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.
Talk about clickbait … Article title: trump can pull the plug on the internet and europe can’t do anything about it (my emphasis) First line: the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world (not “pull the plug on the internet”) And then further down: “The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.”
So first, it’s “the internet”, then it’s “unplug europe from the digital world”, then it’s “europe’s dependency on US cloud providers”
So it’s NOT “the internet”, and it’s NOT “unplug europe”, it’s disconnect european customers from US cloud providers.
Methinks Monseiur Pollet doesn’t understand very much about the internet.
It’s like tubes. With trucks in them. It’s simple!
It’s even less of a thing. Things like AWS have datacenters in Europe, where most of Europe-side of traffic is hosted. Even if Trump made executive decisions to stop any internets companies doing business in Europe, it would have ZERO impact on the subsidy. Any cloud issues would really only impact “vertical scaling cloud-native” bullshit software, there are plenty and most reasonable companies are based on more sane (and less expensive) hosting solutions, which are in-house European.
Takes a massive fool to think European companies are basing their data in US continent, where the ping would be >150ms, and speeds would be far slower and less manageable.
It’s actually simpler than that: It’s not in regulatory compliance. Cloud providers need to host their data centers in different regions because of geopolitical instability, including the distinct possibility of this scenario, among other localized regulatory factors. These companies may be headquartered in America but they still are at the whim of many different governments.
Source: I have an AWS certification
But honestly, disconnection from the US cloud providers is a lot bigger than you seem to think. A ton of governmental services are hosted on US cloud providers. Pulling that plug would mean blackout for a crapload of governmental services, which we have grown to depend on.
It would also mean a huge hit on their own tech sector, if not near wipeout.
It’s one of those situations that, sure, they could, just like a monkey could purposely snap the branch where he and his friend are sitting on and both fall.
As for Europe, yes, it would be a painful transition, but eventually it could build its own infrastructure anyway
eh, in the Netherlands we would just cut off all their datacenters, maybe even the internet hub we have to the US.
so go ahead