I certainly don't blame the activists for governments refusing to listen, but this threat was clear at least 15 years ago and I would expect someone as knowledgeable as Bert Hubert to have perceived it at the time.
Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher?
I hope you're right, but one of the rough dislocations of the present moment is the disconnect between how europeans conceive of their sovereignty and the reality of their economic, military, and cultural fragility in their relationship with the US and US companies.
No amount of grandstanding rhetoric and appeals to "courage" changes that if there are any serious economic consequences (caused by US/corporate coercion or otherwise), the government would likely fall and be replaced by someone more amenable to the status quo. What feels like a small price to pay for someone focused on security long-term may be an unacceptable price for someone focused on short-term outcomes in their political fortunes.
> Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher?
I believe so, yes. I don't think Americans realize how profoundly the last few weeks have affected European political thought. It'll take a while before you see concrete changes. Europe is like a mammoth tanker, slow to change direction, but practically unstoppable. I believe that it's more likely now than ever before for European governments and businesses to sever their dependency on American technology. Lots of comments in this thread explain how hard this is, how big the feature gap between, say, AWS and OVH is, but as a European entrepreneur I gotta say, this looks a lot more like an opportunity than a problem to me.
Preferably all in the same place and at least somewhat integrated with each other. I'm not spelling out logging, auditing, IaC and other supplementary features but rather core functionality.
That seems to me like a minimal set of services a cloud provider must offer so that clients would work on "service assembly" instead of "building from scratch" or "integrating integration-hostile products".
OVH and Open Telekom Cloud have the vast majority of the features that you request and are provider EU based and owned.
IMHO:
- Configuration management, not needed, i vastly prefer Ansible. If you mean IAC: terraform is the best.
- Domain and cert registration. Domain use 3dparty
- Email /SMS: use third party provider
I think the biggest open question right now is asking if there is such a thing as "Europe" and if it's capable of responding in a unified way in a relevant timeframe.
Ie, are you a Europe-wide entrepreneur working to move the whole unstoppable tanker away from american clouds, or do you just have contracts with EU entities in Brussels and perhaps a few EU members like Germany or Denmark?
Do those contracts really help you navigate the digital contracting systems of Italy, Spain, Greece, and Croatia? And is your timetable for growth going to line up with their elections that could result in contract negotiations stalling or even existing agreements being frozen?
The concerns expressed seem a bit silly, unless the various Euro systems didn't take the very basic approach of using open standards and avoiding lock-in. Oh, and they should be backing up their data somewhere besides "in the cloud".
If those very basic precautions had been taken, migrating to a Euro cloud, or a private environment (open cloud stack) would be trivial.
If not, a lot of people should be fired...but granted, there are a lot of stupid people out there...
All that said, I'd say the concerns around this are vastly overblown.
“the very basic step” is a lot less basic than you imply.
There’s a million little proprietary APIs and the temptation to glue one to another, especially circumstances like AWS where they use lambdas for basic functionality that should have been just provided by the cloud provider itself.
Why do you say that the cost of throwing out American tech giants has gone up by 100-1000x compared to 15 years ago?
I mean before everything became cloud/SaaS, American software companies were still essential to most European business and governmental operations. It was just on more traditional server/desktop systems?
Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher?
I hope you're right, but one of the rough dislocations of the present moment is the disconnect between how europeans conceive of their sovereignty and the reality of their economic, military, and cultural fragility in their relationship with the US and US companies.
No amount of grandstanding rhetoric and appeals to "courage" changes that if there are any serious economic consequences (caused by US/corporate coercion or otherwise), the government would likely fall and be replaced by someone more amenable to the status quo. What feels like a small price to pay for someone focused on security long-term may be an unacceptable price for someone focused on short-term outcomes in their political fortunes.