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> No sovereign nation should use US companies for data storage or processing. Period.

So what is Europe supposed to do just stop pretending to be sovereign?

Are you replacing Cisco with Ericsson?

Palo is starting to require telemetry that sends realtime data on rulebase and hitcount from every firewall to increase support effectiveness.

also, just like galileo, this seem to be the correct path for europe to take.

I do not trust anyone with my data. This is just my preference but every year I move further and further away from using the internet for anything other than making comments on this site and watching a few vloggers. In a few years I will not have more than 3 to 5 logins on anything and those will be value add and must be within driving distance. All critical services I use will require walking into a building in person.

If I could find a reputable construction company to build my underground home I would be a true troglodyte.

It seems to me that major US cloud companies are using politics to try to get more value from non-US data, which I believe will push the EU (and others) to accelerate the move to their own alternatives. This is another move that seems to sacrifice longer-term trust (and profits) to boost near-term profits.

Depends how much compromising information they already have access to on the politicians concerned :-)

Please don't stop us having access to your information, else we will destroy you with the information we already hold :-)

I can’t imagine such a thing either, but here in Europe plenty of organisations continue planning on increasing their reliance and lock-in on American tech corps.

I'm a US citizen and I hope more of the world decouples because I think a lot of our issues are due to a lack of competition.

I mean the other options are China and Europe but honestly it's probably way safer as a EU/European citizen to have your data in the USA vs Europe.

The last thing I want is Europe in control of any of my data they just fundamentally don't think privacy from the government should exist. Pair that with the frankly appalling lack of free speech I wouldn't want to risk it.

Such a missed opportunity. We could have been to data privacy and protection what Switzerland is to Banking.

But no, our cooperate oligarch overlords just can't keep their hands out of the piggy bank.

> I’m hoping tech companies in Europe and Asia become independent enough to no longer be beholden to US interests

What tech companies?

At the end of the day, it's all about capital and IP.

American domiciled VCs and companies can outinvest just about any other competitor, and much of the core IP for vast swathes of critical next-gen technologies (high NA EUV, Foundation Models, Quantum Computing) is in the US, but American companies are fine transferring technology abroad (often with American government backing [3][4]) and moving jobs abroad.

China has a similar ecosystem but prefers to invest domestically and for IP to remain within China.

Meanwhile Japan, Taiwan, and Korea continue to back the US no matter what due to tensions with China and North Korea along with existing fixed asset investments in the US.

When companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and others are able to invest tens of billions of dollars in India [0], Poland [1], Israel [2], Portugal [5], Ireland [6], and others it makes them more open to collaborate with American capital and IP instead of dealing with alternatives who cannot deploy similar amounts of capital and transfer IP.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra...

[1] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions...

[2] - https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjcwdmxxzg

[3] - https://www.state.gov/pax-silica

[4] - https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-11/microsoft...

[6] - https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/11/27/microsoft-has...

>It’s clear that the era where any one country has global hegemony should end.

Unipolar worlds are safer than Bipolar. Multipolar is extremely dangerous.

I imagine you didn't know that more people will be killed if the US doesn't have hegemony.

I don't care if they go sovereign, but the GDPR crap is annoying. Would be funny if the US just forced them to get rid of it.

US 'diplomats' are campaigns big donors, or primary supports. I've eaten with someone who expected to be named diplomat in Europe because he supported Obama by 2007, but was one-uped by a richer donor post-primary.

You should look up the word "imperialism" because it's something countries like to do to extract as much wealth as possible to benefit a few people.

This administration really, truly lives under the delusion that they hold "all the cards". In every engagement they think it is for them to dictate and everyone else to follow. Any graciousness they show is just kind benevolence.

And the "diplomats" of this administration is a rogues gallery of Epstein associates (e.g. pedophile sex-trafficking garbage) and self-dealing criminals. Just a who's-who of garbage.

They are sending their absolute worst.

Americans are just blissfully unaware how much their country is being destroyed. It's staggering stuff. Even if you're a super conservative, there should be utter embarrassment and outrage about how incompetent and clownish this parade of imbeciles is.

The US ambassador to France has just had his access to parliamentarians and members of the government withdrawn because he is trying to turn a neo-Nazi who died in a fight into a political martyr. There are similar situations in Belgium and Poland.

American diplomats have been doing Trump's dirty work for a some time.

I am more concerned about US interference in elections and campaigning for the far right than lobbying for data at the moment.

Most 'diplomats' of the new USA are just grifters like Witkoff or Kushner. Real estate people cosplaying diplomats.

The US as the world has known it is gone

https://apnews.com/article/france-us-ambassador-kushner-far-...

The US doesn't have diplomats anymore. Just Republican donors with no experience. Hell, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's dad is a diplomat. A really bad one.

