Russia axing their energy supply, citing the same thought expressed in the grandparent post: ”Surely they wouldn’t do that, it makes no economic sense!“ The EU should therefore not rely on the USA staying a reliable partner just for the sake of the market relations, especially with the possibility of a second Trump term. America is self-centered, unreliable, and politically ruined—you can’t work with populists. All this is to say: Technological sovereignty is the right direction.
  - maeil 2y ago
    > People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went. Those people were completely clueless. I don't have a better way to phrase it. Nordstream 2 was an insane idea the second it was announced.
- siruncledrew 2y ago
  At a personal level, it feels better to have something of your own to hold on to instead of someone else’s, so I think beaucrats will also respond accordingly. In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that. Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.
slightwinder 2y ago
> imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.
Gravityloss 2y ago
One historical example: After the second world war, Europe was developing space launch capability (multiple governments and companies in Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats that competed with American ones couldn't get launch opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed its own launcher. EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symphonie https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symp...