Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
Yeah. That’s literally the whole point of “the cloud” it can be anywhere.
The EU has lots of places with available renewable energy.
Hook up a couple servers to some dams. With “free” electricity it’ll be almost impossible to not end up being cheaper than Amazon in the long run.
Like, I’m struggling to see how this would be a bad thing long term. Relying on American corporations just isn’t a rational choice anymore
As someone who works in IT, I love the optimism of making it sound this simple. Things that I expect to take 10 minutes can end up taking weeks, because there’s always a surprising answer to “How complicated could it be?”
True, but sometimes the only way something worthwhile ever gets done in the first place is because somebody started on it without realizing how hard it would be. Columbus only discovered the New World because he’d underestimated how far away from Asia he was. Sometimes you NEED an optimistic idiot to actually get something done. And yes it’s a pain in the ass for everyone else who has to clean up the mess, but often the achievement lasts a lot longer and outweighs the trouble by orders of magnitude.
Yes, that’s a good point. We both benefit and suffer from humanity’s overly optimistic moments.
True too, but Columbus might not be the clearest example of that.
“Oh, it wouldn’t work the way we’ve thought because” is a phrase I’ve had to say too often for that level of optimism.