European alternatives

15 Comments

1. April 1, 2025 at 3:30 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   https://euro-stackletter.eu/

   EuroStack

   A European Industrial Policy initiative bringing together tech, governance and funding for Europe-focused investment to build and adopt a suite of digital infrastructures: from connectivity to cloud computing, AI and digital platforms.

   Reply
2. April 4, 2025 at 12:21 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Foreign Affairs:
   Big Tech risks losing access to Europe by embracing Trump, pushing Europe to build its own companies and platforms and letting Chinese companies expand access

   The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War
   How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost
   https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/brewing-transatlantic-tech-war

   arlos Barria / Reuters

   HENRY FARRELL is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

   ABRAHAM NEWMAN is John Powers Chair in International Business Diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

   They are the authors of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

   More by Henry Farrell
   More by Abraham Newman

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   Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By getting close to U.S. President Donald Trump, they risk losing access to one of their biggest markets: Europe.

   Just a decade ago, these companies believed that information technology would limit the power of governments and liberalize the world. But then, as globalization withered and the U.S. confrontation with China took hold, they tried to take advantage of growing geopolitical divides, enlisting on Washington’s side in the new technological cold war. Now, the new Trump administration appears less enthusiastic about fighting China than it is about subjugating U.S. allies in the European Union and elsewhere. U.S. tech companies extract billions of dollars in profits from European markets. Although many of these tech companies would love to take the EU regulatory state down a peg, they don’t want to get caught in the crossfire of an all-out EU-U.S. tech war.

   Unfortunately for Big Tech, such a war may be about to erupt. The Trump administration’s evident contempt for Europe may not only endanger the business interests of European companies. It could also spell the end of today’s open Internet, as Europeans look to build alternative platforms to those of the giant U.S. tech firms.

   As tech executives have embraced the new U.S. government, they have increasingly embroiled themselves in the brewing conflict between European regulators in Brussels and an executive in Washington acting with striking unilateralism. As a result, Europeans are starting to take a second look at their reliance on U.S. cloud, platform, and satellite providers. They increasingly see such dependence not just as a competitiveness issue but also as a critical strategic vulnerability that could be exploited against them. Most worrying for U.S. tech companies is that even if European politicians are reluctant to act, European judges, regulators, and activists may act in their stead and push to sever data flows between the United States and Europe.

   This is not the first time that a rift has opened between the United States and Europe on technology. A decade ago, the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the United States had been spying on European leaders, revelations that provoked EU threats to limit flows of personal data to the United States. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, explained in a 2019 book that the uproar around Snowden’s disclosures had created a lasting “chasm between governments and the tech sector.” When the European Court of Justice ruled in 2015 against an arrangement that allowed data on EU citizens to be sent to the United States, Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Alphabet, lamented that the EU might break the global Internet, “one of the greatest achievements of humanity.”

   The global Internet will likely continue to exist in the form of shared technical infrastructure. But if U.S. companies persist in identifying with a U.S. administration that is hostile to Europe, it is likely that Europe will want its own companies and platforms to build technological fortifications against its former ally and protector. Chinese firms will try to expand in Europe, too, although they may also face greater public skepticism. Either way, the end result will be lower profits, weakened American innovation, and a more isolated and insecure United States.

   JELLO ON THE WALL

   Not too long ago, things weren’t so complicated. Silicon Valley’s business model seemed to go hand in hand with Washington’s geopolitical consensus. The U.S. government and U.S. tech companies agreed that the future lay in building a world that was safe for liberal politics and economics. The spread of the Internet and social media would inexorably undermine the power of autocratic governments. President Bill Clinton famously told China in 2000 that trying to control the Internet was like trying to nail Jello to the wall, and President George W. Bush funded the creation and spread of “liberation technology” that might nibble away at the foundations of dictatorship.

   U.S. tech firms could lose access to the European market.

   U.S. tech seemed well positioned for Trump’s return to power this year, even before the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk became Trump’s universal plenipotentiary. Before last year’s election, influential figures such as Zuckerberg and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos began cozying up to the new regime; Zuckerberg courted Trump in private phone calls and, over the summer of 2024, removed restrictions that had been placed on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, while Bezos scrapped a planned endorsement by The Washington Post—the paper he owns—of Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris. After Trump won, both Zuckerberg and Bezos made pilgrimages to visit the president-elect at his residence, Mar-a-Lago. Trump clearly relished their obeisance, commenting in December that “everyone wanted to be my friend.” For their part, many tech leaders were hopeful that Trump’s victory would be a boon for them; Trump seemed hawkish on China and willing to deregulate tech.

