For the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showcasing their products to a closed audience of EU gov. officials.
One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.
Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.
>I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before
Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.
His point is that those laws were basically ignored, until now.
The conversation started all the way back, with the Patriot Act, but until now the dynamic was roughly: politicians write lofty laws that pay lip service to data sovereignty, then add enough loopholes so that nothing has to change in practice, and nobody really cares.
Now people do care, and they don't want to use those loopholes. It's pretty obvious why things have changed.
There are no laws that force companies to store all (generic) data in Europe. If there were then the companies asking about migrations just now would already be in breach.
You’re probably thinking of PII (GDPR/EUDPR) and even there there are plenty of loopholes, creative interpretations, and “privacy shields”.
The push for sovereignty doesn’t just come from regulators, it comes from the companies themselves who lost trust in the US, and also from European providers who jumped on the opportunity to make a killing.
And then you've got a country like the US introducing the CLOUD Act, which "allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil."
In other words: physical location isn't enough, the company's HQ being in the US is in itself already a massive risk.
The big American cloud companies are trying to get around this by offering their services via "independent" EU entities who aren't owned by the US company but still offer the exact same stack, but I bet most customers are just as unimpressed as I imagine US law enforcement is going to be.
Well, there are also noises about the SaaS company preferably not being American. Apparently there's a US law that compels US companies to divulge data on their users even if the data is hosted outside of the US. (I'm not sure this wouldn't happen anyway, without such a law.)
Most nations can coerce information from corporate entities within their nation, even information that corporation holds outside said country. To what extents that coercion can hold will of course vary by local laws, customs and the people in charge. The US has a fairly large media footprint, not to mention it's actual physical size and outsized influence even then. So it is more covered and visible.
Inside the US, the biggest concerns similarly come with China, which I consider a bigger risk. For better or worse, if you're inside the US, you're probably better off holding as much of your presence as you can inside the US as EU requirements can actually be more harmful than helpful in terms of compliance. There are also certain protections and resistance you can take to less than formal (judicial warrant) requests. Only because if you hold an online presence in the EU, and are forced to violate EU laws, then you're in trouble on both sides.
I would assume similar in most cases, though the EU confederation is something I'm far less familiar with where national laws and EU laws conflict, etc. I'm more familiar with US state to federal structures.
EU doesn’t really have laws just directives and regulations it excepts every individual member to implement.
Sometimes there are disputes on the implementations that are then fought over in the eu courts but if the member county really doesn’t want to implement or follow them there really isn’t much outside of withholding funds eu can do. (For example see Hungary under Orban)
EU just doesn’t have the monopoly of violence like the federal government effective has in the US to enforce its will on the member states with force if necessary. EU quite literally doesn’t have a police or military force at all.
US states follow US federal law for much of the same reason, because the federal government will withhold funds. We do not use our military to force states to comply with federal law. There’s an entire court system to handle governors who ignore federal law.
> There’s an entire court system to handle governors who ignore federal law.
And if there wasn’t a federal police force (or national guard put under federal control in the more extreme end) to enforce those decisions of such court would they matter in the more extreme cases?
EU cut Orbans funding and still he kept doing what he was doing and as there is no way to for EU to enforce its decisions beyond that he kept doing it until voted out of office.
That is a massive difference between the 2 systems. In EU the individual states are truly independent in that EU can’t force them to do anything.
For the record EU also has the courts etc but when they rule against a country it is pretty much reliant on the courty going “ok I will pay” as the court doesn’t have any means to actually enforce its decision.
Also there is 9 member states in EU that pay more then they receive from the EU so withholding funds from them will just lead to them not paying their fees. Obviously US has states like this too.
> We do not use our military to force states to comply with federal law.
Isn't the National Guard in the US considered to be a part of the military? I seem to recall that they were federalized/deployed at least twice recently, because supposedly state-actors/police didn't do enough to combat violence, or to protect federal workers or something like that?
Also, hasn't the current administration threaten to deploy the National Guard even more times, because the states are not following what the administration believes are the federal laws? Or what was the reason for those "threats"?
A National Guard's chain of command has the Governor of the state as the head of each State's National Guard. There are conditions where command can temporarily be redirected under federal control, but those are somewhat limited in practice. Usually even under certain emergencies, the technical command structure is still at a state level.
There are a lot of reasons behind some of these distinctions, and some interesting history. But the National Guard kind of serves as the official Militia for each given state... But is far from the coverage meant for what a militia should be when compared to say the first militia act under US law.
Edit: regarding any requests/threats of use... it's generally voluntary use of guardsmen from a state whose governor is friendly to the federal/presidential administration. Hence seeing national guard deployed from one state in order to handle what the president considers an emergency in another state when that state refuses a request.
Which is just wildly backwards. It is the same mindset of the cyberpunk "privacy advocates" of the early 2000s, move your stuff to Sealand or Switzerland.
The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.
Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.
>The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.
the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.
secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.
I wish I believed that they have to go to the FISA court for much of anything any more. Instead they go to Palantir and the like which simply buy the data and aggregate it. Very similar to the process of money laundering. And for the data that can't be bought there's the five eyes work around.
As an advocate (and practitioner) of European digital sovereignty, let me tell you, at least from my perspective, it has absolutely nothing to do with fear of US intelligence agencies spying on us, and everything to do with the catastrophic consequences of an unreliable and unstable American government pulling the plug on our vital infrastructure, or at least the very least weaponizing our dependency on American companies.
I live in Denmark, a country whose primary threat at the moment is the USA, and the thought of Donald Trump effectively having a kill-switch to our highly digitalized society is absolutely frightening. Reducing our dependence on American tech means that we are less vulnerable to a hostile power using it to extort us out of our territory. We cannot remove the threat entirely, but we can make the pain less extreme.
Other EU countries are also seeing things this way, that the US no longer has a stable government and is no longer a friendly country. Who cares about American spying when the real threat is your country being turned off?
