Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
musings.martyn.berlin22 points by mooreds 2 hours ago
22 points by mooreds 2 hours ago
I feel the article is a bit roundabout, but eventually gets to the point: "Sovereignty" is not (mainly) about physical location, it's about which legal entity controls the data and whether or not that entity is subject to US jurisdiction and could be forced to disclose the data to US companies or agencies, in violation of EU law.
Which is mightily funny because in the opening paragraph the article equates "anti-free movement" with "problematic baggage". It's a problem if people can't move freely in and out of Europe, but not data -- that's our red line!
I mean... Yes? People and data about people are two different things - as is who is doing the "movement" in the first place.
Would you also support free movement of all the valuables in your bank vault?
> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU.
I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.
There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?
This…
It’s painful being a non-EU person working here, and hearing people wax lyrical about sovereign EU cloud without an actual product or product plan.
And once a product is anctua shipped and offered it is like already 5 years behind what US clouds are offering.
It’s embarrassing really
But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services into hundreds of abstracted products carefully designed to have circular dependencies between each other ..... And all shipped with price sheets billed in invented unit metrics and more small-print than a packet of prescription drugs that makes it completely impossible to predict how much you're going to pay.
I'll take the cleaner approach with predictable billing offered by the EU providers. Even if it means using my brain to RTFM and edit a couple of config files (which can then be rolled into automation via images or Ansible or whatever).
You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offer compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.
> There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
Lidl! https://horovits.medium.com/lidl-is-taking-on-aws-the-age-of...
> Who is investing in that?
Big companies that see the opportunity to be "Not AWS"?
A VPS provider who wants to grow their marketshare?
Nation states?
Not saying it'll be a small effort, but if the US continues to wield national laws to coerce American companies to negatively affect European citizens, it's possible.
> And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
My money would be on the French.
If an EU company refuses to play ball with the US, the US can simply compel the company through sanctions, as it is trying to do with ICC judges.
Travel bans, visa/mastercard, debanking, the whole nine yards.
So when is France/Germany going to subsidize a local competitor, say through anchor customers like their militaries
For start organizations thwt are sponsored by non-SU entities should disclose their conflict of interest!
This is such a dumb topic to me - and I work closely to this issue. The blog post talks about criminal surveillance and gag order possibilities - but has no examples of these being meaningfully applied. Eu govt also spies on citizens.
Obviously the true political point is the geopolitical security risk of depending on another country. There's some truth there but really all countries depend on all others and the way to balance it is to use and grow the trading leverage you do have, not trying to shore up your weaknesses.