I think it's more likely we end up with a better software ecosystem. There will be plenty of companies for the foreseeable future willing to buy from either continent if one offering is substantially better. More competition will be better, as long as the US govt doesn't succeed in stifling it.

Microsoft for example has had a de facto monopoly in many areas for quite some time and I doubt many would argue that their software quality has flourished in recent years.

Or maybe a better product that’s cheaper. Let’s not let hubris get the best of us. There’s nothing special about the US. I mean imagine being an Oracle customer and switching to a local supplier. Must be like emerging from a nightmare

The UK used to have a cloud provider (UK Cloud) but it got aggressively outcompeted by the US Hyperscalers, despite primarily targeting government departments. It's interesting that at the time the UK didn't consider data sovereignty enough of an issue to support a local cloud company. Shocking really.

A great deal of what may be included in "homegrown talent" in the US according to this comment, indeed has come from other countries...

Ignorance is a Weapon.

Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evil X, which is why so many of our wars start with a ship "under attack" (USS Maine, RMS Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin incident), or supposed WMDs (Iran, Iraq)

A great example is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ask any American and they can call up all kinds of minute details about the attack. However if you ask them about the US trade embargoes and blockades against Japan in the months leading up to the attack, the vast majority of Americans will draw a blank. That is on purpose.

When stuff does break through to us, raw and unfiltered, most will react with horror. The self image of Americans as the Good Guys cracks. This happened in the Viet-Nam conflict when journalists had a free hand to show what was happening. Massive protests and a near mutiny by the US Army caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts. More recently Americans were so horrified when they witnessed the Israeli genocide after October 7th that it completely inverted both public sentiment and support for Israel, causing the forced sale of TikTok to Oracle and under US control to clamp down on the coverage.

The republican population and the foolish minded people who want to be centrists have led to this situation of democrats and republican politicians acting out this way. More than 50% hopefully don't feel that way. I don't

There's a substantial population of most countries who feel that everyone else on the planet is somehow inferior. Basic nationalism. One of the big achievements of the 20th century was reducing that so it might be below 50% in many places.

However, that's not the same as "enemy". That's a more confrontational level. It's that particular branch of the far right which has recently risen to prominence. Ironically, in a lot of different countries.

The general population doesn't even think about the rest of the world.

Not only europe:

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

https://apnews.com/article/chile-united-states-china-visa-sa...

I don't think it's going to be anymore successful in the EU, honestly. The last couple of years have EU politicians throughly over their shit, and it's unlikely many concessions to US BigTech can be bought without serious reciprocity on the table (for example, a major expansion of US military aid to Ukraine)

I don't think it's right to say "privacy/sovereignty". As gestured towards in the source article, Japan and Korea have joined the US's preferred data privacy forum https://www.globalcbpr.org/. Data sovereignty is not a common idea outside the EU, and AFAIK even the current American government doesn't object to US citizens' data being stored in foreign servers under foreign jurisdiction.

At the end of the day it isn't US tech companies that'd suffer (outside some minor short term pain) it's the US. If being in America is bad for business those companies (which already exist multi-nationally in most cases) will just pack up their US holdings.

That'd be amazing. It'd suck for some weeks initially, including for myself and the companies I'm involved in, but at least then it'll start being a "all hands on desk" sort of thing instead of "Lets make sure we finish this before the end of 2026" which is the current state of affairs.

I imagine if the current administration does, Europe could retaliate by withholding ASML’s tech or even doing a mass sell off of US treasuries. Europe is admittedly not in a position of strength compared to the US, but there are still a lot of levers they can pull.

There's no chance in hell that he would because if there's one easy way to piss off the oligarchy it's to make their net worth plummet. And losing >20% of revenue in one fell swoop does just that. Europe remains a huge profit center. That's why all the talk by many Americans including on HN in the past about "well if the EU keeps fining Meta and co billions, maybe they'll stop doing business there!". They'd be removed from their positions before they could even utter the phrase considering it. Imagine how that earnings call would go. "Yeah uhh, we left a market where we were making 20 billion per year net profit because we got fined 5 billion. Mhm.".

Trump's grip on the US oligarchy isn't even 1% as tight as Putin's on Russia's, who has everything completely under his thumb. If the US oligarchy conspires to depose Trump, he's gone next week. That they're all sucking up to him doesn't refute that at all, that's just the optimal move until it isn't. All these people do is take the optimal move for their own net worth at the current point in time.

I'm sure this would be better received if I took an LLM and had it rewrite this in a less conversational and higher-brow way, but it's no longer the time for that.

There is literally no such thing as "US tech". Even for those companies domiciled in the US, it is just the label on a world of contributions.

He wouldn't dare, the coward! ;)

it doesn't mean anything after Microsoft turned over eu government leaders emails to the US.

the damage is done. trump fanning the flames and then using ham fisted threats that frankly carry no weight now... are just making it worse.

the money's already been allocated. the results are inevitable.