As a Canadian who has been listening to the "51st state" wordvomit coming out of US administration your comment is very apt.
For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment. There's countless US articles talking about US/Canada relations as if it is a trade dispute and that they think Canadians are eager to re-unite and go back to the way things were without ever addressing the threats to our sovereignty. Then you have comments like the parent to your post who is....wildly off the mark thinking that in a point of contention we'd prefer to keep our data on US controlled systems because their government would need to follow their own legal processes to acquire data of a foreign/hostile state??????
This becomes even more striking if you look at who they surveyed:
> They asked citizens across the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.)
They're not even asking those from the half of the world that has been bombed or coup d'etated by the US in the last half century. They're asking those who should on paper dislike the US the least.
People from those countries ranking the US below India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey is quite something. Israel coming in at 55th out of 60, below Saudi Arabia, is also fantastic proof of how incredibly unrepresentative these "representative democracies" are of their populace. The US and Germany are even 2 of the 7 surveyed countries! Without them I wouldn't be surprised if they came in last, under Iran and China.
For some reason I cannot grasp Canadians think the US citizens think about them at all. We may as well not have a northern neighbor, all that most of us think exist between Michigan and Alaska is snowy wilderness.
The parent to their post was saying your risk assessment of which country should host is incorrect, given who you believe to be your biggest threat, i.e. your preferences are not aligned with reducing your risk.
> Is the rest of the world going to stop trying to immigrate here, though
Yes. If you look for example at people from the world leader in science and technology, China, then there is a very noticeable drop in the number of young Chinese people wanting to study in,or after graduation stay in, the US.
>the more US citizens have to worry that that foreigners attempting to immigrate here for the long-term have a plan involving exercising influence on US politics from their position inside the country, in order to punish existing US citizens.
I am not aware of any, but I would love to hear any and all plans to punish US citizens.
> worry that that foreigners attempting to immigrate here for the long-term have a plan involving exercising influence on US politics from their position inside the country, in order to punish existing US citizens.
This is indeed a valid concern for immigrants like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Rupert Murdoch. They’ve all had a significant deleterious effect on the US.
For the average immigrant just trying to live their life, it’sa much less valid concern. You could equally point the finger at the millions of natural-born US citizens who believe that the US is a “Christian nation”, who are well organized, and are trying to change the laws in that direction.
The entire reason that people in Europe care about moving their digital infrastructure from American cloud companies to European cloud companies is because they're upset about current American politics, particularly Trump being president. Immigration is one of the biggest issues in American politics right now, and is also a pretty big issue in the politics of basically every European country.
The comment I was responding to was claiming "For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment." in the context of making an argument that American citizens should be concerned about people in foreign countries feeling threatened by potential actions of the US government and reacting to this by reducing their dependence on American cloud companies.
And my genuine response to this comment is that US citizens are less ignorant of how the rest of the world perceives them than the commenter thinks - because the rest of the world is still trying to physically come here (and often still trying to come here illegally, or remain here illegally - ICE is still arresting tons of people).
Immigrants who dislike the US generally don't stop talking about their problems with the US when they move here - but now they use their status as an immigrant to make a moral claim, that they are more authentically American than those who didn't move here, and so their understanding of what America is and should be is better and more moral than that of existing American citizens. You can go to any college campus and see what the foreign students are saying about the US, including what they're saying about the very policy of giving visas to foreign students to begin with. Or you can go to congress and see what the immigrant members of the house of representatives are saying about the US. There's no conspiracy.
The fear is not "NSA is snooping on our customer data", it's "Trump has a beef with our premiere minister/president, and Jeff Bezos accepted Trumps request to turn off AWS from them" that's the fear.
We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.
Businesses are scared to lose access to data hosted at US entities, because this recently happened, so they have good reason to fear something like that.
AFAIK, the US has never done that with IP space, but if we did see evidence of that, then you'd see similar worries about that for sure. But I think most of us see it as pretty implausible to happen, since the consequences of such move would be huge, and would probably end the internet as we know it today.
The US won't want to do that because China will have an alternative ready within a day and every China-friendly country will migrate to it. Now US leadership is demented, luckily they've never heard of IPs and I really don't believe it would happen. I think the likelihood of them starting WW3 is more likely than using IPs for power games.
Compelling Microsoft to turn off your Office 365 at least requires Microsoft to be complicit. Sovereign infrastructure didn't protect Venezuela or Iran.
If you rely on services provided by the US, you are one signature away from the current president forbidding US companies to provide service to you. This could be extremely disruptive.
I remember when iCloud arrangements required by China was seen as draconian. Now it seems we're not far from people cheering for such laws elsewhere...
The people calling those draconian had always been very naive - and 99% of them American, as such incentivized to take that stance. It was the right thing to do since day 1 and the people with more of a long-term vision outside the US have always been advocating for such things. While China is the most extreme, there are other countries which have also understood this importance of sovereignty and been smart enough to at least demand/construct meaningful degrees of it. Mostly in Asia and the Middle East. Not a single EU country was among them, which is why they're now scrambling.
Exactly. I know of many public grants that you can’t get if you aren’t doing everything in the EU, and so many companies in the EU would cease to exist without these handouts.
It’s not something that the business owners want to do, but they are being forced to from above.
In Australia we have legislated it on multiple places, and it has become tied to things like privacy legislation and for that which isnt privacy related we defer to industry best practice - which is often discussed and published by national agencies in the tech and security space, which of course turns into "must do" actions by every government CISO and CDO/CIO.
There been mumblings for as long as I've been a developer, I remember hearing about "EU data independence" first when the ePrivacy Directive came around, which must have been multiple decades ago at this point.
But yeah, in recent times the sentiment became more urgent. If I were to guess, with zero data in front of me and just judging by what I remember, I think the sentiment really changed first with the ICC blockade that happened last year, then it got really fueled on by the US threats to Greenland's sovereignty, I think that's when organizations and people really got stressed out about moving ASAP.
