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Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
- philipallstar 1y agoI think this is long overdue, just like Europe's sudden investment in militaries to pull its weight in global defence. More competition is better.
- noosphr 1y agoGlobal military competition is usually called a world war and is generally a bad thing.
- jeffrallen 1y agoThe best defense is a good offense.
- graemep 1y agoIf you want peace, prepare for war.
- ekianjo 1y agoA single superpower is called living in servitude so pick your poison
- jajko 1y agoWell if one big dictatorship bully starts attacking around for made up reasons, stating wiping out half of continent with nuclear strikes repeatedly, or just roll over the place with a massive conventional army to enslave its population... only a fool remains still. And worse than fool in case of said dictatorship which already enslaved half of said continent for decades in the recent past, infecting those societies with their corrupt ways of life, terror and ruling that still affect those places to this day very negatively. I know about this a bit since I was raised in one such place and saw it all before, during and after fall of Iron curtain. Russians/Soviets were feared even when they were liberating these lands from nazis - they stole everything they could from common folks (soldiers carrying many watches on their hands that needed to be removed in propaganda photos later) and raped whom they could. Not all of them just to be clear, but many many (stories of my grandparents).
- ta1243 1y agoEurope has tried this in the past and the US has vetoed it. The dirty secret is America wants Europe to spend more money with American companies, not just spend more on defence. America would rather 80% of a 100b defence industry than 20% of a 300b defence industry, both from a financial point of view and from a strategic point of view.
- toxicunderGroov 1y agoThey had a good thing going on but that will stop the moment our infrastructure is in place. And pretty soon like the US Europe will be looking to get a return on those investments :)
- philipallstar 1y ago> The dirty secret is America wants Europe to spend more money with American companies Well of course. Just as Europe wants American businesses to spend more money on the EU through fines.
- ta1243 1y agoEurope wants American companies to follow European laws when operating in Europe, same as it wants European companies to follow European laws when operating in Europe. America does not want Europe to have its own defence industry, as this makes Europe less reliant on America. Now I would argue that Europe needs to treat IT services (cloud etc) as a strategic importance like Food and Defence, and America has shown - not just over the last few months, but increasingly over the last decade, that it may not be the reliable partner Europe once thought it was. That would mean subsidising IT in Europe and increasing barriers to non-european services -- i.e. artificially increasing costs of AWS and Azure, but Europe hasn't done that yet.
- croes 1y ago> Under Trump 2.0, some Europeans fear that storing their data in the bit barns of Microsoft, Google and AWS is no longer safe More like realize it wasn’t safe even before Trump
- pjc50 1y ago> "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else." Exactly. So long as that is true, the idea that an EU datacenter run by Microsoft can be "sovereign" is nonsense. Having an in-EU owned cloud becomes a national security issue. Tech independence is a long way off though. I wonder if, like the carbon transition, it will require an announced phaseout date to concentrate minds.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoForget about access. What happens if Trump, tomorrow, orders Microsoft to cut off some government because they were mean to him or whatnot? How much leverage does a European economy running on American technology hand D.C., and do you really trust us to safeguard that power responsibly?
- pjc50 1y agoIt's a very real risk! Economic suicide for Microsoft .. in the long term. In the short term? Well, Satya Nadella is an immigrant, so he can simply be disappeared like Jack Ma, without guaranteed access to a court, if he doesn't follow orders.
- ForHackernews 1y agoUber has already shown tech companies can overthrow local governments that won't play ball. Amazon could probably topple the Trump regime tomorrow by surfacing tariff charges on their invoices. Microsoft could just bluescreen every Windows device in the USA with a message "Call your legislator at 555-9999 and tell them to repeal the CHUM Act"
- belter 1y agoThere’s virtually nothing, technically or managerially, that can slow down the massive iceberg that is Azure and Microsoft. Call it cynical if you like, but I see it as a plain statement of fact that as of May 2025: - A cloud platform riddled with security vulnerabilities. - Two major breaches that exposed customer data to other customers. - Widely disliked by seasoned cloud professionals who are forced to use it. And yet...it’s thriving....Microsoft’s earnings yesterday showed Azure and other cloud services up 33% year-over-year, and the stock jumped 9% in after-hours trading.
