Comment by michaelt

Comment by michaelt 21 hours ago

> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.

If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.

If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.

If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.

hilbert42 3 hours ago

In case of war AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft and others would be immediately directed by government to adopt its war strategy—like it or not—just as US manufacturing was forced to retool for war production during WWII.

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agubelu 18 hours ago

That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet.

The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.

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FpUser 17 hours ago

>"nationalized and forced to keep operating."
Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render a whole infra including hardware inoperable.

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- gopher_space 14 hours ago
  
  I'd imagine the government would be in talks with the highest ranking local Amazon employees long before, but I can't imagine a country trusting the hardware or wanting to manage the jank.
  
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- martijnvds 17 hours ago
  
  It's called us-east-1?
  
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  solatic 15 hours ago
  
  AWS China is a completely separate partition under separate Chinese management, with no dependencies on us-east-1. It also greatly lags in feature deployments as a result.
  
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- hdgvhicv 14 hours ago
  
  We saw the damage crowdstrike caused in a few hours
  
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nixpulvis 21 hours ago

I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power and food production not to mention medical supplies and emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in international trade.

The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.

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michaelt 20 hours ago

Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of countries.
If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.
That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.

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- GoblinSlayer 25 minutes ago
  
  Self hosted ms installations have no instant kill switch, only a slow one.
  
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