Around me, the threat to Greenland is what kicked the plans from “okay what mitigations should we envision?” to “alright, let’s go as far to actually run shadow ops to get acquainted with …” to full on move after the invasion.
Trump may genuinely end up being the best salesman European hosting companies ever had. I run one of the tools mentioned in this post (Bugsink) and I literally had an uptick of Danish people/companies (specifically) reaching out to me after Davos.
As someone who've basically started being known as "The guy who helps you move data out of US to Europe" in certain circles, I'm not complaining either :)
Yes, that was the thing that set off all the alarms. Trump 1 said a lot of things but had not completed the Hungary-fication of the US. Trump 1 was also before the Ukraine war!
I feel like the concern started getting popularised during the first Trump administration, because the US were overtly bullying the EU (and others of course). But the main change was that it was done overtly: before that the US has always been a big power trying to... say "defend the interests of the US" abroad. E.g. the US have been spying their allies forever. So I think it was more of a "they should stop bullying us in a few years", and indeed it went back to normal with Biden (again, "defending the interests of the US" and "leveraging their dominant position", which was kind of accepted).
The second Trump administration moved from "overtly bullying" to "behaving like a potential threat". In the second Trump administration, the US has used the tech monopolies against the EU and has become a military threat (not to mention the commercial war with tariffs). For many Europeans, it's not that the US are abusing their dominant position in negotiations anymore: it's that they are not an ally anymore. Not that they are seen as an enemy, but rather an unreliable partner who threatened to become an enemy.
I think that this is a very big shift, and that is why things are actually moving. And I don't think that this will change, because the risk of depending on the US monopolies has now materialised. That cannot be undone.
If even all the shenanigans from the US administration and essentially it threatening to invade European territory did not result in European companies and governments finally doing something about their digital sovereignty, then nothing but a declaration of war would.
Possibly, yeah. The thing is, there is a lot of inertia in Europe, because it is a union of 27 countries. It's not that one election can change it all.
Trump 2 is worse than Trump 1 by far from EU perspective. And it also proved that it wasn't a once-off that Americans will vote in someone who threatens to dismantle NATO, invade Greenland, or start trade wars with allies for no reason.
Also Trump 2 proves without a doubt that at least half of the american voters are absolutely insane or incredibly stupid. For 1 there used to be some doubt.
We in Europe are enjoying roughly 15-20% insane/stupid ratings at this point, which is not great but still a bit better.
The algorithm/method of vote determines a large part of the political landscape (and in the US, only 2 significant political parties can realistically exist. People have to choose between those 2 and lot choose to abstain).
The question wasn't which "team" (grow up!) is "dominant," it was whether the election result proves anything about the American public. It does if you think it was an honest and fair election. Simple as that.
Let's face it. Trump 2 is about dismantling democracy. The administration radiates hostility and aggression to anything democratic. In the new national security policy the EU is the adversary of the US. If that isn't a wake-up call.
Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how "if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
If a presidential candidate anywhere else was openly talking about wanting to remove elections and democracy in the country (not to mention triggered an insurrection [?!]), I'm fairly sure they'd almost be automatically disqualified. Really strange situation all around.
Sources for those quotes would be very helpful for anyone interested in this, because I’ve certainly never heard this before.
We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
> We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
I'm not American, I dislike Democrats and Republicans in the US, they're both horrible, just to preface this. Secondly, no other president has urged people to vote for them so people don't have to vote ever again, nor has any president threatened to put previous presidents in jail, nor has any president talked about wanting to skip the mid-terms.
I dislike politicians in general, but also, I'd be blind to not see when someone is extremely dangerous to democracy in general, beyond political affiliations. I'd say the same if it was Obama or who else, because as I said, I don't like any of them.
He hasn’t said what the parent said he did, and in the peer comment linking a video of him saying something similar, the context supplies quite a different meaning than was implied above.
The issue with voter ID laws isn't with the concept of having to identify yourself at the ballot box, it is with the way it is implemented.
For example, in my EU country I can vote with my passport, my drivers license, or my ID card, and they accept documents which are expired for up to 5 years. For context: this is less restrictive than the documents anyone is technically required to carry every time they leave their home! The number of people who can't meet this requirement is basically zero, and a decent bunch of municipalities offer them for free to poor people.
Meanwhile US has no universal ID system, which allows the pro voter ID groups to carve out a list of "acceptable" IDs which just so happens to be popular with the people that are going to vote for one side of the political spectrum, while excluding the forms of ID which are popular with the other side. And of course it's not just about identification, as they also add a bunch of irrelevant details to the requirements like the information having to exactly match your birth certificate.
Combine that with the failed two-party system where even a handful of votes often completely swings the political landscape and it is pretty obvious what is going on.
State ID (usually a driver’s license) is the defacto universal ID system.
It’s not hard to get, and you need it to do everything from filling a scheduled prescription, buying alcohol, entering a bar, flying on a plane, or purchasing cold medicine. You literally cannot function as an independent adult without one.
You also need to show it — along with a second form of ID — to be hired at a job.
Anyone claiming a state ID requirement meaningfully prevents anyone from voting is being deeply unserious.
If they actually believed what they claim, they’d be campaigning to remove the ID requirements that are already pervasive in our daily lives. They are not.
I’ll also note that buying a gun requires not just multiple forms of ID, but also an entire background check. If we can do that for one constitutionally enumerated right, we can damn well require a photo ID to cast a ballot.
I think you’re being disingenuous and deliberately trying to refocus the conversation on something else now.
He literally said “if you vote for me, you won’t need to vote again”. It’s not an ambiguous statement and doesn’t require extra context. Everything else you said didn’t really have anything to do with it.
>Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of >this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how >"if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
1) Puerto Ricans were called publicly on a Trump rally in New York, an "island of garbage" and they massively voted for Trump.
- Second generation Latinos, whose many parents, and grand parents and other close family are illegal immigrants, were repeatedly warned of what would happen, and its one of the constitutions, that massively voted for Trump...
