Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch.
Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.
European companies just ignore privacy and make their lawyers write increasingly contorted cya statements. I’ve worked in several and the idea we shouldn’t be using American hyperscalers (remember, the CLOUD act means hosting in Europe is useless) gets laughs.
This is even worse. For instance, in a medical university, we
recently were told we need a smartphone and install an app
from Google store (!!!), in order to read emails sent out
by officials at the medical university. I protested to that
but they had a deal already with the private company and
their signature meant they had to keep on being addicted to
that private company, so now I am locked out of receiving
emails since for redirect you also need to have that app
installed once. I don't have a smartphone though and I
find it outrageous that people are forced to install it
AND forced to use Google Store, for publicly funded (!!!)
universities here in central Europe. Some lobbyists are
currently getting very rich. I call it theft of taxpayer's
money though.
Doing business with the US is just impossible these days. If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners.
I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out
The concern is not so much that the US will lose friends moreso that other business partners will become more prominent. The US has a lot of social capital to burn. I’m not certain that somebody hasn’t calculated how much they can get away with…
- Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.
- Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.
- Majority see these but just move on
- 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat
- Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.
- Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks
I mean, if you saw the Canadian PMs speech at davos, you'd know "the west" is already distancing itself from the US. This is not a hypothetical, it has begun.
It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night, it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect, but it is happening, and has been happening for over a year.
A speech is the definition of a hypothetical. I can show you a million Trump speeches that "show" the opposite. Something tells me you wont take those as gospel for some reason.
>It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night
Oh really? I thought we're ABOUT to find out what it's like to have no allies or business partners? Weird!
>it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect
Ah, the magic "it's happening but I can't prove it, so trust me bro". Meanwhile, I can point you to tangible metrics showing the world is moving away from the EU to China, meaning the EU will have zero trade with anyone else in short order (trust me it's really happening).
False equivalency. Trump constantly says whatever he wants in plain contradiction to verifiable facts:
The strait is open!
We win the war!
I’m not in the Epstein files!
the other ~~subsidiary of AIPAC~~ party will be in power again in less than 3 years and everything will go back to business as usual. a divorce from the US is the last thing the EU really wants.
What the EU wants is irrelevant. The EU is a derivative, a function, a dependency of the entity we still call the USA.
The EU having some leash on some matters that are not only irrelevant to the entity we call US and even serves a purpose for the entity called the USA, should not be confused with freedom to want or not to want. The EU does as it is steered to do by the groomed and placed puppets orchestrating the installed system.
The EU keeps trying to manifest the missing european data infrastructure via data regulation instead of outright bans and limits on american companies, the way China did it.
Privacy laws are actually one of the very useful things that came out. It is difficult to do the same in the US because of the business lobby. It is crazy that US citizens data can be purchased in the “black” market and the used by the agencies. Leaving tech companies to self regulate is just not viable and it is proven time and time again they cannot do it.
They should, but the entire EU economy runs on US clouds. It's hard enough to get new hardware as it is (US hardware btw), so how should the EU, especially today, move to sovereign clouds within the next few years?
I'd argue every single EU business with more than five employees would be impacted by such a decision. Just pulling the plug would be economic suicide.
Seems to me they’re waiting it out. Everything could change in a presidential election and the European economy wins either way. It is an economic bloc after all.
What you describe would be what’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face”
The problem with "everything could change in a presidential election" is that offers no stability. No one wants to plan around "maybe the United States goes rabid again in four years".
> Everything could change in a presidential election
A lot can change, but not everything. Trump won twice and republican elites are fully behind him. Even if he looses, the same ideologies will continue. It happened twice, it is not a fluke but a permanent property of American politics.
Moreover, constitutional changes supreme court created are structural change. They will be super hard to undone - first they would need to change supreme court composition. The influence of money in American politics will just grow, the structural advantages of conservatives have in voting system will just grow and next conservative president will have even more space for maneuvering. (Non conservative one will likely be stopped by supreme court on some excuse.)
