What doesn't get talked about in these articles is the increasing impact to small business in the US.
I run a small business (scanii.com) and I've noticed over the past year an increasing number of customers leaving us to European competitors, customers that have been happy with us for years, using our European region, but now have concerns over US foreign policy and are giving preferred treatment to EU suppliers. When I asked they said, I'm paraphrasing here, "happy with the product but management wants EU supplier".
What this means in practical terms is that, if the tide doesn't change, US entrepreneurs will have a potential buyer population that is roughly cut in half if they can only sell to US buyers. This will have a cascading negative effect in the number of startups that succeed - impossible to quantify at this point.
Large corps can skirt around this issue by establishing an EU entity and trying to buy goodwill that way but that's not an option easily available to small businesses.
To be fair, it was always obvious to anyone with half a brain that "European region" from a US provider was fake-EU.
The problem is that PARIOT act, CLOUD act and everything else has gone from being a paper tiger to real and present danger. No longer a theoretical risk.
So even people willing to previously turn a blind eye to the crystal clear risks can no longer do so.
It is also no longer possible to trust those tasked with implementing it not to bow to political pressures.
A long time ago now, Microsoft (Azure) put up a fight when the US came calling for some data hosted in their "EU (Ireland) region". I think there is zero chance of them putting up a fight today if Donny boy picked up the phone to Satya .
And that's before we get to the example of a Texas court ordering Verisign to cut off the .com domain from a Dutch company.[1]
Sadly I have limited sympathy for a country that having witnessed Donny's first term thought "you know what, we'll have more of that" and voted accordingly.
Sovereignty has gone from being a theoretical concern that a lot of cloud (esp. AWS) advocates poo-poohed to something that is a very real concern in the minds of many. It's not just US foreign policy either. It's even within Europe--to say nothing of things related to China.
It'll be longer than that. If during that 2.5 years more and more companies move away from US companies, why do you think they would just abandon the non-US company to move back to a US company? The non-US company would have to be sooooo bad for that to happen. Also, there's no guarantee that the next US administration will be the opposite of the current, and even if it is there's no guarantee the one after that won't flip back.
No, that’s the new status quo. Even if democrats get in power next time:
1) it’s fairly unlikely that they give up on more powers voluntarily (exactly how much of the patriot act and the post-9/11 rules were given up by Obama and Biden?)
2) there is always the possibility of a future switch to another populist nutcase (or hell, any nutcase really). We are not going to trust American voters to be sensible anymore. We’ll need a couple of sane administrations and long-term polling data for that.
That would not be a big problem. But the next Republican president may be even worse than Trump. Trump is just the symptom of a deeper corruption problem.
That things will fix themselves when Trump is not in the White House anymore is a dangerous misconception.
US-made... Cloud products? Like there's anything US-specific or unique about Taiwan made/China assembled computers the instant it's sold by a US corporation?
Since they are cloud products and not bare metal servers, yes, you are paying for the specific features of AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc that are lacking outside of US companies.
I disagree, that's a price point concern not a market accessibility one. I strongly prefer to be able to sell to another 400M people than not have the option to do so.
US tech does not understand or comprehend the amount of damage they’ve self inflicted in the last couple of years. There will be a steady drip of this in years to come, I suspect.
For one, they are deeply in bed with the current administration (for any definition of current, past, and future).
For another, they fight tooth and nail any and all sovereignity of data even within their own walled gardens. See decade of battles by Google, Apple, Facebook etc. in the EU.
With a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic "AI chip" R&D and production, while still getting-away with grey-market imports for their AI/LLM R&D.
Without a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic AI/LLM R&D and deployment, while still funding indigenous AI chip development efforts.
------
From afar it makes America look so insecure and almost pathetic: China's R&D ecosystem is a huge mass with a lot of inertia - trade policy and embargos will be about as effective against it as the paper they're printed on.
The Trump administration is a shot across the bows for Europeans, undoubtedly.
But do they have to up their defence spending a bit, engage in some tough talk, reduce their dependence on imported energy, and gift Trump some gold-plated furniture?
Or do they have to do that and eliminate their dependence on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Intel, AMD, nvidia, Apple, Mastercard, Visa, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Juniper, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Adobe and Uber?
Because the latter won't happen spontaneously, it'll need deliberate, decisive leadership. And Trump will be out of office long before it's done.
> Or do they have to do that and eliminate their dependence on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Intel, AMD, nvidia, Apple, Mastercard, Visa, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Juniper, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Adobe and Uber?
Some of those are not like the others. Some are B2C and will face (indeed, are facing), tougher regulations. Some are B2B or B2G and there are already companies squaring up to take some of that pie. Many are ultimately reliant on ASML tech which I think Europe is prepared to weaponise in a trade war if they need to.
And yes, it'll take leadership, and constitution of the United States, or constitution of the physical body: one of them is taking that man out of the White House in the next 10, 20 or however many years.
But the tone has been set. Trust takes years to build and seconds to destroy. The direction of travel has been created, and while it might take a generation to get to an end goal, the process has started already.
We will up the defence spending until Trump doesn't have the "card" of removing Ukraine support anymore.
Then having a digital services tax starts looking like free money with few downsides to the EU. And the defence spending increases funding requirements.
The dependence would be eliminated by taxing it away.
And then there is the question of how much net worth of these EU elites is tied to U.S. stock market wealth, itself hugely big tech. We know they are EU elites because there is a culture of going to the best schools where you learn culture and start in big business circles right away like your parents did. These aren't freedom-fighters looking for independence. I remember fondly Gerhard Shroeder, the leader of the SPD, later becoming a Putin ally and making millions sitting on boards of Russian energy companies. Is it any wonder that the country which moved away from nuclear and is a big environmentalist haven is one of the most dependent on Russian gas?
My fear is with these types of issues of sovereignty (or corruption), the reaction is often right-wing or left-wing populism. The type of thing that got Trump there in the first place.
Trump himself understands little of everything he does. He cannot be bothered to read simple texts, but he prefers images. His attention span is very short. So he is somewhat like a toddler. But in the end of course he does sign decisions and orders, even though he might have not read them fully. Someone else writes those documents he signs.
Perhaps, but we can agree that joining the Army goes beyond that. If I were in charge, I'd call the entire Silicon Valley Detachment 201 officer corp to to active duty at some remote desert outpost.
Management listened to the siren call of "it's easier and cheaper".
Now they still have to pay for the same senior sysadmins they were told they wouldn't need anymore, but, with the added bonus of paying 10-1000x for bandwidth over what they could get if they had stayed on-prem.
Everyone went to "the cloud" because they want to make their IT problems someone else's problem. It's no different from the previous era of MSPs, except that there are now only, like, five MSPs in the world.
Note: I mean the Google Docs and Microsoft 365 type of cloud not the AWS and Azure type of cloud
A symptom of the larger problem to want to divest and outsource everything not considered a "core competence". Hence the outsourcing of everything from housekeeping to IT
My take is it's actually because of poor performance of internal teams.
