Trump can pull the plug on the internet, and Europe can’t do anything about it
-
All that would do is get Jeff Bezos to hire a hitman to take out Trump.
I know an Italian guy who might be down
-
Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
Oh but Europe can do something about it, it would only take a long time and be very costly.
-
Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
Our own internet without Americans? Where do I sign up?
-
Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
Misleading title. It's really about cloud services. And Europe is already working on making itself independent of American cloud services.
-
Hook up a couple servers to some dams.
As someone who works in IT, I love the optimism of making it sound this simple. Things that I expect to take 10 minutes can end up taking weeks, because there's always a surprising answer to "How complicated could it be?"
Wouldn't want to be that PM!
-
Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
Oh, yes please!
It would be disastrous at first, but Europe would recover much stronger than before.
We would have to do a lot to catch up but the seeds are there and they cannot grow because they are in the shadow of the US industry.
The US giants have money and userbase to outperform anything Europe has at the moment and when they cannot outperform some company, they buy it. If Trump ever tries to cut US Tech off, European companies would grow rapidly to fill the void.
-
Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
What does this mean, exactly? Sounds like "Trump could end Europe's internet access", but I'm sure wise Lemmy experts could chime in to clarify this means "Trump could disconnect Europe from the US, internet-wise", which tbh don't sound that bad. Sure hoping it's the latter
-
Ya ok but this isn't a doomsday thing, we used to build our own servers before and lots of people know how to do it still.
All AWS and the like do is remove the hardware for the consumer and add some APIs.
Doesn't sound as scary to me as the article paints. The only hard part would be the migration
If the USA switches off cloud services for the EU, that's a short-term problem. Really bad short term, but after a month or so everything is back up and running.
-
The hardware is here. The entire hecking infrastructure is here. Making it work might not be as easy as flipping a switch, but it is definitely not impossible lol
would probably take a month or two
-
This sounds a lot like, “build your own servers and topple another US industry.”
Honestly, as an American living in Silicon Valley, I would be overjoyed if Europe became the primary kickstarter for open source alternatives to the existing US corporate infrastructure, that bends to the knees of the Federal government. Even here at home, myself and some of my co-workers aren't too keen on the existing status quo tools because there are too many caveats - from rent seeking subscriptions to the inability to verify if something is tampered with.
In the same way Valve saw how having all their eggs in the Windows basket led them to dive head first into linux development, I hope the EU's realization of the risks in the US tech sector lead it to developing unified, well funded OSS alternatives. I would certainly install them.
-
Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Just some stupid doom bait.
If it would get to cable cutting between US and Europe then we have much bigger problems than slow web apps. If Europe would ever get to that it definitely has enough cloud providers for essential services. Around 90% of all bandwidth is entertainment.
-
Misleading title. It's really about cloud services. And Europe is already working on making itself independent of American cloud services.
Thanks for sparing me the clickbait
-
Just some stupid doom bait.
If it would get to cable cutting between US and Europe then we have much bigger problems than slow web apps. If Europe would ever get to that it definitely has enough cloud providers for essential services. Around 90% of all bandwidth is entertainment.
who said slow web apps. EU hosting providers could step in probably, but where is exactly all the data stored currently? even assuming that most orgs do proper, working backups, restoring them and setting up their systems for the new providers would still tame a lot of time
-
What does this mean, exactly? Sounds like "Trump could end Europe's internet access", but I'm sure wise Lemmy experts could chime in to clarify this means "Trump could disconnect Europe from the US, internet-wise", which tbh don't sound that bad. Sure hoping it's the latter
It's the latter. But as a crapload of our everyday services depend on US companies and their servers it would be a service outage we've never seen before. Big US companies (Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta..) could technically mitigate at least some effects if it's just the actual connectivity which is missing but if they're forced to shut down all European services it's a whole another matter.
For your everyday consumer it would mean missing a lot of streaming services, email, personal backups of your photos on cloud services and stuff like that. On some cases even access to their bank accounts would be lost. Depending on your usage patterns a majority of your digital life could vanish overnight. For companies it would be even worse, a ton of them rely on AWS and other services to keep their business running and all that would come crashing down and a massive amount of them would not have workforce, knowledge nor resources (money mostly) to switch over to something else. Also a lot of tax paid service rely on M365 and other cloud based stuff so they would be affected too, but maybe/hopefully not quite as badly as commercial side. Also, our credit card processors are mostly US (Visa and Mastercard) so a ton of money transfers would be halted as well.
So, it would be pretty much a digital catastrophe on government, commercial and consumer fronts for majority of the people. Technically there's nothing we couldn't rebuild on our own, but it would take at least months and more likely several years to get everything back online and the bill for that would be astronomical. And if it's a total kill-switch for US services then Europe would need new mobile operating systems to replace Android/IOS, new OS for their computers as Windows wouldn't work anymore and so on. And on top of that, GPS would go too, but with Galileo that might not be the biggest problem around. And also a ton of other stuff I can't remember right off the bat.
Sure, US would be stranded on the internet (and in the real world too at least to some point) after that and EU/UN/some other entity would take the role which is now on ICANN (and the same for other administrative entities). US would of course get a massive economical hit as well by losing all European customers, but on the worst case that would pretty much mean that the Europe's internet access, at least as we know it now, would end and something else would be built on the ashes.
But hey, at least I personally wouldn't have a problem to find a new job should I want to.
-
If the USA switches off cloud services for the EU, that's a short-term problem. Really bad short term, but after a month or so everything is back up and running.
For big entities sure. But SMEs without dedicated IT and relying on the likes of squarespace would have a really bad time.
-
Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.
As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.
The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.
Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.
Time for EU to start a new web, WWWUS. World-Wide-Without-....
-
The hardware is here. The entire hecking infrastructure is here. Making it work might not be as easy as flipping a switch, but it is definitely not impossible lol
Given the permissive and, well, stupid business practices that the U.S. allows, I’m sure a shell corporation there, an ownership transfer there, and you’ve got a de facto foreign owned company that’s every bit as answerable to the corporation, although not necessarily the U.S. government. I’m sure the shareholders won’t care so long as the stock price still goes up.
Those sorts of changes could presumably be executed much faster than working through the court challenges of nationalizing companies, or of building new facilities/swapping to new providers.
Not that I’m advocating sticking with what would still ostensibly be U.S.-backed tech.
I live in the U.S., and I ply my trade in tech and tech-adjacent sectors. I wouldn’t prefer it if the country I live in becomes a technological backwater and is passed on by the world, but I also am sort of reaching a point where I think perhaps FAFO. -
For big entities sure. But SMEs without dedicated IT and relying on the likes of squarespace would have a really bad time.
They'd just migrate to some EU alternative: https://alternativeto.net/software/squarespace/?origin=eu
Might not be super easy and they might not get the same results, bit if there's no squarespace it will do.
-
who said slow web apps. EU hosting providers could step in probably, but where is exactly all the data stored currently? even assuming that most orgs do proper, working backups, restoring them and setting up their systems for the new providers would still tame a lot of time
where is exactly all the data stored currently?
Hopefully in the EU, as the EU-US DPF is garbage and should be repealed just like the previous "Privacy Shield" attempts.
-
They'd just migrate to some EU alternative: https://alternativeto.net/software/squarespace/?origin=eu
Might not be super easy and they might not get the same results, bit if there's no squarespace it will do.
Sure, as long as someone’s taught them about backups, and they have them, and they’re up to date.
