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Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

102 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.

There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.

“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The thing is, people often switch providers due to poor network speeds, overprovisioned resources, and outdated hardware. Budget hosts use older hardware and whatnot to keep prices down, and premium hosts use newer hardware to justify a higher price.

If regulations come in that cap certain costs, it'll likely devolve into a race to the bottom per unit, with larger companies generally winning because they can get better deals on hardware due to hulk pricing. I imagine it could kill segmentation as well.

Maybe it would be okay. I'm just not very confident in my government to craft sensible policy that doesn't just benefit the largest lobbies, as in, the largest providers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

You are describing a scenario similar to the Texas power grid where that has indeed happened and then prices go up anyway as services are knocked out from a lack of investment in infrastructure. Similar stuff happens today when a vulnerability in S3 emerges or something like that. It is still a race to the bottom, and we have absolutely seen stagnation in service offerings.

The Independent System Operator (ISO) system works extremely well to field multiple producers and negotiate for the best rates among competition. It's one of the reasons why we all take electricity for granted, unless you live in Texas or on a less serious scale Arizona where two corprorate entities are grandfathered in to manage the supply, they enjoy a duopoly and the rates for the service is not very competitive.