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I think digital sovereignty is a great idea, but no European country has been seriously committed to it. A few examples. * In the UK the NHS and a number of ot

I think digital sovereignty is a great idea, but no European country has been seriously committed to it. A few examples. * In the UK the NHS and a number of other government services use AWS heavily. * A lot of businesses all over the world use AWS, Cloudflare, Google Drive and other "cloud" and similar services. Some of these are quite hard to move off. This includes critical businesses such as banks. * I believe most Windows users now really on MS accounts to login to their PCs * The vast majority of mobile devices rely on Google or Apple for updates and software installation, as do almost all desktops (a few Linux and BSD users aside). * American companies dominate payment systems. Any one of these gives US companies a huge amount of control. The most effort to put alternatives in place have been made by countries that are hostile to the US - such as Russia and China - not an attractive alternative. Governments moving to sovereign services is not enough - if the US can cripple your private sector you are finished anyway. There is no easy, quick or cheap solution.

Aldipower 2y ago
I can say the same for Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Post. Not everything, but quite some things are running on AWS there. Hard to believe, but reality.
high_na_euv 2y ago
>American companies dominate payment systems. Well, not really For example in Poland you have Blik which is really robust
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  In Poland you have Blik which is really robust... ... and yet American companies dominate payment systems in Europe. And in Poland too. Having a choice doesn't mean that the leading option is not dominating the other ones.
JimBlackwood 2y ago
> * American companies dominate payment systems. Which ones? I can't name a single American one that "dominates". Maybe that's just my perspective but the American payment systems feel decades behind. At least in the NL we have iDeal and through EPI (European Payments Initiative) it should become the standard in the EU https://ideal.nl/en/epi-successfully-completes-acquisition-of-ideal-and-payconiq-international https://ideal.nl/en/epi-successfully-completes-acquisition-o... Then there's Klarna as well, which I think is pretty big in the EU.
- tacker2000 2y ago
  Paypal is very strong in the german speaking regions.
- wiether 2y ago
  Visa/Mastercard to begin with And now you have Apple & Google Pay for people using their smartphone You add PayPal to that and... you cover the companies that are the most widespread overall in Europe Each country has its own set of local systems, but, overall, the most commons are americans
- watermelon0 2y ago
  I was under the impression that residents in many (if not most?) EU countries generally use Visa/Mastercard debit cards for electronic physical and online payments. There is also Maestro (owned by Mastercard), but most banks have already switched away to Visa/Mastercard.
- wiether 2y ago
  I know iDeal because I had to implement it for a customer a few years back, but that's the first time I hear about EPI After looking to see what it is about, I can tell you that even though I have accounts in three of the "Founding Shareholders", I never heard of it, they never pushed it to me and I only saw references to Wero in one of their app, but I had to look closely for it. So I have doubts regarding you statement about "it should become the standard in the EU"
mjr00 2y ago