So, basically, outside of change actual constitution which is impossible, it will stay the same at best in the long term.
Outright bans would destroy European companies that rely on American companies. First they need to build their own infrastructure (which China has done).
Outright bans on US companies would just trigger retaliation from the US of equal bans on EU companies, and the EU economy is currently in no place to absorb more blows, so it's forced to suck it up and take it on the chin, as punishment for being asleep for over 20 years.
It's what you get when you're arrogant and think you don't need nuclear energy for your sovereignty but somehow you do need russian gas, and think you can ignore SW industry because exporting diesel engines and luxury goods can carry your economy for the next century, leaving you with no leverage over your geopolitical rivals that are now taking advantage of you and you can't do anything about it.
Eventually the chickens come home to roost and the piper will get paid. The EU is now in the paying stage.
The only answer isn't to sink to the lowest common denominator.
Ban or tax things from the "globalised" world that are just worker/societal/environmental protection arbitrage so they're competing for the EU market on a level playing field, then we'll see who can compete.
The EU is plenty big enough to be self-sufficient if it has to and shouldn't be afraid of risking this if abusive and exploitative companies from other places don't way to pay their way.
It's more simple than that; lack of investment due to various factors among which some are due to regulations, but also because the lower ROI you get in the USA due to corporate culture, higher cost in general (wages, energy, resources, manufacturing, etc.), slower economic growth and so on.
As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.
IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.
> Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.
For the skimmer/TL;DR'er, note that this article is by an advocacy group presenting their analysis of a situation, and then advocating and taking action on it: "Next Steps: Commission must repeal EU-US deal. noyb ..."
It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.
For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.
These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.
The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.
However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.
I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.
You could both be right: Shrems III could be in the works, and TLA could be presenting their legal analysis as an established fact.
In other words, (a) no, the "US Supreme Court" didn't "Just Bl[ow] Up EU-US Data Transfers" – there's nothing in the decision even remotely addressing the transfers (nor the EU!) – but (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.)
So the US Supreme Court is doing here more and better for
EU citizens (!!!) than the EU commission and EU courts are.
Because the EU officials constantly keep on lying to EU
citizens how our data is safe in the USA, which it clearly
is not, even aside from Trump's brown shirts, the ICE snipers
that have already killed US citizens in shootings. The world
is a very strange place, but one good thing is that Trump's
criminal gangster organisation has not undermined the whole
US court system yet. And he is now too old and too demented
to do so, so they will rally behind hugely uncharismatic
losers such as eyeliner-boy "can't stop it with my make-up"
Vance or "I change my opinion all the time" Mr. Rubio.
Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch. Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.
European companies just ignore privacy and make their lawyers write increasingly contorted cya statements. I’ve worked in several and the idea we shouldn’t be using American hyperscalers (remember, the CLOUD act means hosting in Europe is useless) gets laughs.
This is even worse. For instance, in a medical university, we recently were told we need a smartphone and install an app from Google store (!!!), in order to read emails sent out by officials at the medical university. I protested to that but they had a deal already with the private company and their signature meant they had to keep on being addicted to that private company, so now I am locked out of receiving emails since for redirect you also need to have that app installed once. I don't have a smartphone though and I find it outrageous that people are forced to install it AND forced to use Google Store, for publicly funded (!!!) universities here in central Europe. Some lobbyists are currently getting very rich. I call it theft of taxpayer's money though.
Europa, the official web portal of the tech sovereign European Union, will have to change their CDN provider (Amazon's CloudFront).
https://europa.eu
Can they even use a CDN now?
Unless that site collects personal information, it's fine isn't it? This isn't about where stuff is hosted, it's about privacy.
IPs are personal information afaik
Yes, they are
So will https://wero-wallet.eu - you know, the European alternative to VISA/MasterCard.
I wonder how many billions in lobbying money Schrems has cost various big companies.
The treaties and deals he has managed to torpedo by forcing courts to uphold privacy laws is insane (and impressive).
Doing business with the US is just impossible these days. If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners.