With a cloud provider, you can get an account by filling out a sign-up page and handing over a credit card. Internal teams will often hide behind Bureaucracy and a ticket system, with processes that make hosting a simple web app take multiple quarters.
Now there are layered reasons for that, some of them with legitimate basis, but at the end of the day they're usually low skilled teams click-ops-ing some VMWware, delivering a terrible service.
We were contemplating just this as a lunch time conversation among few engineers. Why can’t we have a sort of internal currency in the company and let teams use it as their “budget” to get things done?
Infra team’s budget is broken up by the “user teams’ budgets + markup. Think your team needs a rlasticsearch cluster of your own versus the “managed” one by the infra team’s? Spend your budget accordingly. Want an increased budget? Get your director to pay from his currency budget.. all the way to the top..
Internal hosting teams ( cloud or on-prem ) should work more like public hosting environments and should focus on:
- Segregating workloads. If amazon can host a hacked service on their hosting stack without every tenant immediately being compromised, you can too.
- Self-Service. Teams should be able to just get accounts and do stuff without asking anyone.
- Building assurance. Now you've made it easy for teams to do small things, you're more likely to get more users and have less shadow-IT. You can now try and build organizational assurance without making teams suffer.
A team just needs petty cash and a cost code for a small amount of space in dev land.
What everyone does instead if ask for the planning to be done and completed upfront, which isn't realistic for a team you just stood up trying to do UR and a POC.
Reality of AWS or Azure in Europe :
- Can't provision new ressources without calling them
- If you get defects, you might be with Azure Europe Head after weeks of escalation and the only thing he wants to hear is if Microsoft can do a success story with you
- Gaslighting you on issues
I agree with you, we went from terrible service, to terrible service with no leverage.
> Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place?
The same reason that so many companies went to "the cloud", because the hyperscalers warpped the C-suite round their little finger.
There are two things any C-suite like doing that the hyperscalers could help them tick boxes on.
First, shifting capex to opex. They love doing that because of the accounting treatment. Opex goes into your P&L, so it reduces your taxable profit and therefore it reduces your tax bill. Meanwhile capex goes onto the balance sheet and is deprecated over the asset's life, so the "only" benefit you might get is to claim allowances (e.g. R&D) from your tax authority.
Second, it allows lots of things to be made "someone else's problem". Security ? Their problem. Staff ? Their problem. Tick-boxes to keep the compliance department happy ? Their problem.
So the hyperscalers can turn up and spin a ready-made story that the C-suite will lap up. Perhaps accompanied by a nice lunch and a round of golf. ;)
There is no doubt, companies such as Airbus have the technical competence and the financial means to do it all in-house. Sadly the C-suite calls the shots ....
... is this a reverse Dropbox comment? Everyone up to COVID was treating companies not moving some infra to AWS like how hardware companies would be treated without a mockup humanoid to show around.
I don't fully understand why companies use AWS. Is it a management driven or engineering driven decision? I assume management - in big companies some exec from Amazon comes to play golf, and in small companies the managers copy what the big companies are doing?
Microsoft moved late with Azure, but as they had so many customers in B2B already with SQL Server and Office, that they soon grew market share. Google Cloud followed and acquired companies like Firebase to differentiate.
Anyone who’s actually used Azure knows it’s an unmitigated disaster for uptime. The problem is that this has been consistently true for like a decade now. This indicates real core architectural deficiencies they’ve been unable to address.
Management react differently when it's a 3rd party issue:
"The systems are down, it's a global Microsoft Cloud issue affecting everyone"
vs
"The systems are down, Bob from my team made an error but we are working to fix it"
Except you still have those kinds of errors. What you’re trying to do is outsource maintenance of a system you have less expertise in for cost reasons. There is some transfer of liability that less technical management will buy but anyone serious will then ask “why is Microsoft azure having so many issues when other clouds don’t”
It's fine for things with poor uptime to exist. The problem is that people use it anyway. I think this is a lot to do with corruption. Like when Microsoft bribed a German city to stay on Windows/Office.
IME quite a lot of poor tech decisions come down to techies being too dogmatic in their beliefs[1].
Move to AWS? All techies want to add that to their CV so sure why not... Who cares if it's the best decision as long as the CVs get improved.
============================
[1] My personal bugbear are techies who are adamant that nothing but google chrome can be used by the regardless of the fact that when pressed they can't find a single site that doesn't work on FF. Usually the goalposts are moved at some point in the discussion from "sites don't work on FF" to performance even though FF with uBlock origin cuts actual downloading of ads to zero compared to the uBlock lite on chrome. They'll next complain about memory used in FF compared to google regardless of the lack of any measurements and even though these same techies are using bloated electron apps daily anyway!
As you can tell, this really is a personal bugbear of mine.
Smaller annual opex is far easier to get approved then large multiyear capex with deprecation.
AWS was also cheaper in the beginning but has been slowly ratcheting up the pricing making colocation or on-premise viable again for some workloads which have steady compute demands.
What do you see as the alternative for the purposes of this discussion? Are we talking cloud vs. on-prem or colo, or are we talking AWS vs. other-cloud?
For the first (cloud vs. non-cloud) it's clear that cloud has some advantages because you don't have to manage hardware.
For the second (AWS vs. other-cloud), at least in my experience, AWS is simply the best experience available. If anything the other cloud providers go out of their way to offer special deals and cozy customer relationships to try to get customers to switch, but AWS is still the gold standard in availability and uptime and ease of use.
The gap is narrowing as the field becomes more commoditized though. And I think that's what we're really seeing here. As things like k8s get more common, solutions are becoming more and more substrate-independent, so companies hunt for smaller, more local, cheaper, ambitious alternatives. Everyone is scared of vendor lock-in so it's getting harder for cloud providers to offer distinguishing features.
They get you hooked on a teaser tariff. Like $100k worth of AWS, Azure, GCP credits. Like a good drug dealer, the first hit is free. Once you've convinced yourself that moving to AWS is the right move, based on the teaser rate, they've got you in their jaws. Most of your IT team is gone, most of your on-prem/colo hardware is outdated, and for tax reasons it's better to lease than to purchase capital intensive equipment. But now the low AWS rate is gone, you can't go back, and you'd look like a fool for calling your decision a mistake.
I really like AWS. But I feel like there is a lot of money to be made in consultants overselling services built on it. And a lot of traditionally expensive IT teams are being replaced with even more expensive cloud "architects".
For very small companies (startups) AWS makes a lot of sense because you have very few employees and you don’t want that limited employee time being spent managing servers
We're small (< 25 people). We maintained a single rack in a colo, and all the servers were showing their age. We weighed lease cost for replacement (along with hassle of actually doing it), and migrated into AWS last January.
It's been ... messy. I'm not certain we'll stay. It's easier in the sense that we can bring up arbitrarily many new machines without needing to call Dell when a host gets full, but it's definitely not cheaper. And weirdball AWS-only things get in the way. Oh, and literally nothing is simple or easy in administration or setup.
If I had it to do over again, I think I'd have bitten the bullet and leased more boxes instead.
