> Caffarra frames the challenge starkly: "Imagine if Americans woke up one morning to discover that 90 percent of their digital infrastructure was owned by Europeans. Would they regulate? Or would they march to the White House and demand action: 'Let's build'?"

We can't test if they would "demand action" given that the US solutions are already built, but I think we can see that they definitely do regulate whenever something starts competing heavily against US companies. See Huawei, TikTok, DJI.

People who call for fewer regulations systematically mean "fewer regulations for me, but regulations for the others when they compete against me". Not just in the US of course.

"We cannot allow Europe's biggest export to be regulation," is the phrase I think of after reading this article. I am hopeful that Europe will continue to cultivate an environment full of talent and capital that can produce formidable alternatives to the hyperscalers.

But, today, as the article notes, "European alternatives do exist...Yet for many organizations, distinguishing real alternatives from false promises has become increasingly difficult."

I may not agree with China's control of the internet, but it was never only about censorship. They now have an increasingly complete domestic ecosystem and they would 100% not have had that if Google, Microsoft, AWS and friends had set up camp and head-shotted nascent competitors as they peeked over the parapet.

Sadly it's even more likely to be corporate ad-filled, data-mining, AI-ridden, bloated junkware than the American stuff, with presumably lots of shovelling money at chosen companies rather than leaning into FOSS. On the other hand, it at least mostly looks like it's stealing your data, rather than a sober-looking American system that looks trustworthy but is still stealing the data.

Too bad most of these initiatives don't actually include funding the ongoing and continuing development of open alternatives in practice. All the hand waving about saving money notwithstanding, I want to see open solutions that actually work better than MS Office and Active Directory in practice, that can be managed by relatively mortal beings in govt orgs.

They're not wrong. But, people's tolerance for failure is low, and starting to match existing service levels will demand more cost (-one kind of failure) or risk (the bigger one) of data loss.

I very much hope this survives the first significant failure.

there is an advantage to not bieng the biggest in a fight, in that you know when you are bleeding and need to retreat and regroup. where the US is so big that time and time it keeps backing much smaller countrys into corners and forcing an extitential conflict where by the time they figure out the other guy is just going to fight to the death, AND has friends, and the US can never proffit. Now the US is threatening, Greenland, again,while desperatly trying to conjure a reason to invade south america ALL of it as a bluff to buy time for the always almost quantum AI supremecy that will deliver ever greater technological power, forever. or maybe is too much ket and coke

They migrated from Skype for business to nextcloud? How does that make sense?

Title slightly shortened to fit HN limits.

It just keeps baffling me how some bureaucrats think. I first saw this working for the EU as a consultant, but these people actually do believe this. The fact is that the CIA and the NSA have both had leaks that confirmed they were spying on Microsoft, Google, Yahoo's customers before the US CLOUD act even existed. Hell, they were doing it before some of these companies' clouds even existed. And much has been made from the fact that they violated US law to do it (much was made of the scandal that the CIA is supposed to avoid spying on US citizens and leaks proved they didn't do that in the slightest)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7

https://archive.ph/u4DwB

The CIA has been caught doing industrial espionage for US firms. And, the French secret service has had a similar leak.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2003/06/12/airbuss-...

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19930418/1696416/bo...

Only an EU bureaucrat could make a case that states respect the law when spying. I mean, how absurd is that idea?

To make it worse still, France has been caught doing to the same. Their colleagues! And frankly, I'd be deeply disappointed if every EU country and the US aren't currently doing the same to China and 5 other countries right as you're reading this.

In these circumstances, EU bureaucrats apparently are still unwilling to believe that a state would violate laws as they spy. DESPITE their own colleagues doing the same (France violates EU and French law to spy on US companies).

The problem with US spying is not the US CLOUD act. It is using US hardware and software under the effective control of US companies at all. The solution to that cannot be getting a pinky promise, I guess from Trump, that the spying will stop. Even congress repealing that law would mean exactly nothing.

> Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical chord with US big tech

Oh, I'm all in tears. /s EU will not cut its ombilical cord. Not as long as vdL is at the top.