   TRANSATLANTIC DECOUPLING?

   Big Tech’s leaders certainly didn’t want to make an enemy of Trump and had some reason to believe that he might help them. Tech CEOs and owners, including Bezos, Schmidt’s successor Sundar Pichai, and Zuckerberg were willing to be displayed at Trump’s second inauguration like so many hunting trophies mounted on the wall.

   Unfortunately, none of them are really getting what they hoped for. To be sure, Trump’s second administration dislikes both domestic regulations and EU rules.

   And the Trump administration has evinced naked hostility to the EU, as evidenced by the private contempt for Europe expressed by Vice President JD Vance in leaked Signal messages. Rather than renegotiating the United States’ technology relationship with Europe on better terms, Trump’s demands that Europe back off from regulating U.S. tech companies (and that Denmark hand over Greenland) may lead Europeans to ask a question that U.S. tech firms don’t want them to ask: Is Europe’s reliance on American tech not just a competitiveness problem but a critical national security vulnerability?

   Even during Trump’s first term, many Europeans found such questions unthinkable. The United States had supported Europe for decades. Although Europeans resented the dominance of American Big Tech, they had never seen an alternative or even necessarily wanted one.

   Now, everyone in Europe can see the risks of relying on U.S. tech. The most obvious example is Starlink, the satellite communications firm owned by Musk. When the United States wanted to put pressure on Ukraine regarding possible negotiations to end the war with Russia, the White House suggested that it would deny access to Starlink, which provided the Ukrainian military with critical battlefield resources. Other European countries, now fearing that the United States might sell them out for temporary advantage, took note. They, too, depend on Starlink and other software, hardware, and technology for their daily operations. Europeans are moving away from Starlink as quickly as they can, with the European Commission investigating how it can support domestic alternatives. European car buyers, meanwhile, are turning away from Musk’s Tesla. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, in the eyes of many Europeans, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure business cloud services, and Facebook, too, all risk becoming damaged brands.

   It’s not just that technology might be turned off but that it might be used against European interests. Musk’s intervention on the side of far-right groups in Germany and the United Kingdom, attacking mainstream parties, has many European capitals on edge. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has taken the argument a step further, warning that “tech billionaires want to overthrow democracy.”

   BREAK THE INTERNET

   There is an even greater threat to U.S. tech companies that has gotten far less attention. In sharp contrast to today’s United States, the European Union has a strong commitment to the rule of law, obliging politicians to comply with judge’s rulings. The Trump administration’s scofflaw tendencies and tech companies’ increasing hostility toward European values may lead to the collapse of the EU-U.S. arrangements on which tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft depend.

   Schmidt worried a decade ago that an EU-U.S. data dispute might collapse the Internet. Snowden showed how U.S. intelligence agencies had illicitly accessed European social media and Internet search data, breaching European privacy rules. That dispute was patched over by an ungainly agreement, negotiated between the European Commission and the U.S. government. The EU agreed to allow data flows, as long as the United States committed to protecting the privacy rights of EU citizens and offered some means of redress if they were violated by U.S. surveillance agencies.

   This arrangement made nobody happy but provided legal and political cover for flows of data across the Atlantic. Meta continued to operate Facebook in Europe, and companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were able to host Europeans’ personal data on their cloud-computing platforms. For those companies, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Google alone makes over $100 billion in sales in Europe.

   That arrangement is now on the verge of disintegrating, with the operations of U.S. tech companies in Europe in serious jeopardy. The Trump administration has not only fired most of the PCLOB’s members; it has also made clear in multiple ways that it will not comply with those legal rules that it finds inconvenient. The executive order is under review—but even if it formally stays on the books, no one trusts the Trump administration to abide by it.

   Everyone in Europe can see the risks of relying on U.S. tech.

