Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
It’s even less of a thing. Things like AWS have datacenters in Europe, where most of Europe-side of traffic is hosted. Even if Trump made executive decisions to stop any internets companies doing business in Europe, it would have ZERO impact on the subsidy. Any cloud issues would really only impact “vertical scaling cloud-native” bullshit software, there are plenty and most reasonable companies are based on more sane (and less expensive) hosting solutions, which are in-house European.
Takes a massive fool to think European companies are basing their data in US continent, where the ping would be >150ms, and speeds would be far slower and less manageable.
It’s actually simpler than that: It’s not in regulatory compliance. Cloud providers need to host their data centers in different regions because of geopolitical instability, including the distinct possibility of this scenario, among other localized regulatory factors. These companies may be headquartered in America but they still are at the whim of many different governments.
Source: I have an AWS certification