> For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty.

It’s something that crops up fairly often and I think most of the time from people who are profoundly misguided or just cannot understand that other people might see things differently. Germany is never going to annex parts of France while the EU is a thing. It’s on purpose. The whole construct is full of feedback mechanisms that make it physically impossible.

So yes, for a French company using Hetzner is a bit more risky than OVH, but not that much, and either of those are much better than Azure or AWS.

The big countries all have projects for national infrastructure for things like defense and taxes. In these cases everything needs to be directly controlled by the state and it makes sense to use a local company. Most of the time that would be companies you’ve never heard of.

For random users in the EU, it does not matter because all big service providers will be following the same regulations.

What this means to most people is really independence from the US, whatever the wording. Could you expand on this "manufacturing of consent" part? Who's doing the manufacturing here and at the bidding of whom?

And for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You work best when you trust your friends. You balance self reliance, according to your best judgment.

It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.

The same chomsky who claimed that Epstein is a "highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation"?