I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out
pariah: outcast, disliked
piranha: carnivorous fish
Also piranha: Brazilian Portugese slang for hooker.
Do they mob potential Johns?
Accidental accuracy
> piranha: carnivorous fish
Nice callout.
Neither here nor there, but many (most?) fish are carnivorous.
paraná: a state/river in southern Brazil
Sounds right
The concern is not so much that the US will lose friends moreso that other business partners will become more prominent. The US has a lot of social capital to burn. I’m not certain that somebody hasn’t calculated how much they can get away with…
Sadly nothing will change.
- Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.
- Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.
- Majority see these but just move on
- 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat
- Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.
- Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks
- Its f*king broken system
> If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners
Sure it is, sure it is. Very plausible thing that will definitely happen. Any day now, I'm sure.
Meanwhile, in the real world: https://www.luxtimes.lu/europeanunion/eu-lawmakers-approve-u...
Who WILL become a pariah state is the EU as they continue to antagonize the biggest economies in the world: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/29/eu-introduces-...
The world is starting to shun the EU and turn to China.
I mean, if you saw the Canadian PMs speech at davos, you'd know "the west" is already distancing itself from the US. This is not a hypothetical, it has begun.
It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night, it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect, but it is happening, and has been happening for over a year.
A speech is the definition of a hypothetical. I can show you a million Trump speeches that "show" the opposite. Something tells me you wont take those as gospel for some reason.
>It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night
Oh really? I thought we're ABOUT to find out what it's like to have no allies or business partners? Weird!
>it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect
Ah, the magic "it's happening but I can't prove it, so trust me bro". Meanwhile, I can point you to tangible metrics showing the world is moving away from the EU to China, meaning the EU will have zero trade with anyone else in short order (trust me it's really happening).
False equivalency. Trump constantly says whatever he wants in plain contradiction to verifiable facts: The strait is open! We win the war! I’m not in the Epstein files!
the other ~~subsidiary of AIPAC~~ party will be in power again in less than 3 years and everything will go back to business as usual. a divorce from the US is the last thing the EU really wants.
What the EU wants is irrelevant. The EU is a derivative, a function, a dependency of the entity we still call the USA.
The EU having some leash on some matters that are not only irrelevant to the entity we call US and even serves a purpose for the entity called the USA, should not be confused with freedom to want or not to want. The EU does as it is steered to do by the groomed and placed puppets orchestrating the installed system.
The EU keeps trying to manifest the missing european data infrastructure via data regulation instead of outright bans and limits on american companies, the way China did it.
Privacy laws are actually one of the very useful things that came out. It is difficult to do the same in the US because of the business lobby. It is crazy that US citizens data can be purchased in the “black” market and the used by the agencies. Leaving tech companies to self regulate is just not viable and it is proven time and time again they cannot do it.
The EU should cut all ties with the US, tax US products and impose costly (and difficult to get) visas to American citizens wanting to visit.
It won't do any of this because it has no balls and no vision.
We're doomed and it's our fault.
They should, but the entire EU economy runs on US clouds. It's hard enough to get new hardware as it is (US hardware btw), so how should the EU, especially today, move to sovereign clouds within the next few years?
I'd argue every single EU business with more than five employees would be impacted by such a decision. Just pulling the plug would be economic suicide.
Time to dust off that profiler and make stuff way more efficient, simple and well architected.
> no balls and no vision
Seems to me they’re waiting it out. Everything could change in a presidential election and the European economy wins either way. It is an economic bloc after all.
What you describe would be what’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face”
The problem with "everything could change in a presidential election" is that offers no stability. No one wants to plan around "maybe the United States goes rabid again in four years".
> Everything could change in a presidential election
A lot can change, but not everything. Trump won twice and republican elites are fully behind him. Even if he looses, the same ideologies will continue. It happened twice, it is not a fluke but a permanent property of American politics.