Not enough humans to deal with physical machines and the compliance issues around them.
I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter. Good luck passing due diligence as a bank's vendor when you are also physically responsible for the machines. You can do this, but it sucks and it's your entire job + overtime + on call.
AWS has a dedicated feature (artifact) that can serve as the foundation of your compliance package. If you are racking your own machines you get to start with a blank pile of forms.
> I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter.
I think it's the other way around. At the extreme scales you don't want AWS.
If you're running a cat meme distribution business, a single senior skilled techie will cheaply get you set up on a VPS (or a bunch of them) with the services you need.
If you're a bank, you have all the budget in-house to babysit your own VPS and stand up your own equivalents to whatever the fuck it is you were using on AWS, and follow all regulations. Because, face it, as a bank, the type of regulations you meet by using AWS is a tiny fraction of all the regulations you have to follow, so there is literally a team within the bank tasked purely with making sure all banking regulations are followed, and that team exists even if you're on AWS for everything.
The only place AWS makes sense is if you're a company with no technical department in the first place.
Sure, of you are a one-man shop trying to sell IT services in a regulated category to banks, hosting is not something you want to add to your list of problems.
This is not comparable to the situation in a company like Airbus, with perhaps 10k people of every imaginable expertise employed in just the IT department. Not comparable to most companies that are 1/50th of Airbus size either.
For a largish company (1000+ people, 500M+ turnover), assigning ten FTE:s to managing the racks and general core infra on a 365/24 basis and another five lawyers and general bureaucrats to deal with the general paperwork is nothing.
The reason for the big cloud shift in the 2010s was other things. A lot of hype/lies about how fast, cheap and easy things would be. And in many companies probably also a feeling that internal IT were a bunch of morons who failed at anything you asked them to do, and that anything else must be better.
Because AWS technical expertise are second to none. And for most companies their AWS spend is small % of overheads. Sure they could spend less but their marketing department is lighting money on fire so that would be premature optimization.
Also, not having to deal with the kind of assholes that are capable of both setting up and maintaining your physical infrastructure and are willing to travel on a moments notice to put out fires. Worth the price of AWS just to not have that dysfunctional lot to deal with.
Jane Street recently posted a video of their datacenter warehouse in USA on YouTube
Most of this large building was empty... they said that as compute had become dense along with advancements in liquid cooling, the same amount of power x years ago now only required few racks.
No need for many companies to go on cloud, at a minimum should be hybrid on prem.
I think a lot of commenters here are missing the ball with the idea that this is a foreign policy or anti-US sentiment emerging.
The core reality is that cloud infrastructure is becoming commoditized, and substrate-independence is becoming not only possible but the default. So companies looking for things like lower cost or better customer support are looking around and seeing that smaller rising competitors are going to be a better option. Compliance with local regulatory regimes are going to be a factor as the EU continues its efforts to push European companies towards using EU infrastructure.
I signed up my business with Hetzner. And the first thing I saw during onboarding was a demand to upload my ID to spend $5 to test their service (I was testing before we bought). I wrote to customer service and got,
Dear Client,
We received your email. Thanks for writing to us.
You have probably realized that this is an automated message.
We need some time to process each email that we receive, but we will write back to you personally as soon as we can.
Kind regards
Hetzner Online GmbH
[...]
www.hetzner.com
Digital Ocean? They just let me do it.
Guess where I'm going to recommend spending our money?
If your entire business decision is driven solely by an emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID, maybe you’re not the right person to be making these sort of decisions?
> emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID
It seems to me more like smart business tact, figuring out early on whether your infrastructure provider will be easy to work with or a bureaucratic pain in the ass
Not from a single data point. You have no way of knowing whether this is, on the one hand, a single reasonable request or, on the other, the start of a pattern of bureaucratic pain.
AWS does care. You have to sign up with a credit card and verify a phone number. And if you want to spend serious money you have to actually provide business documentation.
Just because a company wants to know who you are doesn’t mean they are entitled to a scan of a sensitive government document that can be used to commit identity theft.
I’m amazed that it is even legal for businesses to ask for that at all, outside of a few exceptional cases of which “I want to rent a server” most certainly isn’t one.
> I’m amazed that it is even legal for businesses to ask for that at all, outside of a few exceptional cases of which “I want to rent a server” most certainly isn’t one.
How about the case of “I want to rent a server to distribute illicit and or dangerous materials and then it’s your problem”?
Yeah, I think that’s the one case where it’s actually appropriate to use that card.
Like it or not, banks are legally mandated to do KYC, and this is essentially the same, except for information or communication being “moved” instead of money.
It's a foreign concept to Americans but in Europe everyone is supposed to be able to be held accountable. That means a lot more things are KYC. You need ID to get a SIM card or a drone.
It's rather an indicator of a system that is so broken that a digital copy of a single form of ID document is sufficient to impersonate someone well enough to do financial damage.
To be fair: all hosting providers deal with A LOT of abuse happening on their systems. Malware being hosted, people abusing trial periods ands free plans etc.
No sure if requiring a ID upfront is the perfect solution (if i recall, i never had to provide a ID on my private or business Hetzner accounts) but it isn't just there to annoy you.
Welcome to Europe, the land of sustainable business. We do not need to grow just to pollute our planet and die a painful death, individually and as a species.
If you still think your Hetzner registration process is convoluted, try getting a license for IDA Pro.
Yeah I've noticed that while America takes the approach of trying to keep your personal information secret, Europe takes the approach of requiring it to be shared around, but also protecting it with harsh laws for misuse. Things that are anonymous sign-up in America are KYC in Europe.
DigitalOcean simply does this at a later stage and will then just cut you off, Hetzner is doing it from the start. Their obligations aren't so different, they just approach this differently. It's the same thing with Stripe, it's cool that they just let you sign up and process transactions but at some point they will look at your business and if they don't like it they will just cut you off.
Also Hetzner really doesn't care much about individuals as far as I know, they mostly do business with other businesses and that's where the money is, their business is not designed to handle millions of individual users, DigitalOcean might also simply have a different strategy there.
Hetzner is totally fine with individuals, they're probably sad to get less money but they don't care. Remember that in Germany a GmbH company costs $25,000, and if you're not a GmbH you're (in most cases) an individual sole trader.
They're also a bit picky with who they allow to sign up and they discriminate by country of origin. I had no problem being from a first world country with a passport, but I've heard the horror stories. If you're from Asia or Africa you may have an issue - if you have a registered business (even a sole tradership) in Europe, that would probably help convince them.
Vendor lock-in has always been a concern, but AI workloads make the conversation even more important. Designing portable architectures from day one is becoming a competitive advantage.
So after the 2008 spying scandal (cia got caught using German intelligence bases to steal airbus designs), Airbus ran it's critical applications ... on AWS?
Public administration in Europe has already started moving away from the american hyperscalers. This is of course happening at the usual speed which is characteristic of all public administration.
Following the article that generated this column [0] says:
> Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS.
>Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.
[x] doubt
There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.