- rikafurude21 1y agoAnyone else see the parallel to the Trump-Tarriff debacle that has been going on - Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech ~15 years ago. Sounds alot like outsourcing everything to chinese manufacturing and then complaining about being dependent on china, which is unfair! At the very least europe has noticed a problem and started thinking about finding a solution, which is a half step in the right direction. The best day to start is today
- bflesch 1y agoHyperscaler is such a middle management buzzword. Who actually needs hyperscalers? Is it a whole company or just a single app of that company which needs hyperscaling along a certain requirement (storage, processing, bandwidth)? And if you go into a US vs Europe comparison, SAP seems to be scaling fine. And datacenters used by netflix, cloudflare, etc. are all over the place.
- yardie 1y ago2 things happen repeatedly in the European tech scene: you get large enough to be noticed by Google, MS, Amazon, and they acquire you. Or, in order to continue to scale you move the entire company to SV, ie Spotify. If the EU stepped in to block the acquisition or corporate move, in order to keep their tech homegrown, it would be seen as government overreach and not respecting the free markets.
- danielktdoranie 1y agoMicrosoft need to get basic stuff figured out first. Point and case: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/04/windows-rdp-lets-you-log-in-using-revoked-passwords-microsoft-is-ok-with-that/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/04/windows-rdp-lets-yo...
- Delphiza 1y agoWhile governments may be interested in moving stuff off Azure/AWS/GCP, in my experience, most businesses don't care enough. It is difficult enough to get them to spend money on the bare minimum needed for security. Yes, they will want 'sovereign data' because it looks good on the annual report, but most would not do it for double the cost. Europe and other parts of the world should reduce their dependency on American tech, or any other tech that locks them in - regardless of it is geopolitical or something else (SAP?). They're not going to be able to do it soon, so will wait out the next four years. Governments do have a serious problem though, but are going to struggle to get the investment together.
- pjc50 1y agoSAP is German. "Largest non-US software company by revenue", says wikipedia. Doesn't make it suck less, though. Re: investment, there's long been a solid set of EU open source contributors, from Torvalds himself through SUSE etc. I think if we identified the right 100 people and gave them money and a sense of civic mission, the EU could achieve a lot in this area. However, the EU's own anti-subsidy rules trip it up here. The history of Munich is very interesting here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... Of course it's also political. If you want an alternative to US megacorps you have to put up with reds and greens.
- Delphiza 1y agoThe inclusion of SAP, as a German company, was intentional. Lock-in is not just American, and these days it is extremely difficult to have independence from large tech companies. It is not impossible, but requires significant government investment, and a desire for businesses to move. I don't see European businesses moving away from Microsoft and Google email services in big enough numbers to create a sustainable market for alternatives.
- ta1243 1y agoEuropean tarrifs on AWS/Azure/GCP would be an option. European tech companies expanding into SAAS is less of a mountain than physical production.
- abhisek 1y agoGood for open source companies eating a part of the pie from big techs by offering open source self-hosted alternatives. For B2B solutions, it’s more about implementation, workflows and support. Of course scaling and core platform maintenance and support is a challenge with self-hosting.
- jeppester 1y agoTrump might be succeeding at what lots and lots of European tech experts have been unsuccessfully trying to do for years: Making those in power realize that it is not acceptable to be totally dependant on and locked-in to US tech.
- apatheticonion 1y agoI'd love to see the EU aggressively expand investment in the Linux desktop. I'd absolutely drop my job and jump on FOSS projects if there was financial incentive to do so - I'd even take a hit on compensation to participate.
- cruzcampo 1y agoSame, I'd love if the EU sponsored the development of open source alternatives. I'm tired of the American tech industry and how it's towing the (anti-European) party line - just give me a way to make a living while building competitors!
- edhelas 1y agoThey do https://nlnet.nl/core/ https://nlnet.nl/core/ with https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092990 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092990
- apatheticonion 1y agoWhat they already contribute is amazing, honestly. My concern is that, in order to build a genuine competitor to Windows, investment needs to increase substantially. As it stands, getting into kernel development or working on something like a desktop environment (or adjacent software like Firefox or Chromium) is quite difficult in a way that supports you financially. I mean, as individuals, we still invest personal time into public domain projects because we love to tinker and build stuff - but sadly we can't afford to do that full time.
