Open protocols are kind of thing techies do when in cooperative mode, when industry isn't looking. But this is not this kind of problem - this is an economic, geopolitical problem. It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).
I'll grant it, the turmoil of such transitions is a perfect moment for pushing for open protocols, federated solutions, etc. - the industry is distracted, there's more space to sneak in some good solution before everyone notices, and EU has cultural and political tradition of pushing towards FLOSS (even if largely just as an alternative to Microsoft) and associated values/memetic complex. But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.
It's a blind spot for some software folks, because they forget that FLOSS is an exception here; everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.
It makes no sense to try and fight this here - but it does make sense to go along with the flow and improve things by pushing for more globally optimal solutions, especially that EU is known to be favorable to using openness in protocols and standards as a policy vehicle, both internally and externally.
Scaleway and OVH? Although I’m not sure how they compare at scale to AWS / Azure / GCP.
i am not advocating for a pure "open source will save the world" there are just a few points i'd like you to consider, and hopefully give me insights i can learn from
* other than code, open source has also given us governance "experiments" capable of running critical systems. As another poster was mentioning, the risk is to fallback on "big corps", usually run by "big man", and we are back to zero. The hope? expectations? is that the open source governance ecosystem has tackled this space in enough dimensions to be able to build something over this. I am looking specifically at the area around licenses (mariadb, redis, ...) and just overall governance frameworks, as in "deteach business ownership from ethical frameworks"
* in order to build anything this big/reliable, without megacorp budgets, you can just ... pay FLOSS? They are one of the 2 majorly screwed groups by the current SV setup (with PLENTY of cavaets,amongst them that SV is a huge open soure contributor) The other one being content creators. Slogan? "For this to succeed, you need the best coders and the best marketing departments in the world" Looks to me like incentives are aligned towards them being available. Talking broadly on a systemic level: details need refinement, and space beyond this single message.
* EU (the political instituion) desperately needs this. An innovative tech ecosystem (not startup, not product) driven by "european values" that puts them on the spot. Start with redefining it: there are no users, but citizens. Something effectively out-innovating SV, not just trying to get on par. The risk of "being bought out/copied" doesn't really apply, since (as I said in my original comment) the discriminator is existential: US companies cannot be trusted because they built the existing system. Any attempt to block this (stop users from getting their data back) is going to be challenged by the EU (GDPR violations cannot be brought to court by citizens, only by nation's data authorities, which means a citizen gets big guns and doesn't ned to pay). Also, go on and explain that to all you other (US and not) users.
* A EU cloud provider doesn't have to provide the same services an US provides. That would hardly be innovative. You also don't need to focus on corporations. Provide data storage for citizens, that will be the basis to build a privacy focus cloud, and then business might want that. There is a possible continuation into "advantages of storage&privacy based vs compute", that i skip.
But essentially, to me it seems that an open source, true, "give me back my data" business driven initiative has never been as actionable as now. I short, such a project can make 2 bold statements "We are more innovative than SV" "We have better freedoms than the US"
> But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.
100% i launched into a long trajectory from the comment i was originally answering to, and stopped short
i think-of? dream-of? try-to-build? what you just said
my "in the EU" claim is mostly around legislation (EU art 8 vs US CLOUDS act vs vs China approach to citizen's data)
the legislation is there, since GDPR it's a matter of tools
since corps built tools, they "forgot" to add the third button on cookie banners: "give me back my data" ... (and fourth: "delete it") but the legal framework is there, as well as most of the tooling (google takeout, and so on from all other major players)
it's not that pipelines for moving data from US corps to inidividual do not exists, it's more that, up to now, whenever i was talking about "data rights" to people, even in tech, i got yawns back
now we have a "perfect storm": distrust towards US (administration, collpasing onto US businesses) + global uncertainty towards AI (where lots of people just perceive something happening but lack any tool that gives them control over it)
this is what i perceive as a tectonic shift that can be used innovatively, by EU businesses, hopefully leveraging open
for completeness, i have indeed wrapped "EU" as the spearhead for this, given the incentives to build it, but yes, central authority over this should live inside of each citizen nation framework (see, Japan and South Korea, both providing legal frameworks for data protection)