- Trump continued to state, as late as 2024,that the Central Park Five were responsible for the 1989 rape of a woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the five males having been officially exonerated in 2002.
- Trump was a leading proponent of the debunked birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming president Barack Obama was not born in the United States
- Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African-American renters.
Donald Trump made big gains with Black voters in 2024.
- Trump is a convicted rapist and felon, and is known 44 million women voted for him...
We are past strange, and we are in the phase of electorate deserves what they voted for.
If you find yourself with a view of reality that massively differs from others, you have two options.
(1) Assume they’re irrational, uninformed, and wrong, or
(2) Reconsider your priors and attempt to understand why they think the way that they do.
Let’s take the “island of garbage”. It was said by a comedian during his set. The Trump campaign stated “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”.
The way that you framed it, however, was very careful to be true while also being misleading.
I think the viral quote "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." is probably pretty apt. The IRGC also has real support among the Iranian population. Putin clearly has strong support in Russia.
Generally, a lot of people are just not good people.
I mean, I would have said something exactly like that a few years ago. But first of all, history is full of atrocities committed by humans. They may all have considered themselves good people, but if they were/are objectively not, what does that matter? And secondly, I have encountered people who appear to think that decency is for sissies or something to that effect. Those people seem seriously emboldened lately. Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
> but if they were/are objectively not, what does that matter?
It matters less for them, and more for you. Yes, we see them as horrible, but also yes, they see us as horrible people. In the end we're all humans, and we all work towards what we think is better, but the method and goal what "better" actually is obviously differs.
> Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
Yes, of course they do, but their definition of "good person" differs between you and them. For you, decency is "good person", for them, ignoring decency is "good person", so of course they aspire to being a good person, whatever that means for them.
From the a US perspective, EU hate each other and I see no way any temporary cohesiveness will last. Most EU countries are just as likely to elect a Trump in the next decade
I see how it may look like this from the outside. But I think it would be like saying that siblings hate each other because you witnessed an argument.
Most people in most EU countries consider the other EU countries as allies, even though they don't agree on everything. Now the fact that 27 countries argue means that they talk to each other. I think it's a lot less polarised than in the US. Or course there are extremes too.
The EU needs to be more vigilant than ever, though. Russia has been trying to export their nationalistic totalitarianism to the EU for decades and now the US has openly declared a goal of exporting their brand of blind ignorant nationalism to the EU as well. Both influences will boost alt-right parties if successful. The obvious intended outcome for both powers is a EU that is breaking up from the inside.
On the positive side, this shows that the EU has gained a level of international influence that is taken very seriously by other major powers. It's not 100% certain that it will survive this current wave of assaults, but if it does, it will be even stronger.
I don't think it's new: dividing Europe makes Europe weaker, so if you are not Europe, it is generally in your interest to divide it. Be it Russia, China or the US.
That is also why the nationalists inside of Europe want to be friends with those other players: because if you want to make Europe weaker (because you think you are better off on your own as a European country), then your interests align with those other players.
Do you think that I do? Nationalism existed at the edges of the political spectrum for a long time. I'm saying that outside propaganda tries to actively boost the popularity of those parties.
Well of course there is nationalism in Europe. The thing is, it weakens Europe. And nationalists outside of Europe are very happy to help them. Not only Russia: look at Elon Musk and his nazi salute and publicly endorsing neo-nazis in Germany...
Also not new, been happening for as long as I can remember. Nordic Resistance Movement for example been around since late 90s, and early 2000s they were already banding together with other organizations in the Nordics, and even collaboration with their German counter-parts and more.
From the top of my head, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini frequently helped each other, two of them even created a somewhat famous alliance together, even though by their own "theories" they should have been fighting against each other instead.
I'm sure there are even more examples further back too.
I have no idea how you'd measure it, but I suspect Republican states hate Democrat ones more than most European countries hate each other. Listen to the way they talk about California and New York.
What gave you the impression that EU members hate each other? It'd be a weird union if that was the case. Not saying it's not possible, I just haven't seen it myself, although I am a Swede so clearly I do hate the Danes and the Norrbaggar with passion, but it's love-hate, not hate-hate.
> leaders often favoring national interests to what would be best for the union
If we're talking about leaders for member states, then they're doing their job right :) They're not meant to figure out what's best for the union, we have separate elections for those people who go to EU and represent the country + care about the union. The national "leaders" of the country are quite expected to put national interests above what's best for the union :)
Because of the convoluted way the EU works, those national leaders can have outsized power and even veto some decisions (Hungary, anyone?). The parliament needs to have more power if we want to make the EU more democratic.
As a Brit, I consider it my god given duty to take the piss out of the French; a duty I know is entirely mutual. Please don't however, consider this anything other than a slightly odd friendship.
Ah, as someone who live on the border to France, and every summer experience lost Frenchies asking for directions in French, when we're not in France, I agree :)
Still, love em, let the weirdos eat their snails in peace and may we always be brothers and sisters <3
I don't think it's worse than Midwest vs the coasts or Republican vs Democrat.
In the us these groups have just stopped talking to each other. The only time that happens is over Thanksgiving and that's when it stops for some of those conversations.
At least in Europe the split is usually not within families...
Are you referring to the time when the world Cup is going on? In that case, absolutely. We all turn into monkeys climbing onto our own rock lol
In the same way that the US hates itself, yes. How well do the various US states get along? Surely there is absolutely zero tension between, say, California and Alabama?
I guess they eventually read their own local (US) laws and figured no one cares about that effort since Amazon is still covered by CLOUD Act, regardless of what ccTLD they happen to use for their landing page.
> The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
Once that was in place, AWS could host their "EU" servers on the moon for all I and others care, still not a solution to avoid the claws of the US.
Their idea is that the EU cloud's corporate structure is completely independent, so AWS US isn't a parent company' so the CLOUD Act doesn't apply. They aren't a local subsidiary, they are an independent company licensing the AWS tech stack to operate fully independently on their own hardware - which just happens to also have a license to the AWS name.
