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.
I hope he will do it so EU politicians stop feeding foreign corporations with tax money.
Honestly you’re probably right.
The US officially giving tech execs military ranks is… interesting. One of the stronger reasons to avoid companies like Huawei, was that the CCP had direct military ties / agents working within Huawei. The argument in favour of US tech companies in comparison, was that while they may have agreements with the US military, they were at arms length. Now they aren’t, and the rationale seems to be attempting to shift to “just trust us”, while they openly start major wars/conflicts and support genocidal actions in the middle east.
idk. If I were involved in the decision making for any critical area, I’d avoid the hell out of foreign controlled anything in my regular stacks at this point. Even if it means you have some efficiency hits until there may be an in-country provider available. It wouldn’t matter who the other country is at this point, as the US going awol is something most wouldn’t have ‘bet’ on like a decade ago, but here we are.
I’m more shocked that Europeans trusted the US that much knowing how goddamned stupid people are here. We were already an oligarchy 10 years ago.
I work for a publicly traded company.
We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.
I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.
And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.
Yep one of the big drivers is flexibility in capex vs opex. They’ll shape the contract whichever way you want but on prem is straight to capex. I think. I’m not an accountant.
It’s literally organized crime.
Misleading title. It’s really about cloud services. And Europe is already working on making itself independent of American cloud services.
Thanks for sparing me the clickbait
latam is doomed
Just some stupid doom bait.
If it would get to cable cutting between US and Europe then we have much bigger problems than slow web apps. If Europe would ever get to that it definitely has enough cloud providers for essential services. Around 90% of all bandwidth is entertainment.
who said slow web apps. EU hosting providers could step in probably, but where is exactly all the data stored currently? even assuming that most orgs do proper, working backups, restoring them and setting up their systems for the new providers would still tame a lot of time
where is exactly all the data stored currently?
Hopefully in the EU, as the EU-US DPF is garbage and should be repealed just like the previous “Privacy Shield” attempts.
Ya ok but this isn’t a doomsday thing, we used to build our own servers before and lots of people know how to do it still.
All AWS and the like do is remove the hardware for the consumer and add some APIs.
Doesn’t sound as scary to me as the article paints. The only hard part would be the migration 😅
Yeah. That’s literally the whole point of “the cloud” it can be anywhere.
The EU has lots of places with available renewable energy.
Hook up a couple servers to some dams. With “free” electricity it’ll be almost impossible to not end up being cheaper than Amazon in the long run.
Like, I’m struggling to see how this would be a bad thing long term. Relying on American corporations just isn’t a rational choice anymore
Hook up a couple servers to some dams.
As someone who works in IT, I love the optimism of making it sound this simple. Things that I expect to take 10 minutes can end up taking weeks, because there’s always a surprising answer to “How complicated could it be?”
True, but sometimes the only way something worthwhile ever gets done in the first place is because somebody started on it without realizing how hard it would be. Columbus only discovered the New World because he’d underestimated how far away from Asia he was. Sometimes you NEED an optimistic idiot to actually get something done. Nobody else wanted to sail west because they (correctly) assessed that the Earth was bigger than Columbus thought, and it was only blind luck that Columbus encountered an unknown continent before running out of supplies. So an idiot was necessary.
And (as a separate point) yes, when an idiot embarks on an overly-optimistic project it’s a pain in the ass for everyone else who has to clean up the mess, but often the achievement lasts a lot longer and outweighs the trouble by orders of magnitude. For example the Moon landing ended up costing ten times what was originally budgeted, but I’d still say it was worth it.
sometimes the only way something worthwhile ever gets done in the first place is because somebody started on it without realizing how hard it would be.
Yes, that’s a good point. We both benefit and suffer from humanity’s overly optimistic moments.
often the achievement lasts a lot longer and outweighs the trouble by orders of magnitude.
True too, but Columbus might not be the clearest example of that.
Ah yes, I hadn’t intended that part to be considered a continuation of the Columbus point. “Sometimes idiots like Columbus get things done that nobody else was gonna do because everybody else understands just how monumental the task actually is and are deterred from doing it” is a separate point from “often even when a project was more trouble, time and effort than bargained for, it’s still worth it”. My apologies for the confusion. I’ve edited my other comment to make it clearer on that score.
Wouldn’t want to be that PM!
“Oh, it wouldn’t work the way we’ve thought because” is a phrase I’ve had to say too often for that level of optimism.
If the USA switches off cloud services for the EU, that’s a short-term problem. Really bad short term, but after a month or so everything is back up and running.
For big entities sure. But SMEs without dedicated IT and relying on the likes of squarespace would have a really bad time.
They’d just migrate to some EU alternative: https://alternativeto.net/software/squarespace/?origin=eu
Might not be super easy and they might not get the same results, bit if there’s no squarespace it will do.
