Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
It’d take some time to organise a replacement organisation but it’s not like those systems collapse when the central service goes down. We do have our own root servers and the internet can survive a month or two of not being able to register new tlds or assign subnets.
On the flipside, I wonder how US multinationals would fare without SAP.
My partner is a primary architect of AWS to build a replacement the size and scope that could replace US cloud computing isn’t reasonable unless they already have been developing this for years behind the scenes. The people who understand these systems at scale are few and far between
There’s no “behind the scenes” there are plenty of EU-based cloud providers. Including SAP though that’s not why I mentioned them.
I believe many EU nations are already divesting from US companies and products, both at governmental levels and citizen boycotts. I recently read one of the countries was switching their government’s computers to linux/foss