   This time, there will be no plausible agreement between the two regimes. European judges and national privacy regulators will be extremely skeptical of promises from the Trump administration, and rightly so. European judges are not subject to the same political pressures as European politicians or European Commission officials. They see themselves as the guardians of national laws and a European constitutional order, which Trump and his officials want to undermine.

   Google and Microsoft currently control two-thirds of the European market for cloud computing. But European politicians, academics, think tanks, and entrepreneurs are already converging on the notion that Europe needs to build its own cloud resources to gain the strategic autonomy that it needs to wean itself from U.S. technology. A European court ruling against EU-U.S. data flows would dramatically accelerate these plans. So, too, could sweeping U.S. trade tariffs, which Europe might respond to by restricting U.S. technology services.

   If that happens, Big Tech will have no one to blame but itself. Its response to geopolitical changes has been to build a closer relationship with the U.S. government, anticipating that it could continue to thrive in a world of U.S.-Chinese rivalry. Tech leaders willingly embraced Trump after his reelection, when they could have kept their distance. Big Tech companies may be about to discover that not only are they never going to have access to the Chinese market but they are increasingly persona non grata in European markets, too.

   These fraying ties may mark the end of the dream of a global Internet, in which everyone shares the same services. Just as in China, European platforms may continue to use the Internet as the technological foundation for their services. But they will begin to construct their own alternative platforms on top, walled away from U.S. interference through Europe-only business models and strong encryption. This will not just lower U.S. profits; it will further damage the transatlantic security relationship. Schmidt’s prophecy may come true a decade later than he expected, and U.S. tech companies will have been complicit in bringing it to fruition.

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3. April 4, 2025 at 12:23 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Euractiv:
   France says the EU’s second response to President Trump’s tariffs will cover digital services, like those provided by Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft

   https://www.euractiv.com/section/tech/news/france-singles-out-digital-services-for-eus-tariff-response/

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4. April 5, 2025 at 3:23 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Kommentti: Trump pakottaa sijoittajan puntaroimaan poliittista riskiä tavalla, joka olisi puoli vuotta sitten tuntunut pöhköltä
   https://www.is.fi/taloussanomat/art-2000011147072.html

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5. April 9, 2025 at 10:48 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Mauro Orru / Wall Street Journal:
   The EU unveils its AI Continent Action Plan, seeking to compete with the US and China, and says it wants to build “AI gigafactories” with ~100K AI chips

   EU Bets on Gigafactories to Catch Up With U.S., China in AI Race
   The bloc has been lagging behind since OpenAI’s 2022 release of ChatGPT
   https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/eu-bets-on-gigafactories-to-catch-up-with-u-s-china-in-ai-race-283683b8?st=MFLtzZ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

   The European Union said it would focus on building artificial-intelligence data and computing infrastructure and making it easier for companies to comply with regulation in a bid to catch up with the U.S. and China in the AI race.

   The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said it wanted to develop a network of so-called AI gigafactories to help companies train the most complex models. Those facilities will be equipped with roughly 100,000 of the latest AI chips, around four times more than the number installed in AI factories being set up right now.

   The announcement, part of the EU’s AI Continent Action Plan, underscores efforts from the block to position itself as a key player in the AI race against the U.S. and China. The EU has been lagging behind since OpenAI’s 2022 release of ChatGPT ushered in a spending bonanza.

   Earlier this year, Washington announced Stargate, an AI joint venture that aims to build data centers in the U.S. for OpenAI. OpenAI, SoftBank Group, Oracle and MGX are the initial equity funders in Stargate, while Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia are technology partners. The companies are committing $100 billion initially, but plan to invest up to $500 billion over the next four years.

   Beijing, for its part, has also made strides in the technology. Chinese company DeepSeek developed AI models that it said nearly matched American rivals despite using inferior chips, raising questions about the need to spend huge sums on advanced gear provided by Nvidia and other tech giants.

   “The global race for AI is far from over,” said Henna Virkkunen, EU executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. “This action plan outlines key areas where efforts need to intensify to make Europe a leading AI continent.”

   The EU in February pledged to mobilize 200 billion euros ($219.17 billion) in AI investments. More than 20 investors earmarked 150 billion euros for AI-related opportunities in Europe over the next five years, while the bloc is setting up a new 20 billion-euro fund for up to five AI gigafactories.