Sure, as long as someone’s taught them about backups, and they have them, and they’re up to date.
All that would do is get Jeff Bezos to hire a hitman to take out Trump.
I’m not hearing a problem here
I know an Italian guy who might be down
I mean, there are servers in European countries, couldn’t they just nationalize the servers and continue as usual?
The servers would stop working the moment the US “pulls the plug.” Nationalization would not secure service, that would only secure non-functional hardware
The hardware is here. The entire hecking infrastructure is here. Making it work might not be as easy as flipping a switch, but it is definitely not impossible lol
The hardware isn’t the hard part, but I get your point
would probably take a month or two
Given the permissive and, well, stupid business practices that the U.S. allows, I’m sure a shell corporation there, an ownership transfer there, and you’ve got a de facto foreign owned company that’s every bit as answerable to the corporation, although not necessarily the U.S. government. I’m sure the shareholders won’t care so long as the stock price still goes up.
Those sorts of changes could presumably be executed much faster than working through the court challenges of nationalizing companies, or of building new facilities/swapping to new providers.
Not that I’m advocating sticking with what would still ostensibly be U.S.-backed tech.
I live in the U.S., and I ply my trade in tech and tech-adjacent sectors. I wouldn’t prefer it if the country I live in becomes a technological backwater and is passed on by the world, but I also am sort of reaching a point where I think perhaps FAFO.
Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google…
Do it! What are you waiting for? Do it!
Can we pull the plug on Trump already? I swear this timeline is a cruel joke.
It’s purgatory
Oh, yes please!
It would be disastrous at first, but Europe would recover much stronger than before.
We would have to do a lot to catch up but the seeds are there and they cannot grow because they are in the shadow of the US industry.
The US giants have money and userbase to outperform anything Europe has at the moment and when they cannot outperform some company, they buy it. If Trump ever tries to cut US Tech off, European companies would grow rapidly to fill the void.
I would love to get some of these data centers off our power grid.
Oh but Europe can do something about it, it would only take a long time and be very costly.
What does this mean, exactly? Sounds like “Trump could end Europe’s internet access”, but I’m sure wise Lemmy experts could chime in to clarify this means “Trump could disconnect Europe from the US, internet-wise”, which tbh don’t sound that bad. Sure hoping it’s the latter
It’s the latter. But as a crapload of our everyday services depend on US companies and their servers it would be a service outage we’ve never seen before. Big US companies (Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta…) could technically mitigate at least some effects if it’s just the actual connectivity which is missing but if they’re forced to shut down all European services it’s a whole another matter.
For your everyday consumer it would mean missing a lot of streaming services, email, personal backups of your photos on cloud services and stuff like that. On some cases even access to their bank accounts would be lost. Depending on your usage patterns a majority of your digital life could vanish overnight. For companies it would be even worse, a ton of them rely on AWS and other services to keep their business running and all that would come crashing down and a massive amount of them would not have workforce, knowledge nor resources (money mostly) to switch over to something else. Also a lot of tax paid service rely on M365 and other cloud based stuff so they would be affected too, but maybe/hopefully not quite as badly as commercial side. Also, our credit card processors are mostly US (Visa and Mastercard) so a ton of money transfers would be halted as well.
So, it would be pretty much a digital catastrophe on government, commercial and consumer fronts for majority of the people. Technically there’s nothing we couldn’t rebuild on our own, but it would take at least months and more likely several years to get everything back online and the bill for that would be astronomical. And if it’s a total kill-switch for US services then Europe would need new mobile operating systems to replace Android/IOS, new OS for their computers as Windows wouldn’t work anymore and so on. And on top of that, GPS would go too, but with Galileo that might not be the biggest problem around. And also a ton of other stuff I can’t remember right off the bat.
Sure, US would be stranded on the internet (and in the real world too at least to some point) after that and EU/UN/some other entity would take the role which is now on ICANN (and the same for other administrative entities). US would of course get a massive economical hit as well by losing all European customers, but on the worst case that would pretty much mean that the Europe’s internet access, at least as we know it now, would end and something else would be built on the ashes.
But hey, at least I personally wouldn’t have a problem to find a new job should I want to.
Well, worse than it seems, then.
I’d be willing to experiment, try and block US connections to and from my computer, but I could probably deal with it, seeing as I don’t use as much US stuff as the average person. Companies also probably have servers in other places, meaning perhaps they’d connect through elsewhere, and, in such a test scenario, me having control, I could allow the connections whenever I want or need.
To have everyone lose internet connection to/from US, would be real bad, it seems. Worse than I thought (though granted, I did not think much, clearly). Though if it were for a few hours, maybe let people see the consequences of their dependence, and what life would be like without these services. Guve 'em a taste.
