It’s no mistake China banned foreign companies with infinite money from setting up shop there. It is dangerous and expensive in the long run.

As someone with an infra background a lifetime ago, I am confident I could spin up Kubernetes and Deepseek R1 in OVH or Hetzer within a few days. The primitives exist, the EU simply needs to lean into cultivating and supporting them (orgs, platforms, etc) to push EU entities consuming these services away from US Tech. Perhaps the tech stack is a national security interest, just as a manufacturing base and supply chain is. Better to be prepared than to be entrenched in the US Tech ecosystem and then suddenly be held hostage for reasons.

I'd certainly enjoy the case studies of European enterprises jumping from full-scale Azure and AWS deployments to OVHcloud or Hetzner, though. That'd make for some interesting reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5_4DvPO-7w

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/20/airbus-could-prioritise-non-...

If my (Canadian) government decides to ban Azure in a year, my critical infrastructure company ignores it for 11 months because they figure it won't actually happen, and then goes to the government to tell them that if the ban actually goes through, our infrastructure stops working because we'd actually need a multi-year timeframe to migrate off of Azure.

Blaming Trump for their own well-known problems is silly. They were dependent on the US before him and they will continue to be dependent on the US after him until they look in the mirror and decide to fix what is broken.

But the argument of the parent might be that a very active open source community based in Europe points towards a big potential of experienced developers working at their mid sized companies in the shadow of American big tech. Once big tech is gone...

Don't know what it is. Am I not fake enough? Not forcing fake smiles and excluding obnoxious positivity constantly? Not ego stroking the interviewer? Am I doomed to, in comparison to US, poverty wages?

Absolutely infuriating.

My last company paid 2-2.5x a UK salary for a US engineer. Perhaps the ratio for a company like Meta is closer, but I doubt it's equal. For startups you may find random roles that have equal pay globally, but they're relatively uncommon.

In practice, this means no US cloud providers provide foreign data sovereignty (though many claim to).

As long as whatever sham of a data protection agency was nominally functional in the US european elites could convince themselves that it was legal to transfer personal data to some US corporations, but now that agency is defunct.

But yeah, it's a bad idea to do business with empires. Sooner or later they turn to bullying and extortion.

(I’m not disputing the chances, just the logic of the analogy with Airbus.)

Microsoft will be tough to replace. There are good alternatives, but retraining personnel, etc. will take years. Google, I am not sure. Their cloud services are replaceable. Search may be tougher, but the quality of Google Search has become so bad that it's often easier to ask an LLM.

See also: https://mergr.com/transaction/ebay-acquires-marktplaats-bv

Being US startup with English only you have access to 300m people right away.

There were country specific social networks but then all cool kids were on FB so everyone moved there.

The same with LinkedIn, our country specific business social network closed down finally last year. First 3-5 years it was growing then everyone moved to LinkedIn so that network was ghost town for 15 years someone kept it alive just in case but seems like they stopped wasting money.

I do see opportunities with LLMs as making all kind of platforms language agnostic - you should be able to write your own language and read your own language even if other person is from different country using different language.

(as of this comment, Bluesky has ~32M users and counting)

We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion, and if not, why not.

The UK's largest "social" sites are pretty much forums (e.g. Mumsnet, The Student Room, DigitalSpy, MoneySavingExpert) and while they're good for their respective topics, they don't cover the Reddit/Facebook/Instagram use cases (they could be arguably considered on a par with individual sub-reddits).

If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server, then you get the network effects of Facebook and Reddit. Individual boards can just sub to the central server keeping them connected to the hivemind or not. Your community can remain isolated or throttled (only 30% of global updates get through). We do this manually here, where not all global posts get through (you'd be hard pressed to push a Reddit post to the top here). It's the simplest way to federate using existing technology.

This model is already at play. X, Bluesky, Reddit, Truth Social, and Rumble are basically heavily funded private message boards with a large mindshare subscriber base.

Taking our message boards back is proving to be difficult, especially because trying to move the userbase off of it is the same as trying to move people off drugs.

Your're doing this with phpBB? Doesn't happen to be open-source somewhere?

