| ▲ | flexie 3 hours ago |
| I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector. I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software. "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it. Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT. |
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| ▲ | gizzlon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found a lot of interest here in Norway so far.. |
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| ▲ | mfru an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave. Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira. (Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country) |
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| ▲ | trimethylpurine 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can guess it's the same in Europe. It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation. For example, Californians are fine using software from New York. Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far. This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to establish a thriving standard. |
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| ▲ | esafak 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers? |
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| ▲ | dijit 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They're largely not unless you are looking to appease your superiors. OVH, Telecity, Hezner, Bahnhof, Tele2 etc;etc;etc;etc;etc; are all valid suppliers without the need to buy from hyperscalers. I think what tends to work though is the idea that someone in redmond can't arbitrarily decide to shut you down as an individual or exert pressure. So it goes in order of importance: A) Can we buy the software and use it in perpetuity B) If we can't buy the software in perpetuity, do we at least control who has access to the software and our data C) If we can't control who has access to the data then can we at least ensure we always have access to it? D) If we can't ensure we have access to our own data then what are we even doing here? Depending on where you fall on this line (which is a decision each government must make) you'll have to claw back something because right now we're all on D. | |
| ▲ | foobarian 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Should we discuss DNS root servers at some point too? | | |
| ▲ | koalacongregate 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've had this thought too - of the 13 root servers, 10 are US or US-based companies. The only exceptions are Netnod (Sweden), RIPE NCC (Netherlands), WIDE Project (Japan). Even ICANN and Internet Systems Consortium are US-based non-profits... How do you even mitigate risk in this case? | | |
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| ▲ | delfinom 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The US passed the CLOUD Act which subject all those sovereign clouds run by US companies completely subject to US spying and hijack. Those offerings are garbage for anyone outside the US. | | |
| ▲ | beached_whale 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Countries hosting the data centres can make it illegal to allow access from outside their area/EU... or specifically to US entities along with making it illegal to move any data out without customer/local gov approval... This isn't rocket science. The company cannot do business if it doesn't follow the law. There are laws like this in places already. The company's local subsidiary tells the American company to politely pound sand and the American company says sorry, we tried, but do not have the capability to do as asked. | | |
| ▲ | edwinjm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | An American company will always follow US law, no matter the local laws. | | |
| ▲ | beached_whale an hour ago | parent [-] | | It isn't usually an American company doing the local operations, but a local subsidiary. Like Walmart Canada telling Walmart corporate to pound sand in the 1990's over Cuban pajamas. It's illegal for Canadian companies to participate in the US embargo of Cuba. This is all well within the realm of what governments can and do regulate. Want to do business in a country with their laws or not is the choice. | | |
| ▲ | bombcar an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | At some point it comes to a head; Walmart corporate and the USA didn't care enough about Cuban pajamas, but in a situation where they DO care, you quickly get Вкусно – и точка. The EU (nay, perhaps every country) should be prepared to deal with Microsoft or AWS completely cutting them off from access to all their systems - what would be the cost and impact? We are rapidly heading to not one Internet, but country-specific internets that may or may not bridge to other ones in some cases. | |
| ▲ | dijit an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Canadian companies can't use Cloud providers at all then? I'm incredulous about that. Google, AWS & Microsoft all nullroute the countries of Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Google also nullroutes Crimea. So by using a cloud provider, you are participating in the embargo of Cuba. | | |
| ▲ | beached_whale 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Not sure Canada has the leverage/market to get them to sway here. But a body like the EU has the leverage to force local operation and control. |
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| ▲ | j16sdiz an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | GDPR give exemption for foreign government for "national security", "important reasons of public interest" or "law enforcement", whatever that meant. |
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| ▲ | Razengan 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If not, who are your preferred providers? Can we have fully decentralized mesh networking yet? I love how some hyper-sci-fi settings have the concept of a "datasphere" (analogous to atmosphere): an actual physical cloud of ubiquitous nanorobots that provide connectivity, storage and computation. Wouldn't that also be ideal for AI too the way it's shaping up to be? Any device anywhere would just need to connect to a signal "neuron" of the global brain (possibly becoming a neuron itself) and it should theoretically be able to fetch anything. | | |
| ▲ | amarant 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | First we gotta migrate everybody to IPv6, then we can start talking. | |
| ▲ | esafak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Dealing with the patchwork of lesser-known infra providers in the EU is work enough. You want to live life on hard mode! | | |
| ▲ | bombcar an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | If everyone started doing it, it would get easier and easier. There's no inherent reason why the various AWS services shouldn't be completely replaceable with similar services from other vendors on a whim. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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