All the more reason to not rely solely on the US and maybe adopt / help fund alternatives.
On another topic, if anyone knows how to block connections based on location, feel free to enlighten me. I’d actually enjoy trying out the aforementioned experiment, but NextDNS doesn’t have such feature
Companies also probably have servers in other places, meaning perhaps they’d connect through elsewhere
Depends on company, but that worst case scenario is that all US companies would shut down all their services in Europe overnight. Every big player has datacenters around the world and if it’s just the traffic between continents which is shut down then the effect is way less radical, absolute majority of Europe already connects to datacenters near them even if they use Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc services.
For example with my employer dropping every US based company would be a hell of a work, specially if it’s needed in a hurry. We, as well as a ton of others, rely on Microsoft services for all kinds of communication and should that go away we’d need to make quite a few phone calls around couple of continents just to set up a common ground on where and how to start building new infrastructure and how to keep communication lines open.
Though if it were for a few hours, maybe let people see the consequences of their dependence, and what life would be like without these services
Few hours is a short time. There’s some problems around the globe all the time which affect various services on various levels for few hours all the time. Few days of complete blackout and C-suits start to really sweat (plus it costs significant amounts of money via lost productivity).
if anyone knows how to block connections based on location, feel free to enlighten me
You’ll need a firewall/router which can do geoblocking. Based on quick search at least pfsense seems to have some options available. If I were to try that I’d set up a pfsense on a virtual machine, set up geoblock on that and use that as a gateway for my testing devices while leaving the rest of the network as it is so that I could limit/choose what devices may behave strangely and still have normal functionality for the rest.
I assume there’s a ton of other options too besides pfsense, but the key words are ‘geoblock’, ‘firewall’ and ‘router’ or something around that. Also I assume that most of the stuff you find explains how to block incoming traffic based on geoIP, but it should be relatively simple to adapt those for outgoing traffic as well.
I was mainly mentioning servers outside US in the context of me blocking access to/from US personally. If US blocked it all everywhere, that woudn’t be possible. You’d at best have the data up to that point in time, until the block, but no further, unless the companies update their servers physically, with, like, USBs, CDs, Floppy Disks.
As for already connecting to data centers nearby, some of my top US connections, according to NextDNS, are, ironically, from Spotify, which, afaik, is European.
Few hours is a short time Yeah, but remember this also affects everyday people. I was mainly thinking of them, I guess. Akin to a nation-wide power outage. You see just how much you depend on it, and what it’d be like without it. It may already be so ingrained in one’s everyday life. To realise to what extent, can be eye-opening. Most people probably wouldn’t expect, and could be surprised, by stuff mentioned, such as GPS and payments, not working. Or just something that, in the background, relies on a big US company, like Amazon servers or something
pfsense Will look into that. And also look for the keywords, see what else I can find. Let’s see if I go through with such experiment
oh no
This sounds a lot like, “build your own servers and topple another US industry.”
Honestly, as an American living in Silicon Valley, I would be overjoyed if Europe became the primary kickstarter for open source alternatives to the existing US corporate infrastructure, that bends to the knees of the Federal government. Even here at home, myself and some of my co-workers aren’t too keen on the existing status quo tools because there are too many caveats - from rent seeking subscriptions to the inability to verify if something is tampered with.
In the same way Valve saw how having all their eggs in the Windows basket led them to dive head first into linux development, I hope the EU’s realization of the risks in the US tech sector lead it to developing unified, well funded OSS alternatives. I would certainly install them.
Another short-term decision by America could lead to more long-term loss of wealth and influence.
“Stop shooting ourselves in the feet!”
So many decisions being made are very isolationist, and that never works well for the one shutting everyone else out. But who looks at history, right?
Talk about clickbait … Article title: trump can pull the plug on the internet and europe can’t do anything about it (my emphasis) First line: the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world (not “pull the plug on the internet”) And then further down: “The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.”
So first, it’s “the internet”, then it’s “unplug europe from the digital world”, then it’s “europe’s dependency on US cloud providers”
So it’s NOT “the internet”, and it’s NOT “unplug europe”, it’s disconnect european customers from US cloud providers.
Methinks Monseiur Pollet doesn’t understand very much about the internet.
But honestly, disconnection from the US cloud providers is a lot bigger than you seem to think. A ton of governmental services are hosted on US cloud providers. Pulling that plug would mean blackout for a crapload of governmental services, which we have grown to depend on.
It would also mean a huge hit on their own tech sector, if not near wipeout.
It’s one of those situations that, sure, they could, just like a monkey could purposely snap the branch where he and his friend are sitting on and both fall.
As for Europe, yes, it would be a painful transition, but eventually it could build its own infrastructure anyway