It's a rather clever idea, and it essentially prevents EU government organisations from excluding them from tenders by requiring EU-based ownership. It obviously won't convince anyone with half a brain that they are genuinely independent, but the government lawyers are going to have a really hard time writing tenders in a way which excludes them from participating.
> Their idea is that the EU cloud's corporate structure is completely independent, so AWS US isn't a parent company'
I'm not sure this is actually the idea, it still isn't so in practice for sure, I'm not sure where this misconception comes from.
The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security memo says the Dutch government asked AWS who ultimately owns AWS European Sovereign Cloud GmbH and AWS Luxembourg. According to that memo, AWS stated that both are indirectly owned by Amazon.com, Inc, and this is all public information: https://open.overheid.nl/documenten/36acf7a6-1ea3-401e-86ad-...
Besides, it doesn't really matter who is the parent or where it geographically is located, 18 U.S.C. § 2713 states this:
> [...] regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.
It'd be a clever idea if it was actually 100% independent, but then it also wouldn't make sense for AWS/Amazon to do, it'd have to be actually independent then, not this weird mix-match of "some stuff in the US and some in EU" which they seem to be aiming for currently.
Thats overly flattering, there have always been good arguments for having your data in the same country (if not the same building) A worse case hypothetical trump is really much worse than the real one.
On the other hand it is also lame to shift the blame on the US. A bit like Jim stole your car after you left the doors open, the key in the ignition and the engine running. Jim is a bad man.
Trump wasn't threatening to invade European countries and supporting Putin's position in an ongoing war in term 1. He has been far more outwardly anti-EU in term 2.
I saw a lot of privacy focused reactions when they cut off Trump from social media before his term ended, while still in office. National sovereignty should always be a consideration, especially when it comes to anything related to essential infrastructure. Not every country is able to insource everything, or even a portion of everything... but every country should make an effort to ensure than there is at least some domestic production for everything that is reasonable related to essential infrastructure.
The US, China, Russia, EU (as a whole) and maybe Brazil are the countries in the best position to be able to do that more than most others just by their size and positions. And even that has limitations.
For example, IMO, the US should be manufacturing at least half of it's prescription medications domestically... it should also be producing a significant portion of it's communications devices domestically as well. We're too dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for technology currently.
I would encourage every nation to consider and take steps towards ensuring their own infrastructure... this does not mean isolation, just security footing.
Out of curiosity how much of this is a manifestation of the utility of LLMs? I get the current political impetus right now but also the barrier for swapping out an infra stack was also much higher 2 years ago. From my own projects major swaps are now relatively trivial which means that vendor lock in is weak.
Given how bad the US military performed against Iran, its pretty clear that any hostilities started by the US against NATO, would finish with a takeover of Washington within...2 weeks...
Where does this weird expectation come from that you can basically achieve your goals in a 2 week air campaign?
If the US wanted to they could probably do a lot of damage but, as you can see in Ukraine, taking over a country is a whole different thing. Unless you're willing to go in with the army and are willing to lose a LOT of people. And even then it'll take months or years for a single country
Besides some companies that were deep into the weeds of AWS and been pushed to enable and use every single AWS service by their reps, I don't think it's much harder/easier today than it was two years ago.
Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.
I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.
Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing. But people in the weeds of a specific public cloud provider today will absolutely need to make tradeoffs between getting to a position where they can be more portable and devoting those resources to other things.
> Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing.
It is, but it's really hard to make the right trade-offs. Usually I'd start by basically making a list of what could potentially be done to make it easier, check lightly how hard each one of those will be, then sit down with stakeholders and figure out the balance between how fast they want to move, and how risky they want the migration to be. Some opts for less safeguards and moving sooner, others for absolutely less risk but it takes the time it takes.
Some. Many companies have relied in the past on the fact that doing things is freaking complicated. Such as maintaining your own services instead of using something from a provider like AWS.
What used to be a half year transition project that will be half-assed due to resource constraints, can now be properly done in a month by a skilled engineering team works on it with LLM leverage.
Of course, if America was still a trusted ally (like if Harris was president), we still wouldn't be doing it. Even if it was easy now.
You put your Headquarters in seattle, your data center in alabama, you have your dev team in SF... every state gets a slice
Like gov contracts and how they are divided is basically the largest conversation in defense contracts, they give more of a shit who will make the nails for a tank than the security parameters of the crew members
Like NASA rockets don't have components whose manufacture is very carefully distributed over all US states just to keep the senators happy.
In any case, there are plenty of EU giants (ASML, SAP, Siemens, Alstom, Rheinmetall, etc) that are rather concentrated geographically speaking. EU fairness is more a government agency distribution thing, not for private companies.
Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. Oh well, I'm looking forward to closer connections and relationships to our French and Belgian brothers and sisters :)
> Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore.
That is a very myopic way of looking at it. Right-wing neoliberal parties were globalists and pro-EU for business reasons. Left-wing social-liberals were pro-EU for social and ideological reasons but were much more ambivalent about globalisation. Hard-right nationalists hate the EU but don’t see much of a problem with globalisation except when people are involved (exploiting them abroad, however, is fine as long as there is a buck to be made). If you’re a bit careful you’ll find opinions all over the place on both globalisation and the EU across the whole spectrum.
Globalisation is more something that affect individual member states than a EU issue.
An entire continent's sentiment shifting to pull market share away from your team is nothing to snark at, regardless of whether the first iteration works perfectly out of the box. I can guarantee you someone in Europe is smart enough to eventually get their needs sorted.
Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).
Being hosted in Canada is no longer the safety many assumed before. In reality it should not be an American company beholden to the current administration.
And that has never happened to any European company, right? (I'm looking at you ASML.) By your logic, does that mean that most European nations are "no longer the safety many assumed before"?
Not just ASML, when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company, the leadership and decision making was mostly US-based and centered around US policies, even if the HQ was still technically in the NL, but because PE and most other major investors were all US Bay Area.