Yeah. Nobody seriously commits to it because fundamentally the idea of EU countries quickly moving off American tech services is as flawed as the idea of American manufacturers quickly moving to production in domestic factories: * There's no existing infrastructure. OVH and Hetzner are great for smaller projects and businesses, but no serious enterprises and governments are using them, as far as I know. There's no real alternatives to Android, iOS and Windows. (Sorry, folks; not the year of the Linux desktop quite yet.) * It's expensive and time-consuming. The on-prem to cloud migration took decades for most (and is still ongoing for many!); even if a viable alternative existed right now, migrating from AWS to a domestic cloud service is a 5+ year project that distracts from other initiatives. * Compounding on the above, business leaders still largely expect this to be a one-time event, believing there's low likelihood this policy would last past 2028. You're not going to see much beyond research and planning for at least 4 years, before anyone commits to investing hundreds of millions in a massive tech migration. * Besides all that, where do you actually move to, specifically? You can say "the EU," but given the rise of populism in the region, are you confident enough to bet $500m that there won't be a "Gexit", "Frexit" or "Swexit"? Is every country in the EU going to make their own Amazon-scale cloud provider and Windows-scale operating system? Seems unrealistic. The most realistic outcome is that MS, Meta, and Alphabet all continue to push region-specific data residency for their cloud platforms and OS'es, so customers are more insulated against foreign policy changes... and charge European customers more for the trouble.
- Aldipower 2y ago
  At least for the cloud, one could consider the Lidl cloud called STACKIT, which targets larger businesses. Otherwise FULL ACK
  - wiether 2y ago
    But do we have concrete examples of what they actually provide and how do they compare to the three majors public cloud providers? For example I can't tell if they have serverless offerings (particularly FaaS) Their public facing website is very similar to OVH or Scaleway Their Terraform provider is... not reassuring I guess from your username that you may have more intel about them, so I'm interested!
xracy 2y ago
At the top you're saying that no one has seriously committed to it, and at the bottom you're saying there's not an easy/quick/cheap solution. But I think the thing you have to consider, and the thing US companies should fear, is if the Tariffs make this a case for a serious commitment. If I'm in the EU right now, I'm looking at all of my dependencies on US, and I'm wondering how many jobs I can create by investing in separating myself from these services ASAP. And given that the US is about to be crippled in their buying power of any silicon I would fully expect to be able to build out Data Centers in the very near future on the relatively cheap because the competition just got hamstrung in the market. Additionally, you can turn up software pretty quickly and just iterate on it with a small number of developers. The problem they have to solve isn't "how do I write software?" The problem they have to solve is "how do I deploy that software." And the US just gift-wrapped them cheap DataCenters by starting a trade war with the major chip manufacturers.
tpm 2y ago
> no European country has been seriously committed to it I would argue several countries and the EU as a whole is seriously committed to it, but this commitment comes with usual European caveats: it will be slow and expensive. But it is happenning. https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/EN/2025/03/dvc.html https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/EN/202... > American companies dominate payment systems. I think SEPA dominates payment systems and anything else is only a layer above than can be replaced. And there are several widely used country-specific systems that are not American. > Governments moving to sovereign services is not enough - if the US can cripple your private sector you are finished anyway. Moving government services is a necessary first step. > There is no easy, quick or cheap solution. Yes.
AlecSchueler 2y ago
> but no European country has been seriously committed to it. TFA is about how it became a priority since January, so that's hardly surprising. Presumably now that it is a priority the commitment level will be changing.