Moreover, constitutional changes supreme court created are structural change. They will be super hard to undone - first they would need to change supreme court composition. The influence of money in American politics will just grow, the structural advantages of conservatives have in voting system will just grow and next conservative president will have even more space for maneuvering. (Non conservative one will likely be stopped by supreme court on some excuse.)
So, basically, outside of change actual constitution which is impossible, it will stay the same at best in the long term.
Europeans should cut ties with their own fascist, Russian sympathizers leading the polls first, then worry about Americans.
Outright bans would destroy European companies that rely on American companies. First they need to build their own infrastructure (which China has done).
Outright bans on US companies would just trigger retaliation from the US of equal bans on EU companies, and the EU economy is currently in no place to absorb more blows, so it's forced to suck it up and take it on the chin, as punishment for being asleep for over 20 years.
It's what you get when you're arrogant and think you don't need nuclear energy for your sovereignty but somehow you do need russian gas, and think you can ignore SW industry because exporting diesel engines and luxury goods can carry your economy for the next century, leaving you with no leverage over your geopolitical rivals that are now taking advantage of you and you can't do anything about it.
Eventually the chickens come home to roost and the piper will get paid. The EU is now in the paying stage.
Ban, limits, and regulation won’t solve a country with too many worker protections. The EU simply can’t compete in the modern globalized world.
The only answer isn't to sink to the lowest common denominator.
Ban or tax things from the "globalised" world that are just worker/societal/environmental protection arbitrage so they're competing for the EU market on a level playing field, then we'll see who can compete.
The EU is plenty big enough to be self-sufficient if it has to and shouldn't be afraid of risking this if abusive and exploitative companies from other places don't way to pay their way.
It's more simple than that; lack of investment due to various factors among which some are due to regulations, but also because the lower ROI you get in the USA due to corporate culture, higher cost in general (wages, energy, resources, manufacturing, etc.), slower economic growth and so on.
slashing worker protections would do what exactly?
free the "animal spirits"?
/s
Reduced worker protections -[somehow]-> better worker output. /s
the [somehow] is pretty clear: exploitative working conditions.
As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.
IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.
> As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
EU is working on mandating scans of all your private encrypted messages right now. EU data protection is marketing for the gullible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719
Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
It's well overdue to take seriously and put all our efforts behind the many (various but little known) local-first initiatives.
See for instance: https://elfaconsortium.eu/ It's a race against time.
> Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.
For the skimmer/TL;DR'er, note that this article is by an advocacy group presenting their analysis of a situation, and then advocating and taking action on it: "Next Steps: Commission must repeal EU-US deal. noyb ..."
It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.
For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.
These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.
The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.
However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.
I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.
You could both be right: Shrems III could be in the works, and TLA could be presenting their legal analysis as an established fact.
In other words, (a) no, the "US Supreme Court" didn't "Just Bl[ow] Up EU-US Data Transfers" – there's nothing in the decision even remotely addressing the transfers (nor the EU!) – but (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.)
So the US Supreme Court is doing here more and better for EU citizens (!!!) than the EU commission and EU courts are. Because the EU officials constantly keep on lying to EU citizens how our data is safe in the USA, which it clearly is not, even aside from Trump's brown shirts, the ICE snipers that have already killed US citizens in shootings. The world is a very strange place, but one good thing is that Trump's criminal gangster organisation has not undermined the whole US court system yet. And he is now too old and too demented to do so, so they will rally behind hugely uncharismatic losers such as eyeliner-boy "can't stop it with my make-up" Vance or "I change my opinion all the time" Mr. Rubio.
A big loser team.
EU needs to decide if it wants to do data processing or not.
If it’s a yes, it needs datacenters and get a lot more energy.
If no, it needs to transfer data to US for training/inferencing on it.
or wait for the bubble to burst and come out on top.
The internet is a fad and will pass any day now.
This. The US is playing the right move with solar panels, wait for the bubble to burst and then swoop in. Let China take the early losses.
>If it’s a yes, it needs datacenters and get a lot more energy.
It can outsource its data centers abroad too like it did with its manufacturing industry.