Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
Ya ok but this isn’t a doomsday thing, we used to build our own servers before and lots of people know how to do it still.
All AWS and the like do is remove the hardware for the consumer and add some APIs.
Doesn’t sound as scary to me as the article paints. The only hard part would be the migration 😅
Yeah. That’s literally the whole point of “the cloud” it can be anywhere.
The EU has lots of places with available renewable energy.
Hook up a couple servers to some dams. With “free” electricity it’ll be almost impossible to not end up being cheaper than Amazon in the long run.
Like, I’m struggling to see how this would be a bad thing long term. Relying on American corporations just isn’t a rational choice anymore
As someone who works in IT, I love the optimism of making it sound this simple. Things that I expect to take 10 minutes can end up taking weeks, because there’s always a surprising answer to “How complicated could it be?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t work the way we’ve thought because” is a phrase I’ve had to say too often for that level of optimism.
Wouldn’t want to be that PM!
If the USA switches off cloud services for the EU, that’s a short-term problem. Really bad short term, but after a month or so everything is back up and running.
For big entities sure. But SMEs without dedicated IT and relying on the likes of squarespace would have a really bad time.
They’d just migrate to some EU alternative: https://alternativeto.net/software/squarespace/?origin=eu
Might not be super easy and they might not get the same results, bit if there’s no squarespace it will do.
Sure, as long as someone’s taught them about backups, and they have them, and they’re up to date.