alt Hacker NewsUS orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives
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We are pivoting out of a huge number of US services at my job. I think windows, Google, PaloAltoNetworks and Aws will be the last we leave, but infoblox is out next year (that's part of my job right now), and old Cisco hardware will stop being replaced by new Cisco hardware in 6 months.
I can’t imagine how any country would think the US is trustworthy enough to be the place where everyone stores their data. If companies cannot comply with data sovereignty laws then they shouldn’t exist at all. Personally, even as a US citizen, I’m hoping tech companies in Europe and Asia become independent enough to no longer be beholden to US interests. It’s clear that the era where any one country has global hegemony should end.
That is useful information to pursue data sovereignty even more.
Similarly, in the 2000s, the US pushed back against the development of Galileo and preferred that Europe continue relying on GPS. That created tensions between the US and the EU.
Fighting data sovereignty is a losing battle for the US: data are too strategic to outsource, even to allies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
How can you be so confrontational and still want people to give you business and data?
I really don't envy the diplomats' job at the moment.
It's difficult to imagine the US diplomats themselves have any real levers to pull here. The bridges have already been quite burned, and any attempt at a carrot or a stick may just speed up countries' data sovereignty initiates.
And in related news, major European democracies are spending real money architecting sovereign cloud tech - planning on replacing not just the infra, but also the key parts of commonly used SaaS stacks. (How do I know? I got a job offer from one of those governments to help them architect that; exciting times).
If it's so cumbersome why don't US companies pull out the EU market? bet they make money anyway don't they
The shame of all this is that now every country will have a worse, more expensive - but yes, soveriegn - solution, and the US makes less money through trade. Everyone loses, except people who want to hurt western economies.
I hope that the EU becomes a real innovation center of decentralized tech initiatives. There are all these tech movements like local-first apps, atproto/activitypub, and self-hosting that could be absolutely supercharged by both the user and developer base of Europe flat out rejecting big tech cloud platforming.
> the U.S. strongly supports cross-border data flows that promote growth and innovation while protecting privacy, safety, and free expression
Yeah that will be a hard no from me. They're not exactly known for their positive attitude towards privacy. And free speech seems to depend on who's aligned with the administration.
Could be a huge opening for Mistral and other European LLM providers who are okay at adhering to data sovereignty requirements
This is like putting your money in a bank ran by a cartel and expecting them not to steal it as soon as it benefits them.
What kind of success are countries having finding technical talent with the right savvy fighter mindset to sever the dependence on an aggressive and culturally-entrenched threat?
(Even the ordinary open source world has a lot of intrigue to be careful of. And most developers still think nothing of pulling in a fleet of dependencies from PyPI/NPM/Cargo/etc. as well as third-party network services. Everyone is being taught in school to play to FAANG interview rituals, and many go on to a career style of performative sprints. HCI is almost lost as a field to UX euphemism. Almost no one can deploy a system that won't be compromised, and most don't even try, except for some mandated ineffective theatre. AI homework-cheating mindset isn't helping. Etc. Not to complain, but to be clear the kind of inertia a country is facing.)
Do the countries wanting to fight this have enough of they right homegrown talent already, and know how to find and nurture it?
If they're importing additional talent, do they know how to find and incentive the right people, while turning away the ones with the wrong mindsets for this mission?
(ProTips: Look for the hardcore privacy&security non-careerist nerds. The left-leaning, societal-minded ones. Give them what they've been looking for, or support to help make what they've been looking for. Don't offer to pay too well. Anyone who asks "Why would I want to live in your country, when I can make more money elsewhere?" gets a permaban.)
It increasingly feels like the US sees everyone as an enemy.
Is it just the government that feels this way, or do the general population of the US feel like everyone else on the planet is an enemy?
Just started exporting my data from google, guess this is the start of my uncoupling journey.
Looking forward to changing my bank card to a EU alternative when its available.
I don't feel like I have major usage issues, but maybe once I have decoupled from the big players, it will be clearer what I had gotten used to, for which there was another way to approach.
The biggest pain points will probably be YouTube, Claude, Gemini and Google docs. The main issues will probably stem from collaborating with others, rather than my own personal usage.
America shocked to discover everyone tolerated them because it was generally easier than not. Turns out if you make it super hard, unpredictable and vindictive, people will go the extra mile to not have to tolerate you.
Misleading title by Reuters.
The title should be "US orders diplomats to fight _EU_ data sovereignty initiatives".
Why? Because the US is far too pussy to fight the other countries that have such initiatives - some of them reaching further than the EU's - knowing that unlike the EU those countries are definitely not going to take their shit.
I can tell you that if the US says to Japan or Korea, just to name two such examples, "stop enacting privacy/sovereignty laws that interfere with US big tech or we tariff you" , there's absolutely zero chance they're going to be listened to and the only thing it will do is make people hate the US.
Sigh. Anecdotally, more Europeans no longer want their governments to rely on software and data controlled by US companies, because they no longer trust the US to act as a reliable ally, defending the same values. Whether you agree or disagree with these concerns, they are valid for many Europeans.