For example my manager had to reject a candidate from Iran, simply due to US policies, even if that wasn't against the EU policies, and would actually have been illegal discrimination in the EU where the position was opened, but this policy came from the US and was applied in an unwritten fashion in the EU.
The influence of the US on finance and tech is massively understated. Plenty of international EU tech companies whose business model doesn't revolve around catering to the EU market and sovereignty, will tailor their products and operations to comply with US regulations since that's where a lot of their customer base and money is made. Just read the last post of the CEO of Bird, you can disagree with him that he's a scumbag and he's full of shit, but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US. That's why Mistral has a large presence in SV and London. Continental EU just sucks for acquiring capital.
Even at the no-name Austrian startup I used to work before, the biggest investor was a US PE, since no German or Austrian investor wanted to invest more than 5 figures in the company, which was not enough to cover the payroll of the ML/data scientists. As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
> but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US
Worth specifying here you're talking about VC-infested SaaS, not just your run-of-the-mill bootstrapped SaaS. It's very much possible to run a SaaS in Europe and make money, as countless of people already do, which I'm sure you too are aware of, but probably way harder to raise similar amount of money as US companies, that I'd agree with.
Edit: Strange typo; s/infested/invested, but kind of makes sense like that too so I'll just leave it, Freudian slip or something.
Yep, they grew quite well, though it was pretty toxic, just like a lot of small Austrian companies with PE as investors, lots of layoffs and people coming and going all the time, mismanagement, too much dependence on cheap foreign student visa labor, etc.
> when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company
Ok, come on, please stop playing this silly HN game of: "another major ... company". There can only be four other options: NXP, SMM, BE Semi, Nexperia.
Or a bit deeper: SMART Photonics, EFFECT Photonics, Nearfield, Prodrive Tech, Neways Elec.
Which one?
> As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
Let me respond in the most offensive manner possible: Do you prefer the teat of US or China (or Russia!)? Pick your poison.
The example you mention is a tricky one, ASML is about as European as it is American. It is heavily subject to US export controls because its machines include US components, US software and US IP. They operate multiple R&D centers and factories in the US and employ a lot of US employees (~20%)
Let me generalise: Does your tech company use CPUs from Intel, AMD or Qualcomm, or NVidia GPUs or memory from SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron, or harddrives/SSDs from Western Digital, Hitachi, IBM, Toshiba, etc., or motherboards from (any Taiwan manuf.)? Or anything produced by Samsung or TSMC? If yes (1000% of tech companies), then you are potentially subject to the magic wand of US sanctions and soverign interference. To be clear, do not read that last paragraph as a support of this soverign interference, only an acknowledgement of it.
The first time I heard that the US was "requesting" (surely a gun-to-head moment) that the Dutch Gov't restrict ASML exports to China, personally, I was stunned. Sure, the Netherlands and US have incredibly strong political, economic, security, and historical bonds, but I never expected US to interfere so deep into the Netherlands. And yet, the Netherlands capitulated. (Please don't read this as a criticism of NL -- they are ultimately "Real Politik" due to their population size.) If NL can fall, then so can any other nation in Europe (or Northeast Asia: JP/KR/TW), except Belarus and Russia.
This line of discussion comes up often on HN, and it's really annoying. It's the equivalent of people bringing up nuclear warfare in geopolitics discussions.
Yes, people know we live in a globalized world, and yes, people know the US has ways to pressure Europe. The point of Europe's moves to host in Europe isn't to get immune from foreign influence ; it is to make interference a bit more costly and a bit less effective, in a way that doesn't cripple our society.
Not really, some of the IP is core to the product and it cannot function without it. In theory if you do something like come up with a complete replacement for EUV, you could, but everyone with deep pockets has already been trying to do that without success. Same goes for the supply chains, most companies (including ASML) don't manufacture everything themselves; so components that come out of the US would need non-US suppliers, which don't always exist.
I suppose it's a case of 'technically possible, realistically infeasible'.
A more likely scenario might be either a from-scratch not-as-good machine that you can source locally (supply-chain wise) or a novel finding (which is hard to predict if it will happen and if so, when).
You lost me here. I disagree. Sure, they have a lot of sales to US. However, the design and engineering is absolutely done in NL. Yes, I know they have a huge global supply chain.
I spoke with some high level folks at a very profitable private company recently and inquired as to why they had DBAs on staff for what amounts to a pretty simple OLTP type system. Id naively assumed that someone of that scale would be using a cloud provider (RDS for AWS etc) thus negating the need for someone who really knows DB internals and upgrades and OS level stuff.
The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.
I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.
Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
From our perspective I'm not sure the cloud abstraction is better or we even want it to be done like that locally. Look at S3 as an API for example. It's absolutely dire. I'd rather use NFS (!). And stuff like Lambda and Cloud Functions are just cat turds.
On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.
Lambda is awesome .. until you actually try to use it for realsies. Cat turd is an apt description. Just being able to get the damn logs for debugging is itself a hassle. Terraform helps a ton in all this and I rarely find myself using the AWS UI anymore. Still Lambda is a great idea that just doesn't deliver for any use case more than responding to some S3 upload action or Event Bridge operation.
Don't even get me started on the API Gateway sitting in front of a group of related Lambdas. Its OK once you get it setup and running but buildign/changing it amounts to stabbing yourself in the eyes.
I saw you post "lambda is awesome" and was going to reply with "only in certain circumstances." But you beat me to it.
After about a year of poking lambda to see how it actually worked (versus how it was documented) and building a cloud formation replacement (TF eventually did what I wanted, but not before I made a simple PROLOG based replacement for it). But I finally made it work after MUCH struggle.
So... +1.
I put this in our code several years ago: "WARNING: Do not look at Lambda stack with remaining eye."
Those local options exist, and have been around forever, but the problem is nobody is doing it without cutting corners and with pay-as-you-go elasticity (and the 'call an API, get a VM instantly' effects that go with it).
