
European Cloud Project Draws Backlash from U.S. Tech Giants - aloknnikhil
https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-cloud-project-draws-backlash-from-u-s-tech-giants-11572600600?mod=rsswn
======
Barrin92
Many people have pointed to privacy and data issues, but there's also the
plain reality that the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic
leverage for political ends over the recent few years, so having key data
stored in the US becomes an increasingly geopolitical risk even for European
allies.

I think these mercantilist plays we're seeing from the US are going to cause a
lot of long term harm to the tech companies. For national security reasons
alone you cannot rely on US cloud infrastructure if the man or woman in the
white house is likely to pull the plug at any moment.

~~~
chance_state
>the US has been shown to be willing to use its economic leverage for
political ends over the recent few years

Are there specific examples you're referring to? Because this is how
geopolitics and diplomacy has worked since the dawn of civilization. This
isn't something unique to Big Bad USA.

~~~
Barrin92
The entity list program against Chinese companies, the pressure on Europe to
reject Huawei infrastructure (and accompanying threats in particular when it
comes to natsec data sharing), the attack on the German car industry, on
French agriculture, the list has been getting pretty long.

And while it's true that this has been the state of affairs for most of
civilisation, it wasn't for the last ~70 years. Up until recently, the US was
willing to underpin global free-trade without using economic politics as
leverage for short-term or one-sided political goals. Which is precisely why
US tech companies have become the first choice in much of Europe and indeed
around the world.

Now the question is being posed if that is still a good decision. Without this
interference, Europe would not think about investing billions and billions
into its own cloud infrastructure, and China would not be ditching Android. It
could have been smooth sailing for US companies for a long time. If this
continues I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even
between the US and Europe.

~~~
Ididntdothis
”I'll give it 10-20 years before there's a major decoupling even between the
US and Europe.”

I am originally from Germany and I think the main obstacle for this decoupling
will be the reluctance of Europe to take defense into their own hands. When
things get tough they so far always have relied on the US. I don’t see that
changing anytime soon.

~~~
woodpanel
I still live in Germany and I can echo your concerns.

The majority of society has zero interest in doing military service, no
respect for people serving in the military at best, to downright hostility at
worst, as urban myths and clichés (like that the Bundeswehr is just for racist
nutjobs) go largely unchallenged (it is by far and large more ethnically
diverse than say most IT departments).

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good thing that we aren’t a militarist
country.

But the reason for us being able to afford this kind of luxury is US
protection.

And thus it doesn’t matter how much some Germans are annoyed with the US, this
social shunning of military service is not going anywhere.

You get what you pay for. Or not...

~~~
Ididntdothis
I remember when the war in Yugoslavia went on. This was clearly a European
thing but in the end it was the Americans that did the dirty work while the
Europeans did a lot of talking but no action.

~~~
progre
Every NATO member plus a whole bunch more was involved in that.

~~~
Ididntdothis
Only after the US went first.

~~~
barry-cotter
Accurate. Much like how Sarkozy really wanted to bomb Libya but nothing
actually happened until Hilary and Obama decided to do it.

~~~
pnako
French people were opposed to that idiotic intervention, just like the ones in
Iraq and Syria. Sarkozy was not re-elected (for this and many other reasons).

------
c3534l
> European Union countries are concerned about depending on technology
> providers that must comply with the U.S. Cloud Act, WSJ Pro Cybersecurity
> reported in October. The 2018 law requires American firms to provide law
> enforcement with customers’ personal data on request, even when the servers
> containing the information are abroad.

I don't blame them. What a horribly short-sighted law.

------
irrational
In retrospect, I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm an American and I
wouldn't trust us as far as I could throw us (and with the rate of obesity we
experience, you wouldn't be able to throw us very far). I have no doubt that
most government agencies with three letter acronyms can look at any data
stored on US cloud servers with impunity.

------
lnsp
> Some European companies that use large American cloud providers say those
> services are more competitively priced than cloud services in Europe, WSJ
> Pro previously reported. Gaia-X could lower transaction costs by
> standardizing contracts and processes between cloud providers and customers,
> the German Economy Ministry said.

I mean Hetzner for example is very competitive price-wise, but they are
missing a lot of the platform functionality AWS and Azure provide.

~~~
rsynnott
Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and
doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction. Which is fine;
there's definitely a market for what they do.

~~~
krn
> Hetzner isn't really a 'cloud' thing in the same way as AWS et al are, and
> doesn't really seem to have ambitions in that direction.

Hetzner Cloud is more about IaaS than PaaS, and competes directly with
DigitalOcean after the introduction of dedicated vCPU, block storage, and
private networks. It's still missing object storage, though.

OVH Public Cloud, on the other hand, is trying to become the AWS / GCP / Azure
of Europe – and with unmetered bandwidth is many times cheaper than they are –
but at the moment it's still much better as IaaS rather than PaaS.

------
buboard
I m on board as long as the EU governments don't have "special rights" to the
data stored in those servers under all kinds of excuses. In many ways, having
your data stored on the other side of the earth offers some privacy/security
benefits.

The right thing to campaign for is to move data AWAY from all kinds of clouds
/ hoarders and back into private silos, away from all kinds of grabby
governments.

