Our bodies interact with extremely large amounts of elements in the environment and behavior that act beyond our conscious comprehension.
Sometimes in our favour and some others against us.
Banning everything that at some point worked against us is just establishing human life full of total deprivation. Worse than living in jail. Good luck maintaining a society in those conditions.
The individual and the society should instead focus on educating and teaching how to navigate an environment full of those elements.
That would be fine, if countries like the USA weren't actively turning their backs on logic and facts, and returning to a period that history refers to as the "dark ages"
I would say there’s even less chance nowadays to generate a fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud offerings.
Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that we’re able to set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen.
That doesn’t mean that won’t be alternatives to American offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else (Singapore, China, Taiwan…)
> set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen
Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
"You can't do X" is a much different experience from "you can do X, but you need to spend a year and thousands of man-hours of paperwork applying for permission to do it".
In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something, businesses will be up and running in months. In France, if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing something, businesses still have to fight individual departments or local governments that have their own ideas about how they should regulate it.
I can't believe we're talking about China in the context of a Cloud sovereignty issue and this is even a question.
Having worked for these Cloud providers China has consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom. Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.
China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled creating a less desirable experience than the less-featured, stable domestic competitor.
Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and industrial assets and move on with business but that's not actually what either side actually wants.
China weaponizing bureaucracy towards foreign companies isn’t really relevant though.
AFAIK domestic companies operating in China don’t have to endure anywhere near the amount of red tape that EU companies typically do when operating in the EU.
I wonder is the GP is referring to the CLOUD Act, as it is true that US companies cannot be compliant with both the GDPR and the CLOUD Act, but it doesn't weaken the case for European tech sovereignty.
Sounds like a broad blanket statement, have any specifics about this?
GDPR and cybersecurity laws are designed to be compatible, not mutually exclusive, but I'm sure there are edge-cases. Still, what exact situation did you find yourself in here in order to believe they're mutually exclusive?
All US companies selling to European customers have to comply with GDPR. European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR. It’s all about who your users are. Not where your company is registered.
I think what OP means is that a US company cannot simultaneously comply with the CLOUD act and the GDPR. That case has also been made by some courts in the EU, that US law and practice are incompatible with the requirements of the GDPR. US companies who claim to process data in accordance with the GDPR seem to be deceiving their customers. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that companies in the EU who rely on US services, corporations in the US, and even governments themselves keep quit about this unpleasant truth. It means that Microsoft Windows violates the GDPR, Google violates it, every US social network violates it, etc.
Of course, as someone else mentioned, that is not an argument against EU sovereignty but rather one of its motors.
> European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR.
Usually they do. European company processing personal data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."
Of course if they do not process any personal data then it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within GDPR either).
> Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years.
None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.
Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report - EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy and overregulation.
I share your opinion. There's nothing worse than a State killing its own citizens, the ones the state had pledged to protect.
But actually, the largest mass killings in history have been always performed by States against their own citizens and not by enemy states:
- Great Chinese Famine (CCP): 20-30 million dead.
- Holocaust (NSP): 6 million
- Holodomor (USSR): 3-5 million
- Congo mass killings (Colonial Regime + Private parties): 1-5 million
- Cambodian genocide (Maoists): 2 million
- Armenian genocide (Young Turk / CUP)
...
The list continues, and remains mainly dominated by assassination's of the State against their own citizens. Majorly communist and totalitarian regimes.
This happened due to a change in regulation in Europe.
Some airports, like AMS or MUC, invested on new machines with higher detection capabilities, and decided to allow all liquids and improve efficiency in boarding. The EU updated the rules claiming those new machines were still not sufficient and airports should go back to forbidding liquids.
It was a mess. I remember flying from MUC and being allowed all liquids and on my return flight, also from EU, when trying to fly with a normal water bottle, security people looked at me wondering what the f I was doing: "Don't you know liquids are not allowed, sir!?"
That’s basically what SAE L3 and above levels of autonomy mean. The manufacturer takes full responsibility of the driving while the function is active.
I drove Mercedes and BMW L3 offering. Both had a really restricted ODD (Operational Design Domain) for it to be of much use outside high traffic situations on an Autobahn. It was restricted to good weather and speeds of around 60km/h. Basic all conditions under which their set of sensors and CPUs would work optimally.
But that was 2021 technology. L4 level of autonomy will be in the market during the next 4/5 years, no doubt. And that will be a game changer for anyone driving any significant amount of time. Sleeping, reading, watching a movie or just working on the laptop will be possible. And the manufacturer will take full responsibility of the driving while the functions are active.
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