Why US cloud services will be make or break for European businesses

A comment on DHH's article "American data spies will never care where the servers are"

American companies will never be able to resist the demands of American intelligence services. It doesn't matter if their servers are located in Virginia or Paris or on the damn moon.

David Heinemier Hansson released another great and straight forward article dealing with one of tech‘s most apparent issues these days: data privacy.

And he’s absolutely on point.

Whatever charade US companies try to play, european data will always be at risk of being targeted by three-letter agencies on the basis of a simple warrant.

But the actual risk for businesses is not even the exposure of data but the fact that european law will at some point make it plainly illegal to use US services.

I’ve chosen a side in this discussion early on, trying to eliminate the dependencies of my companies to US offerings to a non-critical minimum.

The harsh truth is that we’re ABSOLUTELY NOT PREPARED to handle this.

Given how many organizations, big or small, ride on the back of Microsoft‘s product suite for communication, user management and cloud services thanks to their penetration of the market, it will be neck-breaking for our economy if European courts ever decide to ban them from our markets.

As posted a dozen times before, we need to establish alternatives inside our own jurisdiction.

And this is where we will most likely fail, looking at the enormous amount of non-progress initiatives like GAIA-X have made in the past decade.

We need to get shit done here, remembering how to innovate and stop outsourcing the technological foundations of our economy to actors that don’t work in our interest.

After all, our European values are good. The implications we will have to suffer from once we will be forced to act upon them will be crippling though.

Read the full article here