> The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future.

This barely even seems like the relevant part. If Google was founded in Japan and Apple in Brazil, it would still be foolish to entrench them as a dependency. It would barely even be better to do it with a local company.

> They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?).

This feels like hopium. Network effects are powerful and as long as the internet is actually global, there are really only two options: 1) Centralized megacorps, and then the US ones have both the US apparatus behind them and the incumbency advantage, or 2) open protocols where no corporation of any nation is a gatekeeper.

So for Europeans to get the hooks of the US incumbents out of them, their best chance by far is the second one, and that one is also mostly to the advantage of the Americans who aren't the existing incumbents, which is why it works. Start making phones with open hardware and social networks with open protocols and you can get people outside of your own country to use them because they don't much like the incumbents either, and that's how you reclaim the network effect. Try to clone the US megacorps without the US apparatus to get them established in other countries and they don't because they're wary of foreign central control, which in turn means you don't get the network effect and you lose.

But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.

Relying on open protocols to make all the difference is much more potent hopium than what GP wrote.

Open protocols are kind of thing techies do when in cooperative mode, when industry isn't looking. But this is not this kind of problem - this is an economic, geopolitical problem. It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).

I'll grant it, the turmoil of such transitions is a perfect moment for pushing for open protocols, federated solutions, etc. - the industry is distracted, there's more space to sneak in some good solution before everyone notices, and EU has cultural and political tradition of pushing towards FLOSS (even if largely just as an alternative to Microsoft) and associated values/memetic complex. But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.

It's a blind spot for some software folks, because they forget that FLOSS is an exception here; everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.

It makes no sense to try and fight this here - but it does make sense to go along with the flow and improve things by pushing for more globally optimal solutions, especially that EU is known to be favorable to using openness in protocols and standards as a policy vehicle, both internally and externally.

thank you for the insightful answer

> But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.

100% i launched into a long trajectory from the comment i was originally answering to, and stopped short

i think-of? dream-of? try-to-build? what you just said

my "in the EU" claim is mostly around legislation (EU art 8 vs US CLOUDS act vs vs China approach to citizen's data)

the legislation is there, since GDPR it's a matter of tools

since corps built tools, they "forgot" to add the third button on cookie banners: "give me back my data" ... (and fourth: "delete it") but the legal framework is there, as well as most of the tooling (google takeout, and so on from all other major players)

it's not that pipelines for moving data from US corps to inidividual do not exists, it's more that, up to now, whenever i was talking about "data rights" to people, even in tech, i got yawns back

now we have a "perfect storm": distrust towards US (administration, collpasing onto US businesses) + global uncertainty towards AI (where lots of people just perceive something happening but lack any tool that gives them control over it)

this is what i perceive as a tectonic shift that can be used innovatively, by EU businesses, hopefully leveraging open

for completeness, i have indeed wrapped "EU" as the spearhead for this, given the incentives to build it, but yes, central authority over this should live inside of each citizen nation framework (see, Japan and South Korea, both providing legal frameworks for data protection)