Most on-prem deployments were trash and a lot of them still are. Not because it couldn't be better but because it's easier to just have some random hypervisor department do this work manually and not do the work to create it as an internal product. Even VMware with vrealize failed and that's about as 'customisable cloud platform in a box' as COTS enterprise software can get.
Maybe it's because IaC and APIs were just not in the vocabulary of the average system integrator or on-prem operating team (it's still lots of clickops and copy-paste).
The "cloud" rose to prominence from a small period of tiem where Amazon had a lot of extra cloud capacity outside of Black Friday, etc, and linux networking issues that needed architecture to be a certain way.
Those linux networking issues have been long since solved, but the "cloud" was discovered to be incredibly profitable and sticky in the name of convenience and proliferated.
A lot of the "cloud" software is open source software that was packaged to have a web and api front end, and that service renamed to something specific to AWS, etc.
Yup, I've been seeing the same development pretty much everywhere. It's become a standard question in procurement processes in all EU-based organizations I've worked for (I'm a consultant).
I feel this and as a German company, we have our stuff hosted in the EU. But where it becomes pointless to have the host in the EU, is when Cloudflare is a requirement. Since we expose ourselfs through their certificate, we might as well host with a US company. And I’m not aware of a EU Cloudflare competitor with similar WAF offering.
A full integration with Cloudflare means it is their SSL certificate that’s presented to the visitor of your website, and all traffic is passed through them. They do read everything.
Thus it’s pointless to host in the EU if everything first has to go through a US company.
this is good, there's money to be saved in many many cases with self hosting. Cloud was supposed to save money but it's gotten so overdone that now companies have dedicated devops teams just like they use to have dedicated sysadmin teams. I think you can take the opensource paas's out there and selfhost something internal that covers 75-70% of your use case at a fraction of the cost of aws/gcp/azure.
The price of hardware (DELL, HP), and the price of enterprise software (VMWare, Nutanix, etc.) has increased an insane amount in the last 12 months. In our case some of the services it has been as much as 6x. Hardware quotes are rising 10-20% per week. Delivery dates are months out.
It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
What happened with VMWare licensing post acquisition is a travesty and has absolutely ruined what was a great ecosystem of small to medium scale hosting operations (talking in the half a rack to 10 racks territory). There is still no alternative with feature parity.
The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...
I’ve been working in a European SaaS for a few years and I’ve even noticed we get more queries about using specially EU providers. In the past AWS eu-west was sufficiently “In Europe” for clients that cared about that but there’s a growing minority that would like us not to use AWS at all. Not in large enough numbers that our company is planning a migration but it’s being discussed in a way it wasn’t in 2024.
We were doing this in Canada at least 6 years ago, maybe even longer. If the servers are in a different country, your data is sitting on a machine that is subject to a foreign country’s laws and is accessible to their law enforcement.
i mean it makes so much sense, cause of the political instability. I recently was at a reception (because of the europe day) and there I talked to some officials that told me that even they don't really know how to to tackle the problems of nowadays. Basically every european state is trying to move its IT infrastructure from the US to Europe and i read somewhere in the news that Aldi is supposed to provide infrastructure to compete with AWS...
The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.
This is how politicians speak. A loss of trust is actually very serious. The Norwegian foreign minister is saying that the US is no longer sharing our values. That is a _big_ change for us.
Leaders are not conveying so much about the loss of trust, because they are saving face for the US to try to rescue what little can be rescued of the remaining relationship.
The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome. I recently was in a discussion about what kind of responsibility we can put on the residents of the US for this situation. A US lawyer answered "well the 25th amendment ties our hands, and we do a lot of protesting so no blame on us". The judgement on US citizens was pretty harsh.
You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
> The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the American public. I am interested in America's standing in the world. More than half of Americans do not support these lunatics. Unfortunately due to our inherently unfair electoral system which gives preference to money and land over voters, it requires about 60~70% of Americans voting against them consistently for at least a decade to overcome the lunatics. That's just a very high bar to clear.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
Open to suggestions. The only ideas I have for relinquishing control of the US from the billionaires back to the people would, rightly, get me banned from HN.
Well maybe it is, but to give more "power" to a rual vote then one from a city is also something we do in Norway.
What I have problems with is the winner-take-all and that leads to a two party system. If you had 5 parties not 2. I'm sure that 80% of the voters would me more happy 80% of the time :)
There is a way in which this whole situation has been revealing to me about how little some outside the US actually understand about US politics and civic structures, or alternatively have their own form of isolationism.
The heterogeneity in the US — culturally and in terms of political-legal structures — is far greater than those in Europe and Canada seem to understand sometimes. This is now combined with a corruption of democratic legal processes (e.g., gerrymandering) that make options outside of outright civil war a needle increasingly difficult to thread. There is a reason people are bringing up Hungary — it would be absurd to equate the EU with Hungary for the same reasons it's absurd to paint the entire US with a broad brush.
Something like 90% of people in the US opposed what was going on with Greenland. Just about the only people in favor of it in the US were the presidential administration and people trying to curry favor with it. What do you expect the other 90% to do? The legislators being petitioned were busy with a deluge of other immediate domestic problems — maybe people outside the US didn't understand the scope of the unaccountable fascist police occupation going on in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles? Protesters in Minneapolis were being murdered by these thugs. That's not even getting into the dismantling of social safety nets, rampant corruption, Venezuela, etc etc etc
People outside the US do not want a US civil war. It's happened before and if it happened again would happen along the same geopolitical lines as before. It would be devastating not just to the US but to the rest of the world.
Treating everyone in the US as the same, without recognizing the very real divisions involved, or the structural stresses involved, doesn't help anything.
Everything happening in the US could happen everywhere. If you have enough politicians distorting and destroying traditional democratic mechanisms in favor of a criminal fascist and party domination, people have fewer and fewer options left outside of things that no one wants.
