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.
I mean, there are servers in European countries, couldn’t they just nationalize the servers and continue as usual?
The servers would stop working the moment the US “pulls the plug.” Nationalization would not secure service, that would only secure non-functional hardware
The hardware is here. The entire hecking infrastructure is here. Making it work might not be as easy as flipping a switch, but it is definitely not impossible lol
The hardware isn’t the hard part, but I get your point
Given the permissive and, well, stupid business practices that the U.S. allows, I’m sure a shell corporation there, an ownership transfer there, and you’ve got a de facto foreign owned company that’s every bit as answerable to the corporation, although not necessarily the U.S. government. I’m sure the shareholders won’t care so long as the stock price still goes up.
Those sorts of changes could presumably be executed much faster than working through the court challenges of nationalizing companies, or of building new facilities/swapping to new providers.
Not that I’m advocating sticking with what would still ostensibly be U.S.-backed tech.
I live in the U.S., and I ply my trade in tech and tech-adjacent sectors. I wouldn’t prefer it if the country I live in becomes a technological backwater and is passed on by the world, but I also am sort of reaching a point where I think perhaps FAFO.
would probably take a month or two