- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.
Absolutely. That’s basically Oracle’a db strategy.
Things like this are why I’ll never use AWS, even if I get to a scale where it makes sense. I value the ability to switch to a different provider or self-host with my own hardware.
Ideally the market is competitive enough that regulation isn’t needed. But maybe that ship has sailed.
I agree with regulations like Net Neutrality, so I guess it would depend on how it’s worded. I’m just worried massive players like AWS would find ways to abuse any regulations we try to make to exclude others.
But yeah, I don’t pitch switching at work, because I’m not in charge of infra or really involved with it at all. I’m a SWE, not a devOPs or IT tech, so if I’m touching anything in Cloudwatch other than looking at logs, something has gone horribly wrong.
The government can get a lot tougher on companies than they currently are in the US. There is a large and somewhat unstoppable public distrust of corporations that will swing the pendulum away from distrust of the government. Whatever part of the federal government that people didn’t trust is having their image re-rehabilitated by DOGE’s idioacy anyway. Corporations will do sneaky lobbying and everything, but at the end of the day they will follow laws that are enforced properly. They don’t have miliataries or private police forces. At least not yet.
I would hope to see cloud service providers fall more under a utility type of regulation, and have the government set up regional ISOs that can buy and distribute services to everyone at regulated prices, and adhere to certain computing standards. This is why I don’t get too mad at billing deals and schemes - if computation, storage, and virtual network infrastructure can be standardized and treated as a utility it would be great for everyone! They deserve to get paid for the power they have to consume and the maintenance and operations cost of a datacenter.
Instead, we see these companies play a very tricky game using the egress costs to capture traffic and activity within their infrastructure. The same strategy applies at Google with ads dictating browser development, at Amazon’s winners and losers based retail business, and everyone’s race to the bottom stealing data for hungry AI model training. It doesn’t work Jim. We need to establish fair legislation for democratizing access to computing and storage at a large scale, the same way we already did with internet access. Instead, we are seeing it go the wrong way with the corporate war against net neutrality from service providers, which is bad for cloud services anyway. In my area, cox was doing some bad stuff, which finally prompted google to come in and deliver fiber they had been teasing for around a decade, which drove costs way down for internet. So hopefully all this stuff will work itself out, but we really need to focus on empowering everyone with access to computation and ownership of their data.
For work, I am lucky enough to work for an employer that has enough pull with AWS that they essentially have to listen to us. But I prefer their open market and transparent, if complicated, pricing to trying to work though a deal with a dozen different other software platform vendors all trying to close business and screw over our clients. Even their sales people are pretty well incentivize to drive service consumption rather than promote lock in. This is leading to a huge problem in AI, but once again I respect the approach AWS is taking with hugging face and making it about flexible consumption than what microsoft and google are doing, trying to shove AI down your throat.