It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

State of European Cloud Alternatives

  • Many argue Europe “had 20 years” to build its own clouds and office suites and mostly failed; US hyperscalers are seen as years ahead.
  • OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway and others are cited as EU options, but often described as:
    • Good for cheap VMs or bare metal, not as full-service clouds.
    • Missing mature managed services (databases, queues, identity, rich networking).
    • Weaker on reliability, support, and long feature roadmaps.
  • Attempts at EU-hosted productivity (Nextcloud + OnlyOffice/Collabora, etc.) are said to exist but UX and integration are widely viewed as inferior to Google Workspace / O365.
  • Some point out Europe does have strong tech firms (cloud infra vendors, fintech, SaaS), but not consumer megacorps or hyperscale cloud equivalents.

Data Sovereignty, CLOUD Act, and “Sovereign Clouds”

  • Repeated emphasis that data residency ≠ data sovereignty:
    • The US CLOUD Act lets US authorities compel access to data held by US companies, even if stored in the EU.
    • Commenters claim any US provider promising “data sovereignty” is effectively misleading unless it’s genuinely out of US control.
  • EU privacy law (GDPR, Schrems rulings) already made US cloud usage shaky for personal data; recent US moves (e.g. neutering oversight bodies) are seen as breaking the latest legal fig leaf.
  • “Sovereign cloud” models (e.g. Azure/Google tech operated by EU companies) are debated:
    • Pro: operational control and keys in EU hands, US company only supplies software.
    • Con: still dependent on US updates and legal leverage; Cloud Act risk remains.

Cloud Security and Government Secrets

  • Strong minority view: it was never safe for any government to put secrets in any public cloud, regardless of country.
  • Others frame it as a spectrum:
    • With strong client-side encryption, HSMs, confidential compute, and gov-only regions (GovCloud, Secret Cloud), cloud can be acceptable for some classified or sensitive workloads.
    • Real risk is not just espionage but ability to coerce providers to shut down or degrade critical services.

Trump, Geopolitics, and Trust in the US

  • For many European commenters, the change is qualitative: the US is now perceived as an openly unreliable or even adversarial partner (Ukraine policy, trade threats, rhetoric about annexations).
  • They see a realistic scenario where a US administration orders US clouds to cut off or pressure EU states, making cloud a geopolitical weapon.
  • Others argue this risk long predates Trump (Snowden, PRISM), and focusing on one president is partisan framing; US surveillance and legal overreach are structural.
  • Counterpoint: Europe itself is criticized for speech restrictions, encryption-hostile laws, and surveillance ambitions; no government is truly trustworthy with centralized data.

Feasibility of European Tech and Cloud Independence

  • Many doubt Europe can quickly build AWS/Azure-class platforms:
    • Capital is fragmented and risk-averse; management in telco/hosting often described as technically weak and slow.
    • Brain drain to US tech firms is seen as a core structural problem.
  • Others argue this is exactly like the Airbus story: painful, expensive, but strategically necessary, and now politically sellable.
  • There’s debate on strategy:
    • Full EU hyperscaler(s) with heavy public funding vs.
    • On-prem and colocation with open-source stacks (OpenStack, k8s, self-hosted DBs) vs.
    • Hybrid “local operator + US software” as an interim step.

Beyond Cloud: Deeper Stack Dependence

  • Several note that even if infra moves to EU clouds, the edge is still US-controlled:
    • Smartphones (iOS/Android), app stores, browsers, identity providers, and SaaS (O365, Google, GitHub) remain dominated by US firms.
  • Some foresee:
    • More self-hosting, Linux desktops, and EU-focused SaaS for government/critical sectors.
    • Legal measures (tariffs, bans, procurement rules) pushing public-sector workloads off US platforms, despite cost and migration pain.

“No Longer Safe” vs “Never Safe”

  • Many object to the title: they argue it has never been safe or wise for sovereign states to base critical infrastructure on foreign-controlled clouds; recent US politics only exposed an existing strategic error.
  • Others say that while the theoretical risk was always known, its probability and immediacy have changed enough that the cost–benefit calculation for EU governments and enterprises must now flip in favor of local or self-controlled infrastructure.