Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

incompetent people, making decisions they should have made a decade ago, that will take more than a decade to implement, and will by then probably be just as outdated as this decision is now

Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means".

There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.

If China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with politics.

europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea.

European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds

I see this differently.

For European citizens and companies the safest option will always be to have their data in the USA or anywhere where European rulers cannot touch it.

The same for Americans, their data should be safest far away from their government.

If Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to look at thew big picture.

1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7 stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in.

2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap energy. Software is almost "the easy part".

3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the previous model.

4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).

Why now? Why shouldn't have the world reduced its reliance on US tech platforms and services 20 years ago. Or why shouldn't they wait 20 more years.

What did happen?

IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse.

Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner.

China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything.

One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons:

1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and

2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.

EU countries are just vassal states of the USA in practice, anyway. If Uncle Sam wants that data, he's getting it, either by asking politely or by taking it. And the EU countries can't and won't retaliate.

Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data. Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them? This article is more political than logical or technical, it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.