Well, yes, since long before the current administration. It's mentioned multiple times (with examples) in the European Parliament's "The Echelon Affair" report.[0] But it seems to me that this is not really what you're asking, but rather you're implying that there's no justification for this move other than European protectionism. If this is the case, I would argue that a sitting administration actively threatening with the invasion of your territories is a compelling argument for politicians and business leaders to evaluate alternatives.
You don’t need an espionage case to decide a provider is too much risk.
The political unreliability alone is enough. Just takes one orange guy waking up in a foul mood one day and doing something erratic. That increases risk for using anything American across the board even if the individual companies have done nothing wrong
Case in point: the Claude Fable debacle. It's not a big stretch to imagine that one day, they might decide any AI platform developed by an American company is too dangerous to let those shady foreigners access it. Not to mention the potential implications of your internal code being sent to AI datacenters in the US...
Do we? From a EU-hosted location? Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.
I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.
> I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.
Even more mundane reason would be the USA threatening war.
Recently the US gov't had Microsoft shut down an ICC judge's work email account. The threat is very real of more serious shenanigans (though I personally think the risk of backdoors introduced to any other software they use is just as real - Europe is just too much of a patchwork of jurisdictions to get this right).
> Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.
If the US decided to sanction Airbus, decent odds that the EU would make it illegal for EU businesses to comply with those US sanctions.
Similar to how the US has made it illegal for US firms to comply with Arab League sanctions against Israel
Before you come and say something like Trump threatening to invade Greenland and annex Canada is just bluster/ these are democracies that answer to their people, and their people are mad about that, which is going to direct policy. The sentiment in those countries about the US is on par with those on Russia and China, if you think that is not to the US detriment I’m not sure what to say.
If we continue using US hyperscalers then we deserve to have our industries turned off when Trump decides to grab Greenland. Being stupid should get punished.
> Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes
At the time "only" to have the upper hand in trade negotiations, and presumably when "having the President press foreign countries to award business to American firms", as they call it. But that was 30 years ago, and trust that these these things aren't directly forwarded to US private industry is in short supply these days
If any company, especially one with a global presence, ever even strongly suspected that had happened and a competitor was using something they developed you'd of seen it play out in the courtroom. Hopefully we can all agree that if America is good at anything, it's letting its lawyers be litigious.
The fact that, AFAIK, that's never happened nor been alleged says a lot.
It doesn’t have to be espionage, it can be just operational risk. There is the case of Trump ordering sanctions against the International Criminal Court, and Microsoft blocking their accounts to comply (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14203). Or more recently, Trump deciding who gets access to Anthropic’s latest models. You can’t build a business on a vendor who may be forced to block you at any moment.
By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former director of central intelligence.
We'll begin with some candor from the American side. Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it's true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?
Yes, but the US bribes too. In fact, I'd say that corruption is more common in the US than in much of Europe. The article's claim that the US worships Adam Smith is only nominally true; in practice, they love nothing more than monopolisation and market domination.
> Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?
Any advantage that they can exploit. It's no great secret that the US government often acts on behalf of its major corporations and vice versa.
I haven't read the op-ed, but I wonder if it talks about the French Leclerc case?
TIL that when Greece tested four tanks in 2000 before a big arms purchase, the US M1A1 Abrams and British Challenger 2E tanks had trouble with their satellite navigation systems. A French intelligence agency used GPS jammers to help the French Leclerc tank in the competition. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6bhr14/til_th...>
I think this was about two separate events in 1994:
Among the allegations: that the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus Industrie for a $ 6 billion contract; and that Raytheon received information that helped it win a $ 1.3 billion contract to provide radar to Brazil, edging out the French company Thomson-CSF. These claims follow previous allegations that the NSA supplied U.S. automakers with information that helped improve their competitiveness with the Japanese (see "Company Spies," May/June 1994).
What doesn't get talked about in these articles is the increasing impact to small business in the US.
I run a small business (scanii.com) and I've noticed over the past year an increasing number of customers leaving us to European competitors, customers that have been happy with us for years, using our European region, but now have concerns over US foreign policy and are giving preferred treatment to EU suppliers. When I asked they said, I'm paraphrasing here, "happy with the product but management wants EU supplier".
What this means in practical terms is that, if the tide doesn't change, US entrepreneurs will have a potential buyer population that is roughly cut in half if they can only sell to US buyers. This will have a cascading negative effect in the number of startups that succeed - impossible to quantify at this point.
Large corps can skirt around this issue by establishing an EU entity and trying to buy goodwill that way but that's not an option easily available to small businesses.
I fear rough waters ahead.
> using our European region
To be fair, it was always obvious to anyone with half a brain that "European region" from a US provider was fake-EU.
The problem is that PARIOT act, CLOUD act and everything else has gone from being a paper tiger to real and present danger. No longer a theoretical risk.
So even people willing to previously turn a blind eye to the crystal clear risks can no longer do so.
It is also no longer possible to trust those tasked with implementing it not to bow to political pressures.
A long time ago now, Microsoft (Azure) put up a fight when the US came calling for some data hosted in their "EU (Ireland) region". I think there is zero chance of them putting up a fight today if Donny boy picked up the phone to Satya .
And that's before we get to the example of a Texas court ordering Verisign to cut off the .com domain from a Dutch company.[1]
Sadly I have limited sympathy for a country that having witnessed Donny's first term thought "you know what, we'll have more of that" and voted accordingly.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
Sovereignty has gone from being a theoretical concern that a lot of cloud (esp. AWS) advocates poo-poohed to something that is a very real concern in the minds of many. It's not just US foreign policy either. It's even within Europe--to say nothing of things related to China.
> I fear rough waters ahead.
For 2.5 more years.
It'll be longer than that. If during that 2.5 years more and more companies move away from US companies, why do you think they would just abandon the non-US company to move back to a US company? The non-US company would have to be sooooo bad for that to happen. Also, there's no guarantee that the next US administration will be the opposite of the current, and even if it is there's no guarantee the one after that won't flip back.
The long-term trends don't exactly reverse under Democratic administrations.
No, that’s the new status quo. Even if democrats get in power next time:
1) it’s fairly unlikely that they give up on more powers voluntarily (exactly how much of the patriot act and the post-9/11 rules were given up by Obama and Biden?)
2) there is always the possibility of a future switch to another populist nutcase (or hell, any nutcase really). We are not going to trust American voters to be sensible anymore. We’ll need a couple of sane administrations and long-term polling data for that.
> For 2.5 more years.
That would not be a big problem. But the next Republican president may be even worse than Trump. Trump is just the symptom of a deeper corruption problem.
That things will fix themselves when Trump is not in the White House anymore is a dangerous misconception.
Midterm may accelerate the process.
And then at least 4 more years times 2.
What’s the excuse for when the problems remain when the leadership changes?
> For 2.5 more years.
Who is going to trust US voters with not voting for a man-child?
Remember: Trump got in twice.
Yes European GDP, especially buying power has been pretty flat over last decades. They simply cannot afford US made products anymore.
US-made... Cloud products? Like there's anything US-specific or unique about Taiwan made/China assembled computers the instant it's sold by a US corporation?
