U.S. tech companies expected to lose more than $35B due to NSA spying

I noticed that the ITIF report contains this recommendation:

5) Complete trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts."

This situation has several evolutionary stages to go through yet. Simply moving servers to another country is nearly meaningless. Servers can only be reached by passing through hostile territory. End to end security, and security for data at rest has to become pervasive.

> In particular, European cloud companies, like Cloudwatt, Hortnetsecurity, and F-Secure, proudly boast of their non-American credentials and their resistance to NSA spying against foreigners. And the French government has invested $150 million into two cloud startups designed to keep data out of U.S. hands.

I think that is really the moneyshot of that article. Western governments can throw hundreds of millions at developing "French" or "German" or [insert country here] and build effective competitors to the US for commodity services like hosting websites.

The US's advantages [despite Silicon Valley] aren't really insurmountable if you have foreign governments throwing a few hundred million at the problem.