The intent isn't true independence. I think we can all come up with half a dozen ways for AWS US to add backdoors when required to do so by the US government.

The intent isn't true independence. I think we can all come up with half a dozen ways for AWS US to add backdoors when required to do so by the US government. This moves makes a lot more sense when you view it as a compliance checkbox ticking exercise: for all intents and purposes they look like a truly independent company. This means it'll be very hard to write public tenders in a way which exludes AWS, which enables them to sue when EU governments don't pick their "independent" cloud but use an (on paper) more expensive / less featureful EU cloud instead.