I don't see the "unified API across vendors" there. At least not for the actual cloud part. Unified is only the part interacting with the market place.

Devils advocate: So you get this EU-verified catalogue which lets you pick your vendor lock-in between Amazon, Microsoft, and Google just like before.

Yes but user data can be securely accessed between these services too, and fingers crossed the trust mechanisms allow that access to be on a needs basis and incentivised without copying

And how is that „secure” achieved. As soon as someone reads your data and has it in their system - poof, the promise of security is gone.

The most common answer to this problem given by the people behind this is „but there is a legal contract backing the data exchange and the governing body”. Nothing different than what we have today.

you generally have a unified API with all the Tier3-clouds already. Everyone is using OpenStack. A pragmatic way would have been buying RedHat and making a foundation out of it, but keeping the business running. But that would actually work and there would be no bribes involved. So we have this, a "certified" marketplace where you can buy your way to the top (of a small hill...) by influencing the decisionmaking, like companies have always done.

You must be joking. The cloud offerings of Amazon/Microsoft/Google are NOT build on OpenStack.

I was saying Tier 3, where Tier 1 ist GCP, AWS, Azure, Tier 2 Oracle, IBM and Co. and Tier 3 everyone else who is so small that he can't compete with his own API for the breadcrumbs.

I think you're mistaken. Case in point: Scaleway, a founding member of gaia-x, does not use openstack. I know of several others who do not.