> In particular, European cloud companies, like Cloudwatt, Hortnetsecurity, and F-Secure, proudly boast of their non-American credentials and their resistance t

> In particular, European cloud companies, like Cloudwatt, Hortnetsecurity, and F-Secure, proudly boast of their non-American credentials and their resistance to NSA spying against foreigners. And the French government has invested $150 million into two cloud startups designed to keep data out of U.S. hands. I think that is really the moneyshot of that article. Western governments can throw hundreds of millions at developing "French" or "German" or [insert country here] and build effective competitors to the US for commodity services like hosting websites. The US's advantages [despite Silicon Valley] aren't really insurmountable if you have foreign governments throwing a few hundred million at the problem.