[flexie]

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector.

I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.

"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.

Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.

[gizzlon]

> "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier.

I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found a lot of interest here in Norway so far..

[prerok]

In my experience, companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe. This means we have to prove we only store data in European datacenters.

I guess that's fine for now, but it would be better if we could get European alternatives to AWS or GCP.

[lenkite]

I really hope the EU is serious about this and doesn't change its mind with the next American administration who offers hugs and kisses.

[mfru]

Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.

Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.

(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)

[trimethylpurine]

Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can guess it's the same in Europe.

It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation. For example, Californians are fine using software from New York. Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far. This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to establish a thriving standard.

[esafak]

What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?

[delfinom]

The US passed the CLOUD Act which subject all those sovereign clouds run by US companies completely subject to US spying and hijack.

Those offerings are garbage for anyone outside the US.

[dijit]

They're largely not unless you are looking to appease your superiors.

OVH, Telecity, Hezner, Bahnhof, Tele2 etc;etc;etc;etc;etc; are all valid suppliers without the need to buy from hyperscalers.

I think what tends to work though is the idea that someone in redmond can't arbitrarily decide to shut you down as an individual or exert pressure. So it goes in order of importance:

A) Can we buy the software and use it in perpetuity

B) If we can't buy the software in perpetuity, do we at least control who has access to the software and our data

C) If we can't control who has access to the data then can we at least ensure we always have access to it?

D) If we can't ensure we have access to our own data then what are we even doing here?

Depending on where you fall on this line (which is a decision each government must make) you'll have to claw back something because right now we're all on D.

[kakoni]

There are no such thing as sovereign AWS/Google cloud in Europe. Marketing-wise maybe.

[foobarian]

Should we discuss DNS root servers at some point too?

[Razengan]

> If not, who are your preferred providers?

Can we have fully decentralized mesh networking yet?

I love how some hyper-sci-fi settings have the concept of a "datasphere" (analogous to atmosphere): an actual physical cloud of ubiquitous nanorobots that provide connectivity, storage and computation.

Wouldn't that also be ideal for AI too the way it's shaping up to be? Any device anywhere would just need to connect to a signal "neuron" of the global brain (possibly becoming a neuron itself) and it should theoretically be able to fetch anything.