Would be interesting to have a look, I think I a bit like this opt-in partial federation / hivemind. Would be even more interesting if it was possible to sync comments between such forums.

**

Developing forum software myself, Talkyard. Based in Europe (Sweden).

Started thinking even more about using some European cloud, as an option. There's a Swedish hosting provider that looks interesting (I think)

I guess you could do syncing kind of like how CCing email is done. CC my home server and global server. This gives you agency to remain detached from the hivemind, and vice versa. This is not some idea out of left field, it's roughly my workflow between Reddit or HN or other sites. I manually do the filtering in my mind when I move through different channels.

Phpbb is open source, but I mostly brought it up to show that Facebook is just that, and nothing more. Forking Reddit will also give you a Facebook clone (and a Reddit clone).

Websearched for "phpBB federation" and "phpbb subscribe rss broadcasts", found this:

"Feed post bot: This extension enables you to read any RSS, ATOM or RDF feed. It looks for new items every half hour and post them to a specified forum." https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=456&t=241159...

Intering way to use RSS

No need for that, we are just half a billion in Europe.

https://joinmastodon.org/about

(So is SAP, for that matter.)

Have you tried using OVH? It's... not ready for prime time. Don't get me wrong, I love it for cheap EU servers, but man is it a pain in the ass to deal with.

All of these nice F35s made in USA, will soon have no buyers except the USA itself.

It is this generation's F-16, many thousands will be built and sold.

Will it tear up existing deals and say 'accept the new terms or your planes won't fly'?

Why today would one spend $100M on 1 equipment unit when you can pump instead $100M and get 10M unstoppable drones?

What drones are you going to get for $10 each (now or in the future)? How are they “unstoppable”? How are you going to deploy millions of $10 drones on the battlefield without tons of $100M platforms that can survive AA defenses long enough to get to the engagement? How much range do you think $10 of batteries even gets you?

That is without me manufacturing any of the components. If one had a nation state backing I am confident it can be done for a fraction of it.

They are unstoppable because if you have a tank and there is a swarm of 500 of them what do you aim? One of them will find the opening to drop the grenade on your tanks weak spot. These are all single use kamikaze drones.

Same for battery range. Europe is preparing for a defensive war on their land. Even 10 miles of ranges should suffice. You can always deploy them from a mothership.

And you’re entirely ignoring the very real problem of the mothership which has to survive to get within ten miles of the battlefield, unless you’re planning on releasing them from box trucks which means their range will either be useless or they’ll get taken out by bigger, more expensive loitering drones the second they’re spotted. War is antagonistic co-evolution in its purest form, these naive solutions dont last very long which is why our weapons cost so much (for everyone, not just the west).

I totally agree with you that drone swarms is not a silver bullet, and likely some effective adversarial strategy will be developed(jamming, attacking motherships etc), but the point is that airplanes are not as important as they were in the past. Ukraine is still standing with no real air presence.

The main point of conflict is that the US holds the source code for the advanced software systems very closely, no partner country has access. A lot of the differentiated and exotic capabilities of the F-35 that make it attractive to other countries are in the software, everyone recognizes this. There are many algorithms and techniques that rely on classified computer science to deliver qualitative advantages. Even if other countries could replicate the hardware, without replicating the software anything they built would be a pale shadow of the F-35 in terms of capability, which makes alternative hardware much less compelling.

The US knows all the leverage is in the software, so that is the part they strictly control. It is yet another case of the software eating the world, military systems edition.

I suspect that by the time anyone was able to successfully reverse engineer it, it would be semi-obsolete, which limits the value in doing so. Playing catch-up requires taking a lot of aggressive R&D risks that European governments have traditionally been very uncomfortable with or which take far too long to execute.

Maybe the source code also contains a secret kill switch? I'd definitely put one in if I was selling fighter planes to 3rd parties. Alliances can switch overnight, as we're seeing right now.

IIRC the French refused to give the UK the means to disable Argentina's Exocets during the Falklands War.

I think European alternatives for F35 are obviously needed.

