[ChemSpider]

In my main job we provide SaaS services. We get more and more requests for "EU located" services.

A new trend I see is that some customers even rule out using EU located servers that are owned/run by US companies (such as the AWS Dublin or Franfurt locations).

[croes]

Of course they do. Because of the CloudAct the location of the server doesn’t matter.

A US company has to give access to the data on their servers to the authorities no matter where the servers are located.

They can go to court to prevent it but aren’t allowed to inform their customer.

That violates EU law on multiple levels.

[dathinab]

Also EU daughter companies of US tech giants are still legally EU companies (owned by US companies) legally they have to strictly comply with EU law and it matters shit what US law says (from the EU legislative POV) so this puts them into a huge problem spot.

[yibg]

How would that even work if fully enforced? Are there even enough EU owned cloud and SaaS services to fill in for all the US owned ones?

[rsynnott]

At present, no, of course not. No company maintains surplus capacity sufficient to absorb its competitors' business if they withdraw from or are excluded from the market. You'd assume in practice there'd have to be a transition period, during which the likes of Hetzner would be... busy.

(More likely, there's another round of negotiation, and some new bandaid solution is produced; not like it's the first time. No-one, or almost no-one, really _wants_ this to break down entirely; the fallout would be widespread.)

It does seem reasonable to expect that the rate of companies moving stuff out of US-based infrastructure providers will increase, though; the whole thing is very fragile.

[michaelt]

According to [1] "Synergy Research Group data indicated that since early 2017, the collective market share of European cloud players including SAP, Deutsche Telekom, OVHcloud, Telecom Italia, Orange has dropped from 27% to just 13% in their home territory. In the past year alone, their share has dropped around two percentage points. In contrast, Amazon, Google and Microsoft now account for 72% of the regional market."

Doing without would be extremely painful in the short/medium term.

Of course if you could instead force AWS to sell the EU arm of their business, that would be a different matter...

[1] https://www.fierce-network.com/cloud/european-cloud-players-...

[belorn]

What is the time span until it need to be fully enforced? Regulations are rarely if ever instantaneous. For the industry I work in (domain name, hosting, email, and similar services), you start to hear about it when they are being drafted, when they are about to be voted on, when they have been voted on, when it get ratified, when they get a date for when they are going to start being enforced, and once they are being enforced there is a generally a grace period of getting into compliance.

For a lot of stuff this is process that takes 10+ years. A fairly large step is the time between a EU regulation being created and when the same law is ratified by each country, and the span between those two events where the government seeks input from the industry on how to implement the regulation.

[makeitdouble]

It works the other way around: a void is created and it gets filled with business matching the demand.