~~~
bilbo0s
Well of course the EU governments will have special rights. You'll still have
to obey EU law after all. But at least there's an extra step before American
law enforcement can access that data.

So consider, for most people, it's good enough protection. Because we're not
worth the extra step.

~~~
mcv
What's more, EU law says that personal data can't just be shared with
companies or governments. No easy backdoors to your data. I'm no lawyer, but
I'd expect that any government, US, EU or otherwise, will have to provide a
warrant. Final decision will be with a European judge, not an American one.
That means quite a bit.

~~~
freeflight
> No easy backdoors to your data.

In many countries, the easy backdoors are already baked in on a constitutional
national level.

See the NSA pressuring the German government to modify its G-10 law, or FAD
"legal guidance" operations in Sweden and the Netherlands [0].

Case in point: Merkel might have complained loudly about the NSA spying on her
phone for the PR, but I'm pretty certain she was fully aware that this was
completely legal to do for the NSA [1].

[0]
[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/20140307ATT80674EN.pdf)

[1] [https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-10/nsa-
uerberwa...](https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-10/nsa-
uerberwachung-merkel-interview-foschepoth)

------
ptah
Europeans must be on the right track if the monopolists are complaining

~~~
TulliusCicero
Did the definition of monopoly change while I wasn't looking?

There are no cloud monopolists; there are major players, but nobody has a
monopoly.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
Correct. The right term to use here is oligopoly.

~~~
bilbo0s
And considering that they all meet up at conferences and the like, we might
even want to toy with the term "cartel".

But yeah, calling them monopolies is altogether incorrect.

~~~
TulliusCicero
They are very obviously competing with each other. Every industry has
conferences that all the big players go to, it doesn't mean they're illegally
cooperating.

------
toyg
Christmas draws backlash from turkeys. News at 11.

The sad bit is that, had these "giants" fought a bit more all those US
legislative atrocities like the PATRIOT Act, maybe, just maybe, there would
not have been a need for this.

~~~
buboard
or like net neutrality, which in the end didn't change anything.

~~~
MereInterest
Net neutrality is about maintaining the possibilities of newcomers arising.
Saying that removing net neutrality didn't change anything is like saying that
removing elections doesn't change anything. In either case, it inappropriately
freezes the status quo in place.

------
hugh4life
Dependency leads you to getting screwed over in negotiations... from American
IT to Chinese manufacturing. Autarchy is not a serious option but you've got
to have options for exiting lopsided relationships.

------
deanCommie
Having just returned from 4 years living in Western Europe, it is laughable
how technologically inept the European Union is when it comes to the internet.

Europeans are competent and intelligent. Their universities are competitively
amongst the best in the world.

But there is no entrepreneurial or innovative mindset when it comes to the
web. I think the ones that have it move to North America. The ones that are
left are disincentivized by a comfortable and productive social environment.

All this to say, I don't have much hope for this project's success, and unlike
a private enterprise failing and disappearing, this will not fail quietly, but
with billions of dollars, and the ones that will suffer are the European Union
citizens who will be forced to use inept second tier technology.

~~~
pergadad
I do agree that there is much less entrepreneurial mindset but there is not
less creation.

What the creation leads to is different and I'd suggest two main reasons:

1) Europeans are less likely to make it a business - the safety net might play
a role but also just different value sets. I'd suggest that on average
Europeans are less focused on profit/getting rich and more on just living a
decent life e.g. with work-life balance. So they might run things in their
spare time but will be more likely to give their creation away than run a for-
profit company with it. See e.g. PGP, Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, OpenCloud &
Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ... - many leading FOSS and even some
hardware projects are European-lead.

2) Startup success is quite a bit more difficult in Europe due to lower
investor/VC availability and a smaller market (burden of translation &
different legislations, although EU legislation is slowly converging things).
Nonetheless you had Skype, Spotify, TransferWise, etc. But those were all
mostly bootstrapped - there's no money available that allows annual
8-or-9-digit losses like with the typical examples of Uber, Lyft, WeWork or
Lime.

So its not that there's nothing creative going on, but fewer try to make it a
business and of those fewer succeed - and indeed many of those are then bought
by or on their own move to the other side of the Atlantic.

Tidbit: actually I've never seen comparison data on startup success rates
between countries, just on overall startup numbers.

~~~
kazen44
Also, many Europeans are far less market driven then most people in the US
seem to be. A lot of people work in public sectors, where innovations happens
but its simply not put to market, because the entire sector is not part of a
traditional market based economy. Labour relations are also a lot different
then in the US.

------
big_chungus
Lots of support from the usual HN "tariffs bad" crowd that shows up when
America restricts trade. But now, producing your own stuff _can_ be important
strategically? It seems pre-existing opinions of the actor in question are
tainting opinions of the activity.

~~~
rsynnott
Eh? I mean "in general, tariffs are bad" is not incompatible with "some
industries/facilities are strategically important and must be supported". Very
few people are calling for totally free markets with no tariffs or government
support _at all_, but a lot of people would see them as a necessary evil that
should be minimised.