Republicans grew up in a world where they can do anything - voter suppression, gerrymandering, steal a presidency or a supreme court seat and nothing happens. Well some women get hit once and never come back.

This has already been on the table for over 6 years now - Stratechery (a tech blog most decisionmakers read) posited the Four Internet theory all the way back in 2020 [0]

[0] - https://stratechery.com/2020/india-jio-and-the-four-internet...

Reminds me of the "US high healthcare costs are subsidising EU cheap healthcare".

The rough argument was: pharma companies need big payoffs when they discover a new drug and, due to structural characteristics of the US market, that's where they can get the highest prices.

So pharmas make a large chunk of their profits in the US and then sell drugs more cheaply in e.g. Europe.

Fairly weak and incomplete argument [1], but I've seen this pushed seriously by people in public debates in the US.

[1] - a couple of obvious issues with this argument are: 1. why is it Europe's fault that the US has structural issues that prevent it from negotiating drug proces as a united front? 2. healthcare costs are largely inflated by admin costs in the US. Drugs can be expensive too, sure, but this argument ignores the big cost intrinsic to the insane insurance and billing system prevalent in the US.

A people that largely can't comprehend that people walk to get groceries should not pass comment on Europe being lazy.

Not to mention the tourists that need to spend a couple of weeks practicing 'walking' in order to survive a European trip...

The US recently rolled out a childhood investment account that offered to pump a thousand dollars per child into the main market index funds backed by the US government. In the SOTU there was also a mention of matching the first thousand dollar invested in an approved retirement account for all residents - not just federal employees.

The US government is pumping the stock market with debt - as long as nobody starts dumping bonds or currency this is an action that will make number go up.

Confidence that in the short term nothing will change. All large-scale change is hard. Change that impacts everyone's workflow will be resisted even if the new thing is better, and in many areas the alternatives are pretty mediocre. Also a combination of political and economic pressure has in the past been successful in making meaningful initiatives fail or roll them back.

In the long term this is an issue. But I'm not sure the US stock market actually cares that much about what the world will look like in 4 or 8 years.

Because the market does not reflect reality.

They have been, if you compare them to the performance of the non-US market, and most software companies are declining daily.

average trader probably doesn't realise the bigger picture

yet

Voting with your wallet doesn’t work when the corpo is big enough to buy everyone off.

IGV down 18%. Tech stocks are falling

See Also: Isaac Newton...

What are you talking about? There's been a ~18% drop in tech sector this past month (see: IGV)

I don't know if it's due to "decoupling" but there has been some selling recently.

they won't stop it

the US was really, really foolish to crystalise the risk by locking out those judges

prior to that it was just a theoretical people were yelling about

now it's real, and there's a continent of hungry businesses lobbying for resources to be diverted domestically, instead of being sent to the US

and that's the EU's bread and butter

> Private businesses in Europe (and elsewhere) should consider it an existential threat to depend on cloud services from the US

They do already, everyone except the ones truly deep into the US ecosystem already have plans or are making plans for how to get out from US infrastructure in 2026.

The argument that it’s wrong would be because it’s bad for US consumers and those abroad too. There’s monopolization arguments, and there’s clear evidence of wrong-doing by these companies already.

Even for US tech folks like HN, I doubt it would help us. US companies hoard their profits and power, so most people here would see no benefit. It’s yet another move to protect rich corporations and the corporate cronies of the most corrupt administration in US history.

The data sovereignty initiatives have been massively promoted by US policy. All this advocacy will achieve is make the US look even less trustworthy.

The article didn’t say it was wrong by my reading: it reported that it’s happening.

That said: “benefits US companies” != good public policy for the US as a whole. It’s explicitly trying to interfere in how other countries govern themselves for the benefit of shareholders, not because it’s necessarily good policy.

It’s also something we wouldn’t necessarily appreciate if done to us by our allies. If we have any actual allies left given all of Trump’s tariffs and threats against other countries.

In a normal, mature government, advocacy for your nation's products would be reasonable, and even then, would be controversial in this instance. "Do not protect your citizens' privacy, our citizens might get ideas".

I think it's the assumptions that are baked in with the Trump regime. No subtlety, no mutual benefit, do as we say or else.

There is plenty of technology companies in Europe.

It might not seem like it for the HN crowd, who mostly make a living stringing web libraries together.

On the other hand, if US tech businesses want to keep access to European markets they shouldn't support US politicians who want to override the sovereignty of those nations.

Businesses exist to fill a demand. And the market will pay accordingly. For example:

Spotify SE == Napster US

Netflix US == Lovefilm UK

Craigslist US == Gumtree UK

Hmm. Where was http invented? Where was ARM invented?