- cruzcampo 1y agoWhat would said tech independence actually take? Which American services would be highest priority to replace? In other words, if I were an EU startup, who should I compete with/try to clone?
- graemep 1y agoTwo different questions. From a public interest point of view I would say AWS, GCP and Azure From the likelihood of a business being successful probably less well entrenched services, and ones politicians understand - so probably things directly used by consumers and very visible. Probably SaaS of some kind. Also, its not just the EU (which is what the article is about). Non EU European countries, and the rest of the world too also have a problem with this dependence. I think the best approach would be broad collaborations on development, with deployment at a national level so every country could have sovereign data centres.
- impossiblefork 1y agoMy hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines. Going back to the old ways, where software was shrink wrapped, fast and local. So if that's where we end up I think we failed to make use of the potential in this forced decoupling event.
- graemep 1y ago> My hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines. I would prefer that, but the GP was asking what a startup should try to do, and I think trying to get people to go back to using their own machines would be an additional barrier.
- cruzcampo 1y agoI do wonder if building software that runs on your own machine would be a market advantage in the EU. One could market strongly with the data privacy / sovereignty angle that resonates a lot more in Europe than the US.
- whywhywhywhy 1y agoI don't think MS has anything to worry about until Europe can ship something other than policy. As much as I'd like them to it's not a place of making things happen, it's a place of trying to make the other places where things are actually built do what they say.
- Havoc 1y agoThat’s appreciated but not sure that’s enough. Think everyone knows US spy agencies will just help themselves to the data anyway regardless of the legal details. Thats just the reality of today’s world. And beyond that with how DOGE seems to be raiding whatever data they want under questionable circumstances I don’t think the issue is limited to NSA and friends. On that basis the only choice seems to be to move away from US providers
- incomingpain 1y agoMicrosoft either has a good product that is wanted or it doesnt and was anticompetitive. cough cough. The EU absolutely should try to stand up their own tech infrastructure. Entire supply chain. chips, software, everything. Absolutely needs to happen eventually. The problem with the EU is singlular; there has been loads of anti-microsoft folks attempting to beat them for basically forever. Unsuccessfully. They dont have anyone who can; if they did they could just me like hey XYZ here's a trillion $, make us independent. All the EU really has is regulation. Which by itself will prevent investment from ever giving them independence. The irony that their future of independence depends on extreme deregulation.
- Mossy9 1y agoI'm very hopeful that https://www.euro-stack.info https://www.euro-stack.info will not be a pipe dream, but actually produces results
- incomingpain 1y agoRealistically I look at that and think there's not a snowballs chance in hell that the EU is going to accomplish that. Not even in 100 years. Not without major regulation changes anyway. Mind you, they absolutely do need to, so get started right away.
- surgical_fire 1y ago> Under Trump 2.0, some Europeans fear that storing their data in the bit barns of Microsoft, Google and AWS is no longer safe This should be very clear to everyone involved. IMO, the plan should be to disallow US cloud providers this side of the pond. These days internet services are essential infrastructure. Much like you don't want a hostile foreign nation controlling your water supply or electricity, you also don't want them controlling your internet.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoFuture software will mostly be AI. And without the ability to produce their own GPUs, Europe can't become independent of the USA.
- mattlondon 1y agoRelated: https://www.s3ns.io/en https://www.s3ns.io/en This is GCP run in an independent, non-google-owned air-gapped data center, operated by local employees in France. No US connection at all - Google just license their software from what I understand, and have no remote or physical access, so even if they did get a secret order to do something, they couldn't. This sort of thing is the way to go
- rjmunro 1y agoIf it runs on US made software, they could probably release a "critical update" whose real purpose was to add a back door for the US government.
- glimshe 1y agoAs long as Europe is dependent on the US for its defense, it will be dependent on everything else. Building an European OS isn't enough.
- josefritzishere 1y agoTrumps changes are going to hurt the profitability of US software firms.