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.
It’s the latter. But as a crapload of our everyday services depend on US companies and their servers it would be a service outage we’ve never seen before. Big US companies (Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta…) could technically mitigate at least some effects if it’s just the actual connectivity which is missing but if they’re forced to shut down all European services it’s a whole another matter.
For your everyday consumer it would mean missing a lot of streaming services, email, personal backups of your photos on cloud services and stuff like that. On some cases even access to their bank accounts would be lost. Depending on your usage patterns a majority of your digital life could vanish overnight. For companies it would be even worse, a ton of them rely on AWS and other services to keep their business running and all that would come crashing down and a massive amount of them would not have workforce, knowledge nor resources (money mostly) to switch over to something else. Also a lot of tax paid service rely on M365 and other cloud based stuff so they would be affected too, but maybe/hopefully not quite as badly as commercial side. Also, our credit card processors are mostly US (Visa and Mastercard) so a ton of money transfers would be halted as well.
So, it would be pretty much a digital catastrophe on government, commercial and consumer fronts for majority of the people. Technically there’s nothing we couldn’t rebuild on our own, but it would take at least months and more likely several years to get everything back online and the bill for that would be astronomical. And if it’s a total kill-switch for US services then Europe would need new mobile operating systems to replace Android/IOS, new OS for their computers as Windows wouldn’t work anymore and so on. And on top of that, GPS would go too, but with Galileo that might not be the biggest problem around. And also a ton of other stuff I can’t remember right off the bat.
Sure, US would be stranded on the internet (and in the real world too at least to some point) after that and EU/UN/some other entity would take the role which is now on ICANN (and the same for other administrative entities). US would of course get a massive economical hit as well by losing all European customers, but on the worst case that would pretty much mean that the Europe’s internet access, at least as we know it now, would end and something else would be built on the ashes.
But hey, at least I personally wouldn’t have a problem to find a new job should I want to.
Well, worse than it seems, then.
I’d be willing to experiment, try and block US connections to and from my computer, but I could probably deal with it, seeing as I don’t use as much US stuff as the average person. Companies also probably have servers in other places, meaning perhaps they’d connect through elsewhere, and, in such a test scenario, me having control, I could allow the connections whenever I want or need.
To have everyone lose internet connection to/from US, would be real bad, it seems. Worse than I thought (though granted, I did not think much, clearly). Though if it were for a few hours, maybe let people see the consequences of their dependence, and what life would be like without these services. Guve 'em a taste.
All the more reason to not rely solely on the US and maybe adopt / help fund alternatives.
On another topic, if anyone knows how to block connections based on location, feel free to enlighten me. I’d actually enjoy trying out the aforementioned experiment, but NextDNS doesn’t have such feature
Depends on company, but that worst case scenario is that all US companies would shut down all their services in Europe overnight. Every big player has datacenters around the world and if it’s just the traffic between continents which is shut down then the effect is way less radical, absolute majority of Europe already connects to datacenters near them even if they use Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc services.
For example with my employer dropping every US based company would be a hell of a work, specially if it’s needed in a hurry. We, as well as a ton of others, rely on Microsoft services for all kinds of communication and should that go away we’d need to make quite a few phone calls around couple of continents just to set up a common ground on where and how to start building new infrastructure and how to keep communication lines open.
Few hours is a short time. There’s some problems around the globe all the time which affect various services on various levels for few hours all the time. Few days of complete blackout and C-suits start to really sweat (plus it costs significant amounts of money via lost productivity).
You’ll need a firewall/router which can do geoblocking. Based on quick search at least pfsense seems to have some options available. If I were to try that I’d set up a pfsense on a virtual machine, set up geoblock on that and use that as a gateway for my testing devices while leaving the rest of the network as it is so that I could limit/choose what devices may behave strangely and still have normal functionality for the rest.
I assume there’s a ton of other options too besides pfsense, but the key words are ‘geoblock’, ‘firewall’ and ‘router’ or something around that. Also I assume that most of the stuff you find explains how to block incoming traffic based on geoIP, but it should be relatively simple to adapt those for outgoing traffic as well.