Since they are cloud products and not bare metal servers, yes, you are paying for the specific features of AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc that are lacking outside of US companies.
I disagree, that's a price point concern not a market accessibility one. I strongly prefer to be able to sell to another 400M people than not have the option to do so.
US tech does not understand or comprehend the amount of damage they’ve self inflicted in the last couple of years. There will be a steady drip of this in years to come, I suspect.
US Tech does understand, US Administration does not.
US tech helped the US administration get there, and instead of speaking up, gives it gold trinkets for special favors.
I doubt US tech understands.
For one, they are deeply in bed with the current administration (for any definition of current, past, and future).
For another, they fight tooth and nail any and all sovereignity of data even within their own walled gardens. See decade of battles by Google, Apple, Facebook etc. in the EU.
Nvidia's Jensen as an example called out the risk that a GPU ban to China would accelerate Chinese r&D
With a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic "AI chip" R&D and production, while still getting-away with grey-market imports for their AI/LLM R&D.
Without a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic AI/LLM R&D and deployment, while still funding indigenous AI chip development efforts.
------
From afar it makes America look so insecure and almost pathetic: China's R&D ecosystem is a huge mass with a lot of inertia - trade policy and embargos will be about as effective against it as the paper they're printed on.
The true extent of the damage has yet to be seen.
The Trump administration is a shot across the bows for Europeans, undoubtedly.
But do they have to up their defence spending a bit, engage in some tough talk, reduce their dependence on imported energy, and gift Trump some gold-plated furniture?
Or do they have to do that and eliminate their dependence on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Intel, AMD, nvidia, Apple, Mastercard, Visa, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Juniper, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Adobe and Uber?
Because the latter won't happen spontaneously, it'll need deliberate, decisive leadership. And Trump will be out of office long before it's done.
> Or do they have to do that and eliminate their dependence on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Intel, AMD, nvidia, Apple, Mastercard, Visa, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Juniper, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Adobe and Uber?
Some of those are not like the others. Some are B2C and will face (indeed, are facing), tougher regulations. Some are B2B or B2G and there are already companies squaring up to take some of that pie. Many are ultimately reliant on ASML tech which I think Europe is prepared to weaponise in a trade war if they need to.
And yes, it'll take leadership, and constitution of the United States, or constitution of the physical body: one of them is taking that man out of the White House in the next 10, 20 or however many years.
But the tone has been set. Trust takes years to build and seconds to destroy. The direction of travel has been created, and while it might take a generation to get to an end goal, the process has started already.
We will up the defence spending until Trump doesn't have the "card" of removing Ukraine support anymore.
Then having a digital services tax starts looking like free money with few downsides to the EU. And the defence spending increases funding requirements.
The dependence would be eliminated by taxing it away.
And then there is the question of how much net worth of these EU elites is tied to U.S. stock market wealth, itself hugely big tech. We know they are EU elites because there is a culture of going to the best schools where you learn culture and start in big business circles right away like your parents did. These aren't freedom-fighters looking for independence. I remember fondly Gerhard Shroeder, the leader of the SPD, later becoming a Putin ally and making millions sitting on boards of Russian energy companies. Is it any wonder that the country which moved away from nuclear and is a big environmentalist haven is one of the most dependent on Russian gas?
My fear is with these types of issues of sovereignty (or corruption), the reaction is often right-wing or left-wing populism. The type of thing that got Trump there in the first place.
> US Tech does understand, US Administration does not.
US tech bros got a front-row seat, sitting in front of Cabinet picks, at the inauguration:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-inaugu...
Trump wrecks everything he touches.
Trump himself understands little of everything he does. He cannot be bothered to read simple texts, but he prefers images. His attention span is very short. So he is somewhat like a toddler. But in the end of course he does sign decisions and orders, even though he might have not read them fully. Someone else writes those documents he signs.
This is exactly why he is so destructive, he is too stupid to understand complex system but arrogant enough to still make changes.
The tech bros lining up at Donald’s inauguration to kiss his ring suggests otherwise.
They are business leaders who need to do what's best for the business. They have to work with whoever is in office once elected.
well they traded short term gain for long term pain.
Perhaps, but we can agree that joining the Army goes beyond that. If I were in charge, I'd call the entire Silicon Valley Detachment 201 officer corp to to active duty at some remote desert outpost.
Why should they care? Shareholders > stakeholders.
Is Airbus still using Google workspaces for mail? Nice vector for industrial espionage.
Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place? It seems complete overkill for a company like that.
Management listened to the siren call of "it's easier and cheaper".
Now they still have to pay for the same senior sysadmins they were told they wouldn't need anymore, but, with the added bonus of paying 10-1000x for bandwidth over what they could get if they had stayed on-prem.
Everyone went to "the cloud" because they want to make their IT problems someone else's problem. It's no different from the previous era of MSPs, except that there are now only, like, five MSPs in the world.
Note: I mean the Google Docs and Microsoft 365 type of cloud not the AWS and Azure type of cloud
A symptom of the larger problem to want to divest and outsource everything not considered a "core competence". Hence the outsourcing of everything from housekeeping to IT
My take is it's actually because of poor performance of internal teams.
With a cloud provider, you can get an account by filling out a sign-up page and handing over a credit card. Internal teams will often hide behind Bureaucracy and a ticket system, with processes that make hosting a simple web app take multiple quarters.
Now there are layered reasons for that, some of them with legitimate basis, but at the end of the day they're usually low skilled teams click-ops-ing some VMWware, delivering a terrible service.
We were contemplating just this as a lunch time conversation among few engineers. Why can’t we have a sort of internal currency in the company and let teams use it as their “budget” to get things done? Infra team’s budget is broken up by the “user teams’ budgets + markup. Think your team needs a rlasticsearch cluster of your own versus the “managed” one by the infra team’s? Spend your budget accordingly. Want an increased budget? Get your director to pay from his currency budget.. all the way to the top..
That is already how many big corps work, still it doesn't avoid the move to cloud or offshoring.
Honestly, I think you're boiling the ocean there.
Internal hosting teams ( cloud or on-prem ) should work more like public hosting environments and should focus on:
- Segregating workloads. If amazon can host a hacked service on their hosting stack without every tenant immediately being compromised, you can too.
- Self-Service. Teams should be able to just get accounts and do stuff without asking anyone.
- Building assurance. Now you've made it easy for teams to do small things, you're more likely to get more users and have less shadow-IT. You can now try and build organizational assurance without making teams suffer.
A team just needs petty cash and a cost code for a small amount of space in dev land.
What everyone does instead if ask for the planning to be done and completed upfront, which isn't realistic for a team you just stood up trying to do UR and a POC.
Yea layer some more bureaucracy on there… i’m sure adding another sticking point will make it better
Reality of AWS or Azure in Europe : - Can't provision new ressources without calling them - If you get defects, you might be with Azure Europe Head after weeks of escalation and the only thing he wants to hear is if Microsoft can do a success story with you - Gaslighting you on issues
I agree with you, we went from terrible service, to terrible service with no leverage.