Aldipower 2y ago

I can say the same for Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Post. Not everything, but quite some things are running on AWS there. Hard to believe, but reality.

high_na_euv 2y ago

>American companies dominate payment systems. Well, not really For example in Poland you have Blik which is really robust

poincaredisk 2y ago
In Poland you have Blik which is really robust... ... and yet American companies dominate payment systems in Europe. And in Poland too. Having a choice doesn't mean that the leading option is not dominating the other ones.

JimBlackwood 2y ago

> * American companies dominate payment systems. Which ones? I can't name a single American one that "dominates". Maybe that's just my perspective but the American payment systems feel decades behind. At least in the NL we have iDeal and through EPI (European Payments Initiative) it should become the standard in the EU https://ideal.nl/en/epi-successfully-completes-acquisition-of-ideal-and-payconiq-international https://ideal.nl/en/epi-successfully-completes-acquisition-o... Then there's Klarna as well, which I think is pretty big in the EU.

tacker2000 2y ago
Paypal is very strong in the german speaking regions.
wiether 2y ago
Visa/Mastercard to begin with And now you have Apple & Google Pay for people using their smartphone You add PayPal to that and... you cover the companies that are the most widespread overall in Europe Each country has its own set of local systems, but, overall, the most commons are americans
watermelon0 2y ago
I was under the impression that residents in many (if not most?) EU countries generally use Visa/Mastercard debit cards for electronic physical and online payments. There is also Maestro (owned by Mastercard), but most banks have already switched away to Visa/Mastercard.
wiether 2y ago
I know iDeal because I had to implement it for a customer a few years back, but that's the first time I hear about EPI After looking to see what it is about, I can tell you that even though I have accounts in three of the "Founding Shareholders", I never heard of it, they never pushed it to me and I only saw references to Wero in one of their app, but I had to look closely for it. So I have doubts regarding you statement about "it should become the standard in the EU"

mjr00 2y ago

Yeah. Nobody seriously commits to it because fundamentally the idea of EU countries quickly moving off American tech services is as flawed as the idea of American manufacturers quickly moving to production in domestic factories: * There's no existing infrastructure. OVH and Hetzner are great for smaller projects and businesses, but no serious enterprises and governments are using them, as far as I know. There's no real alternatives to Android, iOS and Windows. (Sorry, folks; not the year of the Linux desktop quite yet.) * It's expensive and time-consuming. The on-prem to cloud migration took decades for most (and is still ongoing for many!); even if a viable alternative existed right now, migrating from AWS to a domestic cloud service is a 5+ year project that distracts from other initiatives. * Compounding on the above, business leaders still largely expect this to be a one-time event, believing there's low likelihood this policy would last past 2028. You're not going to see much beyond research and planning for at least 4 years, before anyone commits to investing hundreds of millions in a massive tech migration. * Besides all that, where do you actually move to, specifically? You can say "the EU," but given the rise of populism in the region, are you confident enough to bet $500m that there won't be a "Gexit", "Frexit" or "Swexit"? Is every country in the EU going to make their own Amazon-scale cloud provider and Windows-scale operating system? Seems unrealistic. The most realistic outcome is that MS, Meta, and Alphabet all continue to push region-specific data residency for their cloud platforms and OS'es, so customers are more insulated against foreign policy changes... and charge European customers more for the trouble.

Aldipower 2y ago
At least for the cloud, one could consider the Lidl cloud called STACKIT, which targets larger businesses. Otherwise FULL ACK
- wiether 2y ago
  But do we have concrete examples of what they actually provide and how do they compare to the three majors public cloud providers? For example I can't tell if they have serverless offerings (particularly FaaS) Their public facing website is very similar to OVH or Scaleway Their Terraform provider is... not reassuring I guess from your username that you may have more intel about them, so I'm interested!

xracy 2y ago

At the top you're saying that no one has seriously committed to it, and at the bottom you're saying there's not an easy/quick/cheap solution. But I think the thing you have to consider, and the thing US companies should fear, is if the Tariffs make this a case for a serious commitment. If I'm in the EU right now, I'm looking at all of my dependencies on US, and I'm wondering how many jobs I can create by investing in separating myself from these services ASAP. And given that the US is about to be crippled in their buying power of any silicon I would fully expect to be able to build out Data Centers in the very near future on the relatively cheap because the competition just got hamstrung in the market. Additionally, you can turn up software pretty quickly and just iterate on it with a small number of developers. The problem they have to solve isn't "how do I write software?" The problem they have to solve is "how do I deploy that software." And the US just gift-wrapped them cheap DataCenters by starting a trade war with the major chip manufacturers.

tpm 2y ago

> no European country has been seriously committed to it I would argue several countries and the EU as a whole is seriously committed to it, but this commitment comes with usual European caveats: it will be slow and expensive. But it is happenning. https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/EN/2025/03/dvc.html https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/EN/202... > American companies dominate payment systems. I think SEPA dominates payment systems and anything else is only a layer above than can be replaced. And there are several widely used country-specific systems that are not American. > Governments moving to sovereign services is not enough - if the US can cripple your private sector you are finished anyway. Moving government services is a necessary first step. > There is no easy, quick or cheap solution. Yes.

AlecSchueler 2y ago

> but no European country has been seriously committed to it. TFA is about how it became a priority since January, so that's hardly surprising. Presumably now that it is a priority the commitment level will be changing.