In an ironic twist of fate, the US government's actions could end up causing long-term damage to US tech companies.
This is all based on anecdotal evidence, so I could be wrong, but I have to call it like I see it.
Sure if they can pull it off, but how can they do this without scaring away all future customers?
I bet it’s too late now. They will need very very persuasive arguments to kill all the initiatives, and while they may convince some governments and lobbying groups, I doubt they will manage to convince every IT responsible.
Step 1: Piss away soft power built over the last century or so
Step 2: Ask for favors
Step 3: Profit?
As an EU citizen I really hope we can gain some meaningful distance to the US asap. I hope my leaders feel the same. And if everything works out I think this will be great for the EU.
This is really some sort of diplomatic Streisand effect. If the US would not have been so aggressive and just string us along they could have continued to feed us their slop indefinitely without us noticing.
I wonder if he would go so far as to withhold access to US tech to this end.
Even as a US citizen... fuck that... it'd be like saying the US should open its' data up for China without any restrictions at all, even if they are slurping up everything they can as a state actor.
While, if you choose to use a US service, it shouldn't be required to host data in your country, if you know it's a US service with data in the US... government data is another thing entirely.. and $cloud provider should be required to accommodate if they want that business, or for companies in a given country for that matter.
That the US doesn't like it is the best justification for it.
It is incredibly stupid and counterproductive to make this kind of statement publicly. Most of the GAFAM companies are doing their utmost to try to reassure their European customers with a facade of sovereignty.
All these efforts will come to nothing.
Amazon sovereign cloud https://aws.eu/fr/ Azure sovereign https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/sovereignty Oracle soverign https://www.oracle.com/fr/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/ IBM https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/sovereign-cloud ...
Imagine if the EU builds it's own alternative services to those provided in the US, and these EU services do not rely on advertising revenue and don't shove AI in our faces at every opportunity.
Europe, please Make the Internet Great Again!
standard kyc doesn't run on dedicated infrastructure isolated from the vendor's main cloudflare stack. you don't build a separate gcp cluster for routine age checks. the architecture tells you what the data is worth before anyone admits it.
The fall of the american empire: speedrun any %. The past 5 and next 5 years will be taught in history books longer than ww2 will
Like an abusive spouse.
'No, you can't leave me, you need me.' Actually, we don't. We used to have a good relationship and you lit it on fire. Bye, US.
Interestingly, fighting it like this will only make the resolve stronger.
This just accelerates the Balkanization of the Internet, which already is segregated by China and Russia. Maybe it was inevitable. Corporations benefit the most from open access and as they have demonstrated with unrestricted AI scraping they obey no morality, ethics, or law they are not compelled to by force.
I can't think of a worse way to approach this.
Given that the US has basically no data or privacy protections for its own citizens let alone non-US citizens, it's not surprising that countries are moving away from keeping their data in US-owned places. US companies mine data for everything and the kitchen sink and train AI using it without any sort of notice.
this is hilarious, just last week i heard american tourists complaining that "they" were subisidzing Europe's lazy lifestyle
> (passing data sovereignty laws will) expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship
This Roger Stone playbook shit is wild. This admin will piss on your leg and tell you it's raining.
>> signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agency said such laws would "disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship."
Such fine bullshit, of the highest quality.
Distributing infrastructure may slightly reduce efficiency but seems like a good idea for so many reasons: national pride, increased security, more resilience to outside influences, etc.
Time for an nth amendment to introduce shame to the Konstityushon?
Given the socio-political climate, it's really bonkers to go bashing every ally the US has had since WW2 and then in the other hand go "No No No, trust only us with your data"
What could go wrong?
We've been acting like a bully on the playground and now we are wondering why nobody else on the playground wants to play with us
Thank you trump administration for doing more for European data sovereignty in one year than the last 20 years combined lol
Yeah, good luck with that. That ship has long sailed since Snowden and the Merkel phone affair. Threats to annex Greenland didn't help either.
lol position #2, to #22, in just over an hour... :) (11 -> 22 in 5 minutes)
America has lost trust internationally because this administration is amoral, chaotic and transactional. Trust is a very expensive commodity because it takes generations to build and can be destroyed in a moment. This is a fight that America is going to lose and we're all the worse off for it.
If these countries don't want Mockingbird coordinated regime change, they should ban all U.S. social media altogether.
time to ban US tech companies
To be fair data sovereignty is usually just a way for governments to crack down on free speech/internet usage. They require all the company servers be in the country, then when they want to get information it's easier to get a warrant and threaten to take away all their servers. This is what they did in China/Russia and why they're doing it in the EU.
It's also probably just good business for the US, but locking down on citizen freedom is the only real reason I've seen countries do it.
It's not even just data stored on US servers. According to the CLOUD Act, any data stored by a US company, regardless of location, can be demanded by any authority in the US.
No sovereign nation should use US companies for data storage or processing. Period.
The attempts to shift to open source or non-US services are inevitably hobbled by US companies lobbying (read: bribing) politicians.