You also get internal cloud teams that "own cloud" taking away your ability to get accounts without going through the same all broken processes.
I’ve had this problem with azure in the US or the EU, but I’ve never really had this problem with AWS in Europe.
And now if you try to get a bug fixed or a new feature in GMail, it simply can't be done at all. Problem solved!
> Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place?
The same reason that so many companies went to "the cloud", because the hyperscalers warpped the C-suite round their little finger.
There are two things any C-suite like doing that the hyperscalers could help them tick boxes on.
First, shifting capex to opex. They love doing that because of the accounting treatment. Opex goes into your P&L, so it reduces your taxable profit and therefore it reduces your tax bill. Meanwhile capex goes onto the balance sheet and is deprecated over the asset's life, so the "only" benefit you might get is to claim allowances (e.g. R&D) from your tax authority.
Second, it allows lots of things to be made "someone else's problem". Security ? Their problem. Staff ? Their problem. Tick-boxes to keep the compliance department happy ? Their problem.
So the hyperscalers can turn up and spin a ready-made story that the C-suite will lap up. Perhaps accompanied by a nice lunch and a round of golf. ;)
There is no doubt, companies such as Airbus have the technical competence and the financial means to do it all in-house. Sadly the C-suite calls the shots ....
> Is Airbus still using Google workspaces for mail? Nice vector for industrial espionage.
Whatever email provider they use, people will always be the ultimate vector, clicking links they shouldn't.
Why phish when your victim store their entire company on your drives.
... is this a reverse Dropbox comment? Everyone up to COVID was treating companies not moving some infra to AWS like how hardware companies would be treated without a mockup humanoid to show around.
I don't fully understand why companies use AWS. Is it a management driven or engineering driven decision? I assume management - in big companies some exec from Amazon comes to play golf, and in small companies the managers copy what the big companies are doing?
AWS were first and dominated.
Microsoft moved late with Azure, but as they had so many customers in B2B already with SQL Server and Office, that they soon grew market share. Google Cloud followed and acquired companies like Firebase to differentiate.
https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-...Anyone who’s actually used Azure knows it’s an unmitigated disaster for uptime. The problem is that this has been consistently true for like a decade now. This indicates real core architectural deficiencies they’ve been unable to address.
Management react differently when it's a 3rd party issue:
Except you still have those kinds of errors. What you’re trying to do is outsource maintenance of a system you have less expertise in for cost reasons. There is some transfer of liability that less technical management will buy but anyone serious will then ask “why is Microsoft azure having so many issues when other clouds don’t”
It's fine for things with poor uptime to exist. The problem is that people use it anyway. I think this is a lot to do with corruption. Like when Microsoft bribed a German city to stay on Windows/Office.
IME quite a lot of poor tech decisions come down to techies being too dogmatic in their beliefs[1].
Move to AWS? All techies want to add that to their CV so sure why not... Who cares if it's the best decision as long as the CVs get improved.
============================
[1] My personal bugbear are techies who are adamant that nothing but google chrome can be used by the regardless of the fact that when pressed they can't find a single site that doesn't work on FF. Usually the goalposts are moved at some point in the discussion from "sites don't work on FF" to performance even though FF with uBlock origin cuts actual downloading of ads to zero compared to the uBlock lite on chrome. They'll next complain about memory used in FF compared to google regardless of the lack of any measurements and even though these same techies are using bloated electron apps daily anyway!
As you can tell, this really is a personal bugbear of mine.
Mostly because they’re the defacto SaaS providing that niche product for your niche usecase. The breadth of AWS in incredible.
Smaller annual opex is far easier to get approved then large multiyear capex with deprecation.
AWS was also cheaper in the beginning but has been slowly ratcheting up the pricing making colocation or on-premise viable again for some workloads which have steady compute demands.
What do you see as the alternative for the purposes of this discussion? Are we talking cloud vs. on-prem or colo, or are we talking AWS vs. other-cloud?
For the first (cloud vs. non-cloud) it's clear that cloud has some advantages because you don't have to manage hardware.
For the second (AWS vs. other-cloud), at least in my experience, AWS is simply the best experience available. If anything the other cloud providers go out of their way to offer special deals and cozy customer relationships to try to get customers to switch, but AWS is still the gold standard in availability and uptime and ease of use.
The gap is narrowing as the field becomes more commoditized though. And I think that's what we're really seeing here. As things like k8s get more common, solutions are becoming more and more substrate-independent, so companies hunt for smaller, more local, cheaper, ambitious alternatives. Everyone is scared of vendor lock-in so it's getting harder for cloud providers to offer distinguishing features.
> Are we talking cloud vs. on-prem or colo, or are we talking AWS vs. other-cloud?
We all just forgot you can rent a server huh
They get you hooked on a teaser tariff. Like $100k worth of AWS, Azure, GCP credits. Like a good drug dealer, the first hit is free. Once you've convinced yourself that moving to AWS is the right move, based on the teaser rate, they've got you in their jaws. Most of your IT team is gone, most of your on-prem/colo hardware is outdated, and for tax reasons it's better to lease than to purchase capital intensive equipment. But now the low AWS rate is gone, you can't go back, and you'd look like a fool for calling your decision a mistake.
I really like AWS. But I feel like there is a lot of money to be made in consultants overselling services built on it. And a lot of traditionally expensive IT teams are being replaced with even more expensive cloud "architects".
For very small companies (startups) AWS makes a lot of sense because you have very few employees and you don’t want that limited employee time being spent managing servers
I can try to answer for US.
We're small (< 25 people). We maintained a single rack in a colo, and all the servers were showing their age. We weighed lease cost for replacement (along with hassle of actually doing it), and migrated into AWS last January.
It's been ... messy. I'm not certain we'll stay. It's easier in the sense that we can bring up arbitrarily many new machines without needing to call Dell when a host gets full, but it's definitely not cheaper. And weirdball AWS-only things get in the way. Oh, and literally nothing is simple or easy in administration or setup.
If I had it to do over again, I think I'd have bitten the bullet and leased more boxes instead.
It's not just AWS vs selfhost, it's AWS vs DO/Hetzner/Rackspace/random-VPS-provider
It ain't cheaper on AWS lesson getting relearned everywhere.
Allows you to move stuff from capex to opex while remaining in compliance and governance lines.
They’re not idiots. A lot of thought went into it, and the idea it’s all just incompetent BS dreamt up on a golf course is madness.
To be fair most compliance and governance stuff is dreamt up on a golf cause to cause lock-in
sure, but that doesn't mean we get to ignore it.
Also incredible horizontal scale.
and vertical scale
and fuck fuck fuck load of features.
Not enough humans to deal with physical machines and the compliance issues around them.
I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter. Good luck passing due diligence as a bank's vendor when you are also physically responsible for the machines. You can do this, but it sucks and it's your entire job + overtime + on call.
AWS has a dedicated feature (artifact) that can serve as the foundation of your compliance package. If you are racking your own machines you get to start with a blank pile of forms.