"The complete disinterest in international allies" is a dishonest statement, and I can only assume reflects total ignorance of what is happening in the US, and/or a self-serving defense mechanism to avoid really confronting the difficulty of what those in the US are faced with.
I do not think you understand, you have to start repairing things. You can not only be against something you have to stand up for something that is better. Your number of 90% support for Denmark and Greenland does not show in anyway.
>"Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban."
Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries.
>"Trust is broken forever."
This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
What's ironic to me in these discussions is how similar Ukraine was at one time to the current US administration (probably not by coincidence). Things change quickly.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
As an American, that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn (unless we're buying a tshirt or something) and have been for many presidential administrations. Why would Americans be interested at all in what allies have to say when it's always negative anyway? When someone tells you you're their enemy long enough you begin to believe them.
As for the discussion of moving tech stacks to Europe, if that's where your company is why did that not make obvious sense day 0? Why would you place your critical infrastructure in another country not beholden to your laws? If you're based in Europe then you should host in Europe, and even further, host in your country.
> that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn
457 British solders dead in Afghanistan supporting US operations beg to differ.
Mate, seriously, step away from the propaganda and pay attention to what is happening to your democracy. Then you might understand why your allies are losing trust.
It should be a matter of shame, not pride, to the British that they followed a jingoistic US into a needless war in Afghanistan which achieved nothing but much senseless death.
The 2003 protests against the war in Afghanistan were the biggest in UK history. Approximately 1 Million people (1 in 60 of the UK population) made their way to London to protest, and hundreds of thousands protested in other cities on the day.
What makes you say that wars are unnecessary? You don't get to see what would have happened in the absence of a war. Keeping some countries like Iran in check by restricting their arsenal, or weakening their economies and military capabilities seems absolutely necessary for world peace for example.
You answer your own post, almost everyone saw the US as an ally. That is the reason for trusting you, and why these posts are worrying. If we break economic and military ties, the alliance grows weaker.
You are right that there have always been a hostility against these kind of actions, but now you are doing it against allies. So you are breaking the trust.
trust or not, US vs EU or somewhere else, you should be in charge of your data and your data should be subject to your laws and yours alone. It only makes sense.
As a European: yes definitely. And that won't be fixed if you choose a sane administration again. There can always be another Trump. It will take significant time to build trust again.
Yes. This is important to understand, the trust is broken for a long time. I do not think people will understand what has happend the last year. Europe is slowly (we always move slowly) moving away from US tech. The impact will not be seen/understood completely before 10-15 years have past
As vga1 says, a lot of American services are used by us. American goods too but not quite as much. When Trump complains about his trade balance he always ignores the revenue from services. The trade balance isn't actually bad when you include them.
But also influence through alliance. Even a superpower can't go it alone and use their military to bend others to its will.
An invasion threat isn't easily forgotten. Eventually things will be ok but America will have to prove itself again. Trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback.
Even if Trump is replaced by a Democrat, the conditions that made Trump happen are still there. That won't change from one day to the next. And don't forget he already happened twice.
10-20 years of decent administrations will make things ok again. But of course our economies will be much more decoupled by then. That process has been set in motion now and won't easily stop. That can start going the other way again but things will have to meaningfully change then over time.
As for Hungary I still don't trust them as far as I can throw them. I would have been happy to bump them back to candidate EU member during the Orban reign and let them prove themselves. Don't forget this Magyar guy is still super conservative. Just less anti EU. But unfortunately EU law didn't provide for the ability to throw a country out. That was a huge oversight.
You are right of course. Germany eventually rebuilt trust within Europe, but now have a highly decoupled economy from their neighbors. As you correctly point out.
1.) after ww 2 European economies were very decoupled
2.) One guy mentions Netherlands but if we can think about Poland, Israel, Ukraine. Israel and Ukraine because Germany supported these countries militarily, in Poland financially but still ww2 is not forgotten.
Btw. You can ask Canadian people what they thought about their annexation threats.
When I was young there was still a lot of ill will and distrust against the Germans and that was 40+ years after the war.
We were still joking about wanting our bikes back (the nazis stole everything metal at the end of the war to make weapons). And didn't like them at beach resorts etc. People would much rather buy American than German products.
That's over now but it took a very long time. Which was exactly my point. Time and consistently good politics will heal this but time it will take.
Of course the sooner you turn things around the better but the disconnection has already been set in motion and big ships turn slowly.
EU wokeup from their sleep with backstabs all around. What a rude awakening indeed. Possibly some were dismissed when they raised this scenario as unlikely.
I didn't say never. I just said, if America gets a sane administration again, things won't be automatically back to normal. There will be caution for years. Also, any new administration will spend years undoing all the destruction that has been done until things can be considered normal again.
In some cases but not enough. Some of us has been doing a lot to help educate companies and business here and with the current administration - and the fact that they are being explicitly backed/funded by the Silicon Valley tech companies long resisted government overreach - have helped to finally open ears in boardrooms to the dangers of the Cloud Act and other leverage.
GDPR gave us "oh cool AWS has eu-west-1 and pretends to comply so we can also pretend to comply" but I think the tone has shifted to actually caring, at least a little bit. And with the CLOUD act all the US based hyperscalars can't really offer compliant hosting.
Trump is not the core issue since he isn't a hereditary monarchical dictator.
It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less.
No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. The real enduring toxic legacy is the packing of SCOTUS, sold to voters as a means of overturning Roe V Wade but in fact a massive enabler for corruption and gerrymandering. Those guys are there until they die or Democrats grow a spine, probably the former.
>Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems.
Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully.
The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries.
The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
Loss of trust towards US is one factor; another is enshittification of services; yet another are good enough monopolies that EU don't have capital to disrupt
I'm willing to wager a bet the former reason is the bigger reason. Many of the data migrations I've helped with, been to services that owners know are slightly worse or doesn't have one feature they ideally should have had, but because of the first reason, it's more important to move now than to wait for it to be perfect. I don't think many are migrating because of "enshittification of services", I haven't heard that as a reason myself at least.
One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.
Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.