Given that for today's election here in Germany actual problems barely played a role. Not just that, over the last two decades very little was done. For example, we have skyrocketing rents due to a general lack of housing, which leads to all kinds of problems apart from affordability. For example worker mobility. Who dares to move to another job and city when it's so hard to find a flat?

That's par for the course for almost all big problems.

I think the probability is high that the new German government is going to try to sit this one out. After all, they survived Trump the last time, and it's only four years, right? Worse, they would have to do many things that will be very unpopular with one or the other interest group.

Unless somebody puts a gun to the heads of all those in government they will procrastinate rather than make any big changes.

I see little chance that they will cancel the order for US military hardware. They might actually buy a lot more, to appease Trump. After all, not getting the F-35 would have repercussions for the nuclear sharing agreement with the US. They need the F-35 to have a certified platform for nuclear bombs they are supposed to get from the US, stored in Germany for that purpose.

That would mean they would need a European approach to nuclear weapon sharing and weapons. The German government regularly has trouble even just to work together with only France, due to wildly different philosophies and interests.

Europe is far too divided, and the German government sees its role in doing as little as possible when it comes to radical change.

I think part of it is that the leadership of all our big parties mostly consists of politicians whose whole life is just that. They don't have anything else. Even if they get a job at a company it's for their political connections. They won't risk this, and they barely have any strong opinions! They look at polls and change what they stand for accordingly and easily. I'm not saying this to sound mean, I think that this is a mostly accurate description.

Opposing the US would take spine! It's a lot of trouble and uncertainty. They will try to avoid that if at all possible.

----------

By the way, it's not just F-35. Germany also ordered the Israeli-American Arrow 3 long-range missile defense system, sixty CH-47 Chinook, and 380 other contracts worth 23 billion just from the "Sondervermögen" (special fund) of 100 billion. Surely that will just become more, given that Germany continues to need to purchase things like Patriot missiles.

The strategy was - to the chagrin of the French if I understood the news articles written at the time right - to rather buy something proven and quickly available from the Americans rather than start a lengthy inter-European development process.

But what’s the alternative?

Some open source projects are rebranded as Russian with minimal changes, that happens, yes, but that's the result of gaming the system that incentivizes development of Russian software, not the result of sanctions.

Russian replacements of Office 365 and Google Docs seem to be doing well.

As for hardware, the EU is not yet under American sanctions.

Unlikely.

I've worked at an american cloud provider and (in another job) i've worked with an european cloud provider (in this context, when I say "worked with" I mean i was in contact with the people actually managing the hardware as well as the software that serves the "cloud").

It's just a completely different mindset, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

The main issue i see is that european cloud providers mostly have technically-ignorant upper management for which providing a cloud offering essentially boils down to "buy this software component from company xyz (likely an american company) and install this open source product abc, then slap a cloud marketing name and unleash the salespeople". They can't even contemplate the idea hiring somebody with FAANG-level skills, paying it FAANG-level money and let it do FAANG-level work. They hire a few underpaid 20-somethings and have them manage, at best, an OpenStack installation.

I kid you not: in late 2021 i was in a meeting with (among the others) the head of cloud engineering of one such companies and asked when are they planning on offering ipv6 connectivity. The guy had a loud laugh and said they had no plans to even consider ipv6 connectivity. And that was at a company that does both "cloud" computing infrastructure and connectivity (!!!). That's the mindset.

I don't see europe building a realistic alternative to american cloud providers, and the core issue is not technical.

Thank you! As a german that saw how the sauce is made in public sector tenders it's exactly this!

This is not restricted to hosting / cloud sector. It's a good summary for most german IT companies.

Arrogance and incompetence are rampant. Programmers and their managers need to go en masse to have some substantial change. everyone is so full of themselves and disconnected from reality it's scary.

Linus moved to the US and since 2010 is an american citizen, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Personal_life

Thank you for backing up my argument, I guess?

For example, Hetzner has great potential, but they’re only just now releasing object storage after 4 years in the cloud space, and they don’t even have managed database yet.

Hetzner has existed for a really long time, I'm not even sure what "cloud" means in your context.

Object storage and VMs is what made AWS "cloud" 15 years ago, so by that definition Hetzner only just became a cloud provider.

But the more important point was that they started branding themselves as a cloud vendor 4 years ago, and investing in new offerings around that pitch, but it’s taking them far too long to release basic parts of the offering, and they’re falling behind.

the real point is not ipv6 (or this or that specific service). the point is the attitude.

anybody in this subthread bikeshedding what aws service supports what version of the ip protocol has missed the point and would probably fail a text comprehension test.

Depending on the context, and granted, lacking some of the subtle details missing in the interaction described, might actually show real experience in the field.

"Why No IPv6?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40039154

The brain drain ultimately takes it toll. The most capable people from europe ( and every where else), move to US , be they engineers, management, entrepreneurs etc.

And they are going to stay there once the megalomaniac in chief and his South African oligarch have gone with their wrecking ball through the very fabric of the US society and economy?

This was possible because motivated individuals held technical positions in the ISP while the management has been totally incompetent and was later jugged outright corrupt.

Because of corrupt management and public scandals, my ISP has been sold to Orange. I am afraid this will end the 25 years of technical excellence as well.

On the one hand, this is a bland, press-release congratulations letter that could apply to any new president.

On the other hand, it signals "business as usual".

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/20/tim-cook-joins-bi...

> Why not Oracle or even IBM.

a) They're not as prominent as the 4 mentioned

b) as an acronym, "MAGAFIO" doesn't have the same punch to it. It's cluttered. We get the idea that the 2nd tier tech oligarchs are on board anyway.

I have seen, at least here in the UK, some people speaking about moving entirely back to hardware that is controlled by the organisation. The case is there on a cost basis already but people are reluctant to admit this. If another magical guarantee expires such as a security one, then the reason can be shifted to that and the cost justification is collateral.

Getting out of PaaS systems is going to be horrible and expensive though. We never should have gone further than IaaS.

I suspect the idea of the cloud as it stands today may die fairly quickly.

However there can be weirdness sometimes. I vaguely remember a case where Microsoft had to hand over EU data to a US law enforcement agency due to a court order, but giving that data would violate Irish law. I know there's a new variant of the EU-US Privacy Shield, but with the current US administration that could get ignored very easily.

Which raises the question: can for example Microsoft-the-US-entity in de jure sense cleave off Microsoft-the-EU-entity whilst still maintaining de facto connection between the two? If not, there are definitely big opportunities abound.

What Microsoft might end up doing is following the China model, essentially giving control over their EU servers (probably only those in a special region) to an EU company, while still supplying the software and taking a (very large) cut of the profits.

This is Google + Thales doing the 3rd party operator model, with the operator being a subsidiary of Thales and not Google.

(NB: I work for Google in the EU.)

1. US companies hosting EU data on EU servers are more vulnerable to US Govt demand, not less.

2. US-EU Privacy Shield does not exist anymore.

Like, the conversation will go, "Get us this data"; "EU law says we're not allowed to"; "We don't care, do it or we shut you down."

https://nextcloud.com/blog/eu-court-withdraw-personal-data-o...

Any cloud provider that operates in the US and claims to offer data sovereignty is lying.

Russian gas? Suddenly build nuclear?

Half a century of communist rule showed us not to trust our governments.

Every now and then, the Brussels bureaucrats show us how much do they value our privacy and electronic safety.

Could you possibly name any specific riscs?

I think MAGA is good for Europe, there’s a big incentive to remove any kind of US dependency.

I think the harder services to replace are things like Github and O365/Google Workplace.

I think it'd be faster and cheaper to replicate GitHub or even Office, which are complex but fairly feature-stable, than to offer a real cloud competitor with a fraction of the services that Amazon, Microsoft or Google offer in their cloud portfolios.

I heard an interesting thought on the Lex Friedman podcast though. If software engineering really becomes cheaper and more readily available thanks to AI, maybe more companies will start building more of their own services. Then, maybe then, will the European enterprise be able to wean itself off from the big cloud vendors.

Are there good resources for comparing clouds with sovereignty in mind?