   The EU plans to work with the private sector to roll out the infrastructure given the elevated costs, a senior EU official said, with member states and companies sharing the burden in a public-private partnership. The bloc posted a call for expressions of interest to attract investors.

   EU officials also said the commission would set up an AI Act Service Desk, a point of contact to make it easier for companies to comply with the AI regulation in the bloc.

   EU lawmakers last year approved the world’s most comprehensive legislation yet on artificial intelligence.

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6. April 10, 2025 at 9:03 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Parmy Olson / Bloomberg:
   Trump’s global tariffs are an opportunity for EU to bolster its tech sector via strategic investments, streamlining regulations, and deepening its single market

   This Is Europe’s Shot to Emerge From Silicon Valley’s Shadow
   https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-04-10/tariffs-might-be-europe-s-big-tech-moment

   If AI growth suffers from tariffs on aluminum, steel, and copper, US tech may finally have some competition.

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7. April 10, 2025 at 9:03 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Samantha Subin / CNBC:
   The Nasdaq jumped 12% after Trump paused tariffs for 90 days, with Nvidia up 19%, Apple up 15%, Meta up 15%, Amazon up 12%, Microsoft up 10%, Alphabet up 10% — The Nasdaq Composite climbed more than 12% for its second best day ever as markets clawed back after a rocky few trading sessions spurred …

   https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/09/apple-bounces-3percent-after-worst-losing-streak-since-2000-tech-stocks.html

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8. April 10, 2025 at 9:08 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Sean Hollister / The Verge:
   Framework opens Laptop 12 preorders in the UK, Europe, and Canada starting at €569, £499, and CA$719; US preorders are delayed due to Trump’s tariffs — More than we were hoping to pay, but less than previous machines. … Earlier this year, modular computer company Framework began …

   Framework’s entry-level modular Laptop 12 starts at $549
   More than we were hoping to pay, but less than previous machines.
   https://www.theverge.com/news/646031/framework-laptop-12-price-preorder-uk-eu-ca

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9. April 11, 2025 at 9:40 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Von der Leyen: EU voisi verottaa teknologiajättejä, jos tullineuvottelut Yhdysvaltojen kanssa epäonnistuvat
   EU-komission puheenjohtajan mukaan esimerkiksi digipalveluiden mainostuloista voisi periä maksua.
   https://yle.fi/a/74-20155343

   EU-komission puheenjohtaja Ursula von der Leyen sanoo, että EU voisi verottaa yhdysvaltalaisia teknologiajättejä, jos tullineuvottelut Yhdysvaltojen kanssa epäonnistuvat.

   Von der Leyen kommentoi asiaa Financial Times -lehden torstaina julkaistussa haastattelussa. Puheenjohtajan kommentit mahdollisista vastatoimista ovat voimakkaimmat, mitä tähän mennessä on kuultu.

   – On olemassa monenlaisia vastatoimia. Yksi esimerkki on, että digitaalisten palveluiden mainostuloista voitaisiin periä maksua, von der Leyen sanoi haastattelussa.

   https://www.ft.com/content/fba18bd9-46f9-4736-89f3-976afe3abf7a

   Reply
10. April 18, 2025 at 1:13 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    PaaS + IaaS
    49 comment bubble on white
    Europe’s cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers
    ‘It’s amazing how fast the change has been’
    https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/17/us_hyperscaler_alternatives/

    Are customers on the European side of the pond considering a move from US hyperscalers in the wake of recent events? Some of the region’s vendors are reporting an uptick in inquiries as organizations mull their options.

    After a year of navel-gazing over AI, the topic dominating conversations at April’s KubeCon EU event was what to do about events unfolding in the US. Even before the recent flip-flopping over tariffs, users were already questioning whether including US-based hyperscalers in their supply chain was necessarily a good thing.

    “It’s amazing how fast the change has been,” Mark Boost, CEO of CIVO, a UK cloud provider, told El Reg at the KubeCon EU event. Boost has long banged the drum for digital and data sovereignty, and is a vocal critic of hyperscalers’ sharper practices, but says he was still taken aback by the surge in interest in cloud alternatives.

    Other vendors like Nextcloud have also reported a spike in customer inquiries. CEO Frank Karlitschek attributed this not just to the Trump effect but to the actions of the US administration overall.

