Comment by locknitpicker

> 1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings.

I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed Kubernetes clusters.

It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However, those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware utilization and vendor lock-in.

So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?

I can tell you right away: nothing.

> 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage;

I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies require cloud services for the same reason any other company requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.

> 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent (...)

There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe. NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.

> 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around

You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US also outright disappears people out of the street.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo