Recent erratic policies are having a profound effect on perception of US companies.

It has been brewing for a while.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/27/is-overreliance-on-...

The laws are already there. That's my point.

You’re probably thinking of PII (GDPR/EUDPR) and even there there are plenty of loopholes, creative interpretations, and “privacy shields”.

The push for sovereignty doesn’t just come from regulators, it comes from the companies themselves who lost trust in the US, and also from European providers who jumped on the opportunity to make a killing.

The conversation started all the way back, with the Patriot Act, but until now the dynamic was roughly: politicians write lofty laws that pay lip service to data sovereignty, then add enough loopholes so that nothing has to change in practice, and nobody really cares.

Now people do care, and they don't want to use those loopholes. It's pretty obvious why things have changed.

Inside the US, the biggest concerns similarly come with China, which I consider a bigger risk. For better or worse, if you're inside the US, you're probably better off holding as much of your presence as you can inside the US as EU requirements can actually be more harmful than helpful in terms of compliance. There are also certain protections and resistance you can take to less than formal (judicial warrant) requests. Only because if you hold an online presence in the EU, and are forced to violate EU laws, then you're in trouble on both sides.

I would assume similar in most cases, though the EU confederation is something I'm far less familiar with where national laws and EU laws conflict, etc. I'm more familiar with US state to federal structures.

EU doesn’t really have laws just directives and regulations it excepts every individual member to implement.

Sometimes there are disputes on the implementations that are then fought over in the eu courts but if the member county really doesn’t want to implement or follow them there really isn’t much outside of withholding funds eu can do. (For example see Hungary under Orban)

EU just doesn’t have the monopoly of violence like the federal government effective has in the US to enforce its will on the member states with force if necessary. EU quite literally doesn’t have a police or military force at all.

“Threat of violence”…lmao

Isn't the National Guard in the US considered to be a part of the military? I seem to recall that they were federalized/deployed at least twice recently, because supposedly state-actors/police didn't do enough to combat violence, or to protect federal workers or something like that?

Also, hasn't the current administration threaten to deploy the National Guard even more times, because the states are not following what the administration believes are the federal laws? Or what was the reason for those "threats"?

There are a lot of reasons behind some of these distinctions, and some interesting history. But the National Guard kind of serves as the official Militia for each given state... But is far from the coverage meant for what a militia should be when compared to say the first militia act under US law.

Edit: regarding any requests/threats of use... it's generally voluntary use of guardsmen from a state whose governor is friendly to the federal/presidential administration. Hence seeing national guard deployed from one state in order to handle what the president considers an emergency in another state when that state refuses a request.

And if there wasn’t a federal police force (or national guard put under federal control in the more extreme end) to enforce those decisions of such court would they matter in the more extreme cases?

EU cut Orbans funding and still he kept doing what he was doing and as there is no way to for EU to enforce its decisions beyond that he kept doing it until voted out of office.

That is a massive difference between the 2 systems. In EU the individual states are truly independent in that EU can’t force them to do anything.

For the record EU also has the courts etc but when they rule against a country it is pretty much reliant on the courty going “ok I will pay” as the court doesn’t have any means to actually enforce its decision.

Also there is 9 member states in EU that pay more then they receive from the EU so withholding funds from them will just lead to them not paying their fees. Obviously US has states like this too.

The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.

Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.

Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.

there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.

the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.

secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.

We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.

Imagine if the control plane of the Shahed drones were hosted on AWS.

What are you even talking about?

AFAIK, the US has never done that with IP space, but if we did see evidence of that, then you'd see similar worries about that for sure. But I think most of us see it as pretty implausible to happen, since the consequences of such move would be huge, and would probably end the internet as we know it today.

I live in Denmark, a country whose primary threat at the moment is the USA, and the thought of Donald Trump effectively having a kill-switch to our highly digitalized society is absolutely frightening. Reducing our dependence on American tech means that we are less vulnerable to a hostile power using it to extort us out of our territory. We cannot remove the threat entirely, but we can make the pain less extreme.

Other EU countries are also seeing things this way, that the US no longer has a stable government and is no longer a friendly country. Who cares about American spying when the real threat is your country being turned off?

For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment. There's countless US articles talking about US/Canada relations as if it is a trade dispute and that they think Canadians are eager to re-unite and go back to the way things were without ever addressing the threats to our sovereignty. Then you have comments like the parent to your post who is....wildly off the mark thinking that in a point of contention we'd prefer to keep our data on US controlled systems because their government would need to follow their own legal processes to acquire data of a foreign/hostile state??????

Indeed, the angrier the rest of the world is about the US, the more US citizens have to worry that that foreigners attempting to immigrate here for the long-term have a plan involving exercising influence on US politics from their position inside the country, in order to punish existing US citizens.

The comment I was responding to was claiming "For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment." in the context of making an argument that American citizens should be concerned about people in foreign countries feeling threatened by potential actions of the US government and reacting to this by reducing their dependence on American cloud companies.

And my genuine response to this comment is that US citizens are less ignorant of how the rest of the world perceives them than the commenter thinks - because the rest of the world is still trying to physically come here (and often still trying to come here illegally, or remain here illegally - ICE is still arresting tons of people).

Immigrants who dislike the US generally don't stop talking about their problems with the US when they move here - but now they use their status as an immigrant to make a moral claim, that they are more authentically American than those who didn't move here, and so their understanding of what America is and should be is better and more moral than that of existing American citizens. You can go to any college campus and see what the foreign students are saying about the US, including what they're saying about the very policy of giving visas to foreign students to begin with. Or you can go to congress and see what the immigrant members of the house of representatives are saying about the US. There's no conspiracy.

I am not aware of any, but I would love to hear any and all plans to punish US citizens.

This is indeed a valid concern for immigrants like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Rupert Murdoch. They’ve all had a significant deleterious effect on the US.

For the average immigrant just trying to live their life, it’sa much less valid concern. You could equally point the finger at the millions of natural-born US citizens who believe that the US is a “Christian nation”, who are well organized, and are trying to change the laws in that direction.

Yes. If you look for example at people from the world leader in science and technology, China, then there is a very noticeable drop in the number of young Chinese people wanting to study in,or after graduation stay in, the US.

Lets help them via visualisation: from rank 30 to 48 in just one year

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-b...

> They asked citizens across the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.)

They're not even asking those from the half of the world that has been bombed or coup d'etated by the US in the last half century. They're asking those who should on paper dislike the US the least.

People from those countries ranking the US below India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey is quite something. Israel coming in at 55th out of 60, below Saudi Arabia, is also fantastic proof of how incredibly unrepresentative these "representative democracies" are of their populace. The US and Germany are even 2 of the 7 surveyed countries! Without them I wouldn't be surprised if they came in last, under Iran and China.

You are equating illegal behavior with legal behavior. We do what we can to avoid the legal ways the US government can access our data.

It’s not something that the business owners want to do, but they are being forced to from above.

In other words: physical location isn't enough, the company's HQ being in the US is in itself already a massive risk.

The big American cloud companies are trying to get around this by offering their services via "independent" EU entities who aren't owned by the US company but still offer the exact same stack, but I bet most customers are just as unimpressed as I imagine US law enforcement is going to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism