The article's Karim Khan example pretty deeply undercuts the thesis. Losing access to your bank account is the actual coercive power. Losing a Microsoft email is an inconvenience in comparison.
If your business has everything on GCP/AWS/Azure (which is very common) and the Americans choose to weaponinse US tech against your country or business, then unless you have non-US backups you are probably dead and all of your employees unemployed. If you are a state, all of your services and functions are probably dead and you have to rebuild from nothing. That is certainly true of my company and there are some mutterings starting where I am internally about worst case disaster recovery if suddenly one of these suppliers just disapeared.
In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.
The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.
There are plenty banks owned and operated within the EU. One bank folded for US pressure but when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
That's not the case for digital infrastructure like Google Workspace, Google cloud, Office 365, AWS, etc.
> when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
The article's Karim Khan example pretty deeply undercuts the thesis. Losing access to your bank account is the actual coercive power. Losing a Microsoft email is an inconvenience in comparison.
The real 'military bases' are banks.
If your business has everything on GCP/AWS/Azure (which is very common) and the Americans choose to weaponinse US tech against your country or business, then unless you have non-US backups you are probably dead and all of your employees unemployed. If you are a state, all of your services and functions are probably dead and you have to rebuild from nothing. That is certainly true of my company and there are some mutterings starting where I am internally about worst case disaster recovery if suddenly one of these suppliers just disapeared.
In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.
The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.
There are plenty banks owned and operated within the EU. One bank folded for US pressure but when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
That's not the case for digital infrastructure like Google Workspace, Google cloud, Office 365, AWS, etc.
> when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
Cutting ties with US tech companies is one of the most important things the rest of us need to do these days.
You're not wrong. But let's wait a month, last time cashing in on US stocks.
There's potentially coming a whole lot of European € back to the European market
So what's the solution?
Monitoring of "hostile" workloads at datacentre scale is not going to work.
Should we throw away 80 years of trade, cooperation, and the resulting prosperity and go back into ridiculous tribalism?
The folks who won those 80 years and remember what it took and what was before are all but gone now. Not a coincidence.
Yes!