Comment by tirant

Tax breaks, operations of state owned industry, other incentives etc are guided by five year plans implemented by a party bureaucracy.

I can't believe we're talking about China in the context of a Cloud sovereignty issue and this is even a question.

Having worked for these Cloud providers China has consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom. Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.

China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled creating a less desirable experience than the less-featured, stable domestic competitor.

Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and industrial assets and move on with business but that's not actually what either side actually wants.

I wonder is the GP is referring to the CLOUD Act, as it is true that US companies cannot be compliant with both the GDPR and the CLOUD Act, but it doesn't weaken the case for European tech sovereignty.

> European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR.

Usually they do. European company processing personal data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."

Of course if they do not process any personal data then it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within GDPR either).

I think what OP means is that a US company cannot simultaneously comply with the CLOUD act and the GDPR. That case has also been made by some courts in the EU, that US law and practice are incompatible with the requirements of the GDPR. US companies who claim to process data in accordance with the GDPR seem to be deceiving their customers. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that companies in the EU who rely on US services, corporations in the US, and even governments themselves keep quit about this unpleasant truth. It means that Microsoft Windows violates the GDPR, Google violates it, every US social network violates it, etc.

Of course, as someone else mentioned, that is not an argument against EU sovereignty but rather one of its motors.