> I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter.
I think it's the other way around. At the extreme scales you don't want AWS.
If you're running a cat meme distribution business, a single senior skilled techie will cheaply get you set up on a VPS (or a bunch of them) with the services you need.
If you're a bank, you have all the budget in-house to babysit your own VPS and stand up your own equivalents to whatever the fuck it is you were using on AWS, and follow all regulations. Because, face it, as a bank, the type of regulations you meet by using AWS is a tiny fraction of all the regulations you have to follow, so there is literally a team within the bank tasked purely with making sure all banking regulations are followed, and that team exists even if you're on AWS for everything.
The only place AWS makes sense is if you're a company with no technical department in the first place.
But AWS is a VPS company. Who's managing those VPSes?
> But AWS is a VPS company. Who's managing those VPSes?
The same people who were logging into AWS and managing stuff there.
Sure, of you are a one-man shop trying to sell IT services in a regulated category to banks, hosting is not something you want to add to your list of problems.
This is not comparable to the situation in a company like Airbus, with perhaps 10k people of every imaginable expertise employed in just the IT department. Not comparable to most companies that are 1/50th of Airbus size either.
For a largish company (1000+ people, 500M+ turnover), assigning ten FTE:s to managing the racks and general core infra on a 365/24 basis and another five lawyers and general bureaucrats to deal with the general paperwork is nothing.
The reason for the big cloud shift in the 2010s was other things. A lot of hype/lies about how fast, cheap and easy things would be. And in many companies probably also a feeling that internal IT were a bunch of morons who failed at anything you asked them to do, and that anything else must be better.
Genuine question: is using AWS for compliance any better or worse than using Delve for compliance?
Because AWS technical expertise are second to none. And for most companies their AWS spend is small % of overheads. Sure they could spend less but their marketing department is lighting money on fire so that would be premature optimization.
They provide a service that simply nobody (except GCP and Azure) can easily match.
It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.
It’s easier in most companies to get a cloud bill approved than to ask for a big chunk of cash for hardware and also to pay someone to set it up
Also, not having to deal with the kind of assholes that are capable of both setting up and maintaining your physical infrastructure and are willing to travel on a moments notice to put out fires. Worth the price of AWS just to not have that dysfunctional lot to deal with.
This link is an opinion piece. For a better technical and legal background this link from the same The Register is much better:
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/16/airbus-...
Thank you. That’s already better than the original article that comes off as an unhinged rant with name calling.
Jane Street recently posted a video of their datacenter warehouse in USA on YouTube
Most of this large building was empty... they said that as compute had become dense along with advancements in liquid cooling, the same amount of power x years ago now only required few racks.
No need for many companies to go on cloud, at a minimum should be hybrid on prem.
I think a lot of commenters here are missing the ball with the idea that this is a foreign policy or anti-US sentiment emerging.
The core reality is that cloud infrastructure is becoming commoditized, and substrate-independence is becoming not only possible but the default. So companies looking for things like lower cost or better customer support are looking around and seeing that smaller rising competitors are going to be a better option. Compliance with local regulatory regimes are going to be a factor as the EU continues its efforts to push European companies towards using EU infrastructure.
A study in contrasts,
I signed up my business with Hetzner. And the first thing I saw during onboarding was a demand to upload my ID to spend $5 to test their service (I was testing before we bought). I wrote to customer service and got,
Digital Ocean? They just let me do it.Guess where I'm going to recommend spending our money?
If your entire business decision is driven solely by an emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID, maybe you’re not the right person to be making these sort of decisions?
> emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID
It seems to me more like smart business tact, figuring out early on whether your infrastructure provider will be easy to work with or a bureaucratic pain in the ass
Not from a single data point. You have no way of knowing whether this is, on the one hand, a single reasonable request or, on the other, the start of a pattern of bureaucratic pain.
Can you name one B2B contract you have that didn't require any identification of you or your business?
Hetzner if you have sense.
I haven't found a competent supplier who doesn't want to know who you are.
I entirely exclude Digital Ocean from competent suppliers.
What's wrong with DO? Been happily using them for over a decade.
Sudden account closure. Bad neighbours. IP blocks on DO ranges all over the place randomly. Egress email is painful.
AWS, GCP, Azure don’t care either.
AWS does care. You have to sign up with a credit card and verify a phone number. And if you want to spend serious money you have to actually provide business documentation.
Yes but not for initial $5
Sure. That’s why they call you to verify that you open a new account. That’s why they ask me for company information. Because they don’t care…
They verify a phone number, but you can use the same number on as many accounts as you want, and it's just a verification code.
Yeah, for which I had to identify myself with an ID with a picture and an address on it!
>I haven't found a competent supplier who doesn't want to know who you are.
Thank you! Say this louder for all the people saying VPN providers shouldn't have your government issued ID on file to use them.
As you point out, Mullvad VPN and the like are NOT competent suppliers and should NOT be trusted, as you correctly point out.
I know this is facetious, but Mullvad funded fascism. So you're right anyway.
Just because a company wants to know who you are doesn’t mean they are entitled to a scan of a sensitive government document that can be used to commit identity theft.
I’m amazed that it is even legal for businesses to ask for that at all, outside of a few exceptional cases of which “I want to rent a server” most certainly isn’t one.
> I’m amazed that it is even legal for businesses to ask for that at all, outside of a few exceptional cases of which “I want to rent a server” most certainly isn’t one.
How about the case of “I want to rent a server to distribute illicit and or dangerous materials and then it’s your problem”?
And are we going to use "because terrorism" card on HN?
Yeah, I think that’s the one case where it’s actually appropriate to use that card.
Like it or not, banks are legally mandated to do KYC, and this is essentially the same, except for information or communication being “moved” instead of money.
It's a foreign concept to Americans but in Europe everyone is supposed to be able to be held accountable. That means a lot more things are KYC. You need ID to get a SIM card or a drone.
Why can't they say "we got payments from this and this payment card" and then they can follow up with the bank?
They ask me for it when I need a sim card. What is the difference.
None, and I think it's actually the very same law, all internet connections must be KYCed.
It's rather an indicator of a system that is so broken that a digital copy of a single form of ID document is sufficient to impersonate someone well enough to do financial damage.
Low friction is cool but it leads to tons of abuse
This reads like an ad for Hetzner. Thanks, antispam experience!
When was this? I signed up recently and don't remember this requirement.
In a hostile jurisdiction, I suppose based on your argument.
The German providers have always been more aggressive on KYC & simply saying no to potential clients in some cases.
What works best for you I guess.
To be fair: all hosting providers deal with A LOT of abuse happening on their systems. Malware being hosted, people abusing trial periods ands free plans etc.
No sure if requiring a ID upfront is the perfect solution (if i recall, i never had to provide a ID on my private or business Hetzner accounts) but it isn't just there to annoy you.
Welcome to Europe, the land of sustainable business. We do not need to grow just to pollute our planet and die a painful death, individually and as a species.
If you still think your Hetzner registration process is convoluted, try getting a license for IDA Pro.
