you've had twenty years to build an EU-native alternative...what do you have to show us?
the EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success with fines
the EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success with fines
They don't care at all about the provider being a local or European company. They just want the cheapest option.
Which usually means using the same server to host dev/UAT/prod, and also using the extra storage available to store company data unrelated to the workloads hosted on the server.
Whereas the companies that are using big clouds are more focused on doing things with more care, and trying to avoid as much disaster as possible.
But I guess having PII data exposed on the web from an Hetzner server is better than having everything encrypted on AWS...
At work we rely on "big" clouds offered by major telecom companies. AWS is seen as ridiculously expensive "religious requirement" to gain trust, if we'd ever decide to market our product to US customers, but little else.
Big benefit of smaller countries and local apps. We can more easily fit apps on one to a few computers and don't need your hyperscaling clouds to serve the entire world, because our world is 10 mil. people.
But at the end of the day, there was never any real incentive to make an EU-native alternative. Now, there is. The US is in an uncertain state. Will American be great again? A fascist dictatorship? Argentina? Who the heck knows. Right now, we have a lot of speculation about what's going on and precious little information.
Unreliable partners give a very, very strong incentive to have critical infrastructure local.
Beyond that, what's the downside? Before, it risked triggering a trade war. Seems we're there already, and going local just gives a stronger hand.
Governments are too short termist to care. Its probably OK for the next few years so keep it cheap
The danger is not just governments. Its businesses, and even consumer systems. If another country can brick all your vehicles or look through all your spy cameras or take down your telecoms then they have a great deal of power over you.
This will only change after something happens.
Fascism is a right-wing ideology was widespread throughout all of Europe before WWII, and especially took hold in Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from e.g. Stalinist Russia.
It is not a synonym for "bad government," "dictatorship," "violent government," or similar.
I did not give a definition for fascism. You can look ones up yourself. However, critically:
1. China is not right-wing. That's prerequisite.
2. China has very little fascist-style state / political violence, and virtually no paramilitary elements. You're at no risk of being beaten up or having your windows broken for having the wrong political views. Police officers didn't even have guns until recently. There aren't Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, are groups like the fascist right-wing militias in the US. Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
3. China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
4. China does not try to eliminate minorities if they play ball. Indeed, China is very supportive of non-Han groups (who were, e.g. exempt from One Child). Rather, what you see is forceful "modernization" and cultural assimilation, leading up to violence if there isn't compliance. If the Muslim minorities in China decided to give up their religion, culture, and desire for freedom, and started to act like Han Chinese, they'd almost certainly be left alone. You saw the same directed at Han during the Great Leap Forward. For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
5. Control of the economy is limited and directed. A lot of the Chinese economy is also like the Wild West.
.... and so on.
Note that I'm not passing a value judgment on which system of government is better or worse. However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
One of the key things in China is that if you (personally and collectively) go along with the government, for the most part, you're very safe, and life is quite peaceful. Another is that most control is "soft." The wrong post online will simply be hard to find, load slowly, or not show up for other users. Or you'll have a harder time moving up in life.
It's very little like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s, where you had armed groups walking the streets, breaking windows.
Define right wing in this context. Its historically communist, but it not really so any more, as you your self admit "Control of the economy is limited and directed"
> China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
It is very nationalist and believes its culture to be superior to minority culture which is why they are assimilating it.
> For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
True, but I said "fascism" not "nazism" which are not the same thing.
> Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
is that a necessary trait? The Brownshirts were got rid of once the Nazis were in power. Once you control the state you no longer need the paramilitary.
> However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
I agree, but I think China has a lot of traits in common with fascist states. it might not tick all the boxes in a definition, but it ticks far more than the typical dictatorship.
It's very hard for me to see how. Even taking everything you said about China at face value (some of which I might take issue with):
- Almost every dictator tries (with mixed success) to create a personality cult.
- Almost every totalitarian state tries to build nationalist fervor to keep people in-line
- Almost every totalitarian state uses state violence to maintain control
- Almost every culture believes itself to be superior, and most successful politician try to exploit that (with the exception of a few on the far left)
... and so on.
I think a necessary and requisite element for fascism is an army of thugs and a pervasive level of fear. That's different from, for example, an army of educated bureaucrats deciding to stick problem individuals in a gulag. The brownshirts were never gotten rid of, but rather were institutionalized into the SA and to some extent, the SS. They were still thugs and relatively indiscriminate violence.
China lacks thugs. If you don't stick your head up, I don't see many people fear the government. People generally keep their heads down, fall in line, and lead normal lives.
I don't know if it's core to fascism, but expansionism and imperialism is also rather lacking in China. There are some disputes, mind, you, about places which China thinks should belong, namely Tibet, Taiwan, Mongolia, a little bit of Russia (formerly Manchuria), a few mountains near India, and a few islands, but critically, those ambitions have not changed in nearly a century.
Now someone has thrown a monkey wrench at the invisible hand, and they have to duplicate a lot of effort. They lose, we lose. But at least they've stopped tying their future to an unreliable business partner. Divorce sucks for everyone.
It didn't help that these attempts were torpedoed aggressively by Microsoft, Google et al.
So every innovation and success ends up being sucked into the gravity well of Silicon Valley. Every talent ends up having to move to the US to be credible. Soon everything is "American". The great innovation center of the universe, fueled by foreigners and acquired foreign businesses.
Will this continue? That is hugely to be seen.
There are plenty of other alternatives, e.g. Softmaker Office and Papyrus are German word processor and office applications.
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...
Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.
For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services. Some would consider those to be table stakes to run their application. Does it add complexity? Potentially. But we accept some additional complexity if it yields incremental value.
If you don’t value the additional functionality cloud providers offer, that’s fine. But lots of people do.
Certainly, unnecessary complexity should be avoided. But it’s a bit naive to associate comprehensiveness with complexity. They’re not entirely identical.
I am totally OK setting up my own database software on Hetzner. I understand that some people are used to "cloud" spoon-feeding them what they need and even what they really don't, but I perceive this as a nuisance.
I just checked a handful but didn't see any.
I'd love to have a good Google Docs alternative. No one has made one. Nextcloud is the closest we've got, and I use it sometimes, but it's pretty bad.
It's a lot less hard to build in 2025, and hopefully, someone will now.
https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/sep...
A useful resource: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-tr...
You will surprised, but American businesses benefit from selling their services.