    “There are three factors,” he told The Register. “The first is really the unreliability, because we see what Trump is doing and the danger is that things will be just switched off from one day to another for negotiation purposes. Then we see the whole question around pricing with the tariffs.

    Reply
11. April 18, 2025 at 5:33 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Can the US turn off European weapons? Experts weigh in on ‘kill switch’ fears
    https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/03/13/can-the-us-turn-off-european-weapons-experts-weigh-in-on-kill-switch-fears

    German officials are sounding the alarm over what they say is a “kill switch” embedded in the US-made F-35 fighter jet. Experts say it’s not that simple.

    Reply
12. April 19, 2025 at 6:12 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/18/splintering_cve_bug_tracking/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJwFy1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHq93uii-2PFT6a6P5laSKaVrByEND68dYgiGLmRfHtXlCQVXY-hmQAjNoDtr_aem_T6SOUX9OcL890yu32mciYA

    CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun
    MITRE, EUVD, GCVE … WTF?
    iconJessica Lyons
    Fri 18 Apr 2025 // 09:54 UTC
    Comment The splintering of the global system for identifying and tracking security bugs in technology products has begun.

    Earlier this week, the widely used Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program faced doom as the US government discontinued funding for MITRE, the non-profit that operates the program. Uncle Sam U-turned at the very last minute, and promised another 11 months of cash to keep the program going.

    Meanwhile, the EU is rolling its own.

    The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) developed and maintains this alternative, which is known as the EUVD, or the European Union Vulnerability Database. The EU mandated its creation under the Network and Information Security 2 Directive, and ENISA announced it last June.

    The EUVD is similar to the US government’s NVD, or National Vulnerability Database, in that it organizes disclosed bugs by their CVE-assigned unique ID, documents their impact, and links to advisories and patches.

    Interestingly, the Euro database also uses its own EUVD IDs to track security bugs as well as CVE-managed identifiers and GSD IDs, the latter of which are issued by the (what appears to be now-defunct) Global Security Database operated by the Cloud Security Alliance.
    Although the EUVD has been gestating for nearly a year, the uncertainty around the CVE program is set to push the European effort into the spotlight as a replacement, fallback, or alternative for CVE. ENISA is, we note, a partner of CVE; specifically, it’s a CVE numbering authority.

    The EUVD “will hopefully gain more traction so that Europe can achieve self-sustainability in this domain as well,”

    https://euvd.enisa.europa.eu/

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13. April 19, 2025 at 11:02 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    EU: These are scary times – let’s backdoor encryption!
    ProtectEU plan wants to have its cake and eat it too
    https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/eu_backdoor_encryption/

    Reply
14. April 21, 2025 at 2:58 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Europe’s cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers
    ‘It’s amazing how fast the change has been’
    https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/17/us_hyperscaler_alternatives/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJzNhhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHoV3j_TwBPblsE76MEwp-LJ1BOs5Lw24SVei7CaIR4YgKV5ZkZetIJkkg2wJ_aem_ggk_g5eajThTKhUG7SjMMA

    Reply
15. April 24, 2025 at 6:32 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Valkoinen talo jyrähtää EU:n sakkotällistä
    EU saattaa määrätä lisää sakkoja, jos digijätit eivät tottele sen määräyksiä.
    https://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/a/3101e3c4-cf2d-41e8-a3c7-c64c5d18ac1f

    Valkoinen talo jyrähtää Euroopan unionin jättisakoista.

    EU määräsi keskiviikkona suuria sakkoja amerikkalaisille digijäteille. Apple joutuu maksamaan 500 miljoonaa euroa, somejätti Meta taas 200 miljoonaa euroa.

    Sakot eivät välttämättä ole siinä. Jos amerikkalaisjätit eivät noudata EU-komission määräyksiä 60 päivän kuluessa, ne saavat lisää pulitettavaa.

    – Meidän velvollisuutemme on suojella Euroopan kansalaisten ja innovaatioyritysten oikeuksia, komission varapuheenjohtaja, teknologiakomissaari Henna Virkkunen sanoo lausunnossaan BBC:n mukaan.

    Valkoinen talo on kommentoinut EU:n päätöstä tulisesti.

    Apple and Meta attack ‘unfair’ €700m EU fines
    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm248vzg9jwo

    Reply