You'll love the experience, I promise.
!/s
Yeah I've noticed that while America takes the approach of trying to keep your personal information secret, Europe takes the approach of requiring it to be shared around, but also protecting it with harsh laws for misuse. Things that are anonymous sign-up in America are KYC in Europe.
DigitalOcean simply does this at a later stage and will then just cut you off, Hetzner is doing it from the start. Their obligations aren't so different, they just approach this differently. It's the same thing with Stripe, it's cool that they just let you sign up and process transactions but at some point they will look at your business and if they don't like it they will just cut you off.
Also Hetzner really doesn't care much about individuals as far as I know, they mostly do business with other businesses and that's where the money is, their business is not designed to handle millions of individual users, DigitalOcean might also simply have a different strategy there.
Hetzner is totally fine with individuals, they're probably sad to get less money but they don't care. Remember that in Germany a GmbH company costs $25,000, and if you're not a GmbH you're (in most cases) an individual sole trader.
They're also a bit picky with who they allow to sign up and they discriminate by country of origin. I had no problem being from a first world country with a passport, but I've heard the horror stories. If you're from Asia or Africa you may have an issue - if you have a registered business (even a sole tradership) in Europe, that would probably help convince them.
Count on German companies to make things more complicated than they need and to squander clients for minor nitpicks
Name one B2B relationship you have where you didn't provide ID of you or your business.
Not at an initial sign up and minor spend
Companies usually know how to handle customers
(Yes some do want to verify the customer for every single purchase - but I usually skip those)
Vendor lock-in has always been a concern, but AI workloads make the conversation even more important. Designing portable architectures from day one is becoming a competitive advantage.
Think getting away from vendor lock-in was one of the primary reason Kubernetes took off
So after the 2008 spying scandal (cia got caught using German intelligence bases to steal airbus designs), Airbus ran it's critical applications ... on AWS?
Wow.
Is it the first for similarly high—profile companies?
Public administration in Europe has already started moving away from the american hyperscalers. This is of course happening at the usual speed which is characteristic of all public administration.
More related to the EU's movement away from foreign-hosted infrastructure.
Does this include their Skywise Platform?
Following the article that generated this column [0] says:
> Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS.
--
Interesting, thank you!
Skywise is basically a re-branded Palantir Foundry, and Palantir’s not exactly a big believer in avoiding US tech…
I know, but afaik you can deploy Foundry also on Prem using Apollo, so that should not be a show stopper.
edit: who am I telling this ;)
>Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.
[x] doubt
There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.
It’s the queue of users who want to be hand held because they can’t do X, or open Y, that IT doesn’t want to deal with.
Also, there’s no budget for training any more.
Do you even comprehend the timescales at which these companies operate.
Do we have proven (or probable) case of USA industrial espionage ?
Well, yes, since long before the current administration. It's mentioned multiple times (with examples) in the European Parliament's "The Echelon Affair" report.[0] But it seems to me that this is not really what you're asking, but rather you're implying that there's no justification for this move other than European protectionism. If this is the case, I would argue that a sitting administration actively threatening with the invasion of your territories is a compelling argument for politicians and business leaders to evaluate alternatives.
[0] https://historicalarchives.europarl.europa.eu/files/live/sit...
You don’t need an espionage case to decide a provider is too much risk.
The political unreliability alone is enough. Just takes one orange guy waking up in a foul mood one day and doing something erratic. That increases risk for using anything American across the board even if the individual companies have done nothing wrong
Case in point: the Claude Fable debacle. It's not a big stretch to imagine that one day, they might decide any AI platform developed by an American company is too dangerous to let those shady foreigners access it. Not to mention the potential implications of your internal code being sent to AI datacenters in the US...
We have a proven case of USA pulling the plug. Not sure which is worse.
Do we? From a EU-hosted location? Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.
I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.
> I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.
Even more mundane reason would be the USA threatening war.
Recently the US gov't had Microsoft shut down an ICC judge's work email account. The threat is very real of more serious shenanigans (though I personally think the risk of backdoors introduced to any other software they use is just as real - Europe is just too much of a patchwork of jurisdictions to get this right).
> Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.
If the US decided to sanction Airbus, decent odds that the EU would make it illegal for EU businesses to comply with those US sanctions.
Similar to how the US has made it illegal for US firms to comply with Arab League sanctions against Israel
Before you come and say something like Trump threatening to invade Greenland and annex Canada is just bluster/ these are democracies that answer to their people, and their people are mad about that, which is going to direct policy. The sentiment in those countries about the US is on par with those on Russia and China, if you think that is not to the US detriment I’m not sure what to say.
If we continue using US hyperscalers then we deserve to have our industries turned off when Trump decides to grab Greenland. Being stupid should get punished.
From the NY Times, 1995:
> Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes
At the time "only" to have the upper hand in trade negotiations, and presumably when "having the President press foreign countries to award business to American firms", as they call it. But that was 30 years ago, and trust that these these things aren't directly forwarded to US private industry is in short supply these days
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/15/world/emerging-role-for-t...
https://archive.is/LmEA1 (same site without paywall)
If any company, especially one with a global presence, ever even strongly suspected that had happened and a competitor was using something they developed you'd of seen it play out in the courtroom. Hopefully we can all agree that if America is good at anything, it's letting its lawyers be litigious.
The fact that, AFAIK, that's never happened nor been alleged says a lot.
It doesn’t have to be espionage, it can be just operational risk. There is the case of Trump ordering sanctions against the International Criminal Court, and Microsoft blocking their accounts to comply (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14203). Or more recently, Trump deciding who gets access to Anthropic’s latest models. You can’t build a business on a vendor who may be forced to block you at any moment.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB95326824311657269 (https://archive.is/N46di)
Why We Spy on Our Allies
March 17, 2000 11:56 am ET
By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former director of central intelligence.
We'll begin with some candor from the American side. Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it's true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?
tl;dr: "You bribe, so we spy"
Yes, but the US bribes too. In fact, I'd say that corruption is more common in the US than in much of Europe. The article's claim that the US worships Adam Smith is only nominally true; in practice, they love nothing more than monopolisation and market domination.
> Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?
Any advantage that they can exploit. It's no great secret that the US government often acts on behalf of its major corporations and vice versa.
I haven't read the op-ed, but I wonder if it talks about the French Leclerc case?
TIL that when Greece tested four tanks in 2000 before a big arms purchase, the US M1A1 Abrams and British Challenger 2E tanks had trouble with their satellite navigation systems. A French intelligence agency used GPS jammers to help the French Leclerc tank in the competition. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6bhr14/til_th...>
I think this was about two separate events in 1994:
Among the allegations: that the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus Industrie for a $ 6 billion contract; and that Raytheon received information that helped it win a $ 1.3 billion contract to provide radar to Brazil, edging out the French company Thomson-CSF. These claims follow previous allegations that the NSA supplied U.S. automakers with information that helped improve their competitiveness with the Japanese (see "Company Spies," May/June 1994).
https://irp.fas.org/program/process/991101-echelon-mj.htm