------
outside1234
I'm surprised they didn't call the project Quaero again just to highlight how
hopeless this is from the start. Talk about being five days late and five
euros short!

ref:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero)

------
jasonvorhe
Is there any code for this? Any specific design documents that actually go
into detail? All of the PDFs I find don't go beyond the CIO level.

Reads like a typical German bureaucracy project: Lots of requirements but
nothing that could even remotely be implemented in time.

------
somurzakov
I believe that european bureacracy can be successful in building aws/azure
rival from the ground up. They better support european cloud providers through
some industry association, grants, or establish a university based partnership
project

~~~
somurzakov
typo, should be read: I _don 't_ believe

~~~
arkitaip
It's fine either way because anyone European citizen surely read the first
comment as sarcasm.

------
kmos
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kennethcorbin/2019/07/17/eu-
hit...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kennethcorbin/2019/07/17/eu-hits-amazon-
with-antitrust-probe/)

and then it uses their cloud ;-)

[https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/european-commission-adopts-
ne...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/european-commission-adopts-new-cloud-
strategy-2019-may-28_en)

------
tannhaeuser
Does anyone have info to share about the tech of Gaia-X? I mean it's probably
mostly about cloud services for the public sector, but then it's also open for
other users and I've heard vague hints at service repositories and privacy
metadata. Public press info is only regurgitated "industry 4.0" fluff. Peter
Altmaier (German minister of economics) wanted to talk about details and
roadmaps, but fell off the stage and got injured before he could do so.

------
JohnFen
If they build it, can Americans use it? Asking for a friend...

------
goatinaboat
This is very strange: AWS had no problems at all creating a wholly owned
sovereign Chinese AWS region. Why can they not do exactly the same thing in
France?

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/china_cloud_setup/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/china_cloud_setup/)

------
DenisM
Given the relationship with the US, Russia must have been the first to realize
they need their own cloud. I wonder if they built something serious yet? Maybe
Yandex?

[1] [https://cloud.yandex.com/](https://cloud.yandex.com/)

------
curt15
Any chance this project benefits nextcloud?

------
mcv
Data has become incredibly important. A see a lot of people call data the new
gold, or the new oil. I once read that some European nations stored their gold
in the US, and are now having trouble getting it back. Oil is another valuable
commodity where the US has always tried to stay in control over. With data, I
guess it makes sense that European countries finally want a bit more
sovereignty over it.

~~~
pieix
Could you provide a citation for the claim that European countries have had a
hard time repatriating gold held in the US?

~~~
mcv
My comment is based on some articles from years ago about Germany and maybe
other countries having trouble getting their gold back from the US. Googling a
bit now results in a couple of articles that say that Germany did eventually
get their gold back, but there were some hiccups and delays that made people
wonder whether the gold was even there at all.

[https://bmg-group.com/germanys-gold-reserves-u-s-paper-claim...](https://bmg-
group.com/germanys-gold-reserves-u-s-paper-claims/)

[https://www.rt.com/business/445133-germany-access-gold-us-
fe...](https://www.rt.com/business/445133-germany-access-gold-us-fed/)

[https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-
Gold-...](https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-Gold-Back-
From-The-Fed-And-It-s-A-Big-Deal.html)

Turns out everything is fine, but a couple of years ago, people were worried
about this. It looks like only Germany was involved and no other countries.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/m6bEG](http://archive.is/m6bEG)

------
riffraff
I have not heard of this project. While as a european I appreciate the intent,
I have zero expectations that this will result in anything other than some
pointless spending, on the lines of the "google-killer" quaero[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero)

------
cloudyo
... and as a EU project private alternative to the likes of Dropbox, there's
Duple, an app that gives you your full private Dropbox at home. Self-hosted,
E2EE, and works just like a Dropbox (currently in beta):
[https://www.duple.io/en/](https://www.duple.io/en/)

~~~
OldSchoolJohnny
How does it protect your data if your house burns down?

~~~
magashna
Not how does it, how do you. You should spread the data to an offsite or
secondary location.

~~~
deanCommie
So, a backup solution where part of the instructions is..."another backup
solution"

Come on.

~~~
magashna
Uh, yeah? A common rule in IT is 3-2-1 backups.

3 copies

2 different devices or medias

1 offsite

If your data isn't that important, then don't.

[https://www.us-
cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/dat...](https://www.us-
cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/data_backup_options.pdf)

~~~
deanCommie
A) Cloud backup solutions already abstract away replicating multiple copies
for redundancy.

Unless Google/Dropbox/Amazon/Microsoft go out of business, you are not likely
to lose data from your backup via act of god (aka data center fire)

B) The simple interface of web solutions is still ultimately that if you want
redundancy, just pick 2 (or 3) different providers. Myself - I use Google
Drive for backup of my most core files, and Backblaze for the whole shabang.

~~~
magashna
Right, so you have as part of your backup solution "another backup solution"

~~~
deanCommie
My point is backup that's not Offsite is not backup at all.

