alt Hacker NewsFor me (as an EU citizen), sovereignty is about being independent of companies operating under law that I have no control of (can't vote in the US) and is veeery unpredictible (Trump administration). I don't want to wake up one day I find out my bill tripped because of some tax imposed on EU or completely cut off, because the president woke up in bad mood that morning. EU is very fat from perfect, but for me it is still closer to home, and I truly root for any EU company that tries to take on the US behemoths. I moved everything from GCP and AWS to Hetzner, and am moving from Github to Codeberg.
Unfortunately, it's realty hard. The US giants have offerings that no one in EU has and I am investing huge amounts of time into working around them (e.g. Windows and MacOS CI runners on Github - try to get this for free in EU). I'm fine with paying a bit for this, but even then it's a huge hassle to set it up to be able to get CI checks for my projects on Windows/MacOS. And it's not cheap either. I can afford it, but it is still very expensive.
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I’m not sure why Europeans always bring Trump in here when it comes to this topic, except perhaps he, successfully it appears, woke many of them up from the slumber of dependency on global supply chains, of course, that Americans have been talking about for quite some time.
You can’t vote in American elections, true, but you also can’t vote for the Ayatollah or Saudi Prince who controls your oil supply, the Brazilian president where your rubber comes from, or a Chinese Communist Party official who manufactures your stuff, nor do you vote for elections in other EU countries and I’d argue your EU vote is but an abstract concept of a vote.
You’ve never had control (no country fully does), and so, are you only now waking up to that fact and have been goaded out of a once peaceful slumber? If so you should probably thank Donald Trump, sadly enough. But I’d stop focusing on him when the US is by far the least of Europe’s collective concerns.
> try to get this for free in EU
And therein lies the problem. As long as people are unwilling to pay for services, the winning services will always be the most predatory ones that make their money by selling their users to other companies.