Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch.
Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.
The point they're making is that it's hard to find purely European alternatives. Part of the problem is that companies don't advertise when they somehow still depend on American infra.
The fact that they can't compete can be solved fairly easily by implementing strong trade barriers and legal penalties. Use Salesforce inside of a building in Prague instead of SAP? Police raids and charges of sanctions circumvention up the org chart.
This is even worse. For instance, in a medical university, we
recently were told we need a smartphone and install an app
from Google store (!!!), in order to read emails sent out
by officials at the medical university. I protested to that
but they had a deal already with the private company and
their signature meant they had to keep on being addicted to
that private company, so now I am locked out of receiving
emails since for redirect you also need to have that app
installed once. I don't have a smartphone though and I
find it outrageous that people are forced to install it
AND forced to use Google Store, for publicly funded (!!!)
universities here in central Europe. Some lobbyists are
currently getting very rich. I call it theft of taxpayer's
money though.
Imho, the missing component here (in both the EU and US) is an individual right to access covered services.
Where "access" is specifically defined as full functionality on a device of an individual's choice, and offers safe harbor for example options. Like HTML over HTTP (without javascript) or REST APIs.
This should be built on top of existing accessibility requirements, with the goal of preventing not having a Google / Apple smartphone from being an access barrier.
"Covered services" should be defined two-fold, either by market share above a certain threshold or services that are required for normal life/studying/work (and tied to any public funding).
It should be default illegal for entities to make bargains with Google/Apple (or app developers) that exclusively rely on certified devices, except for extremely limited special circumstances.
I don't know where you are, and I'm not an expert, but a job requiring specific technology typically means it is your employer's responsibility to provide that technology. So if they signed a contract that mandates you have a smartphone, you can use your own if you like, but I think they are legally required to provide you with one if you choose not to buy one. In fact in most cases, I think they should prefer that (since the security of your personal device is very much none of their business).
I think this is kind of a ticking time bomb with a lot of companies depending on personal devices for 2FA.
Which is exactly the point of the whole "sovereignty" debate: on one hand there's a lot of slop about "national interest" and "privacy" and "features" and such, and on the other hand management decides for whoever offers something (anything) cheaper and with a golf tournament on top. And then everybody moans and complains about the situation.
European companies just ignore privacy and make their lawyers write increasingly contorted cya statements. I’ve worked in several and the idea we shouldn’t be using American hyperscalers (remember, the CLOUD act means hosting in Europe is useless) gets laughs.
As tech worked who has worked in US FAANGs (still in europe)... the difference is immense.
EU companies simply can't compete and will never be able to compete until they change the mindset. And the change must be pervasive, across all aspects (including IC compensation).
Oh boy, that server story is painful to read. That ain't universal across providers. I work at european data center and was a tech and the worst SLA is like next business day and even then if our hardware is at fault, you won't be waiting for the next day for us to start taking action on it. And if you have a feeling you're left in dark, you can even pick up the phone at middle of the night to call our support and either get some status or light some fire that will prioritize the process in the pipeline (well, to actually DO something other than cold reboot at night time you may need to purchase SLA that will require involvement of higher support level at nighttime/holiday)
There are some things that I'd like to be improved in technical support side, but we are way better in "human reachability", responsiveness and "blame game" point of view than US hyperscalers.
As someone who also works for a US company with very large EU customers and partners I can attest this is completely true. Most European people on HN seem to be in the startup/SME space, so this won’t resonate, but the key point is that people who work for US companies also have zero incentive to switch to an EU company due to the mindsets we see locally.
if the EU furniture maker has the correct mindset and the EU tech company does not then it seems to me the conclusions fall apart
>European tech imported the product ambition. It forgot to import the customer obsession that’s supposed to come with it.
The French furniture maker didn't import the customer obsession. I agree that U.S tech in these particular subsets are better at the EU doing it, and that needs to be fixed but you can't really talk about how great U.S tech is when you can also point at thousands of horrifying lack of support stories from them also.
U.S Tech has a good mindset for replacing hardware when it fails, they have a good workflow for that. The idea that they have good support however should be tempered by regular reading of some sort of online tech news aggregator.
Yeah the problem with EU is that once "compliance" becomes the only reason, lethargy kicks in. Their players stop competing because they have no incentive to, the compliance will keep them afloat.
I would assume the same here. If they are forced to move to EU just because of compliance, the alternatives would remain poor quality.
Doing business with the US is just impossible these days. If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners.
I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out
As long as US dollar remains the reserve currency, others will have to suck up to the US. This is why moving away from the USD is critical. Beyond that, people should pull their investments away from the US. This is difficult, however: US is the market that offers most returns (as to for how long, that remains to be seen), but it takes only a initial dominos falling.
The concern is not so much that the US will lose friends moreso that other business partners will become more prominent. The US has a lot of social capital to burn. I’m not certain that somebody hasn’t calculated how much they can get away with…
- Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.
- Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.
- Majority see these but just move on
- 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat
- Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.
- Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks
The EU will rely on US tech forever because it is literally not possible to create an EU alternative in that business climate. There are no major EU clouds, nor are there any major EU software services and there never will be because the EU is the worst place in the entire world for startups (try starting a company in Germany or France).
> nor are there any major EU software services and there never will be
SAP and Spotify come to my mind first. Some ex-EU services include Skype and Booking.com (latter might still be counted as EU service depending on definition).
That has gone back and forth numerous times over the decades, particularly in legal cases concerning unlicensed content sharing. I think the consensus ATM is that they generally aren't on their own, largely because most network access is through shared NAT arrangements.
At most an IP address (definitely v4, v6 depending on your arrangement) identifies a household or office, not an individual, and “it seems someone hacked the wireless, or one of my smart devices, or a rouge plugin turned me into a residential proxy, etc.” muddies the water further, often an IP address identifies nothing more than which mobile data provider or VPN provider the user was connected through.
As a simple for instance: No one warns when all that is collected is the calling hosts' apparent IP address in their web server or other service logs. Only once entries with record of the address are explicitly linked to other PII (i.e. if URLs contain PII like names, addresses, etc, so those are logged alongside the calling address) is it an issue - and even then the recording of that information in the wrong places is the problem (in the HTTP logs example, what is that data about the user even doing existing in URIs?) not the calling IP address.
You are somewhat confusing two distinct concepts. IP addresses are considered to be personal data because they can be linked to single individual and controller is allowed to give this personal data to someone who can do the linking (e.g. police who can then request logs from ISP or NAT connection logs from the company).
Now it doesn't mean it will always link to single individual, but unless controller can be sure that there are always at least 2 people behind the IP and the devices on that side do not keep enough information to ever link IP+timestamp+destination service to single individual, the controller essentially must assume that IP address is personal data.
This is different from civil liabilities. National courts determine what is the threshold for that. For example in Finland the court has ruled that if the owner of the car cannot name the person who parked the then the presumption is that they did it and are responsible for parking contract breach (KKO 2026:24). National courts could end up with similar ruling for civil liability for sharing content, i.e. assumption that the IP owner either is the person who shared it or knows who they did it & if they refuse to name the person then presumption is that they did it.
The EU keeps trying to manifest the missing european data infrastructure via data regulation instead of outright bans and limits on american companies, the way China did it.
Alternately, it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe. The Dutch American Friendship Treaty accidentally enables this and has become quite popular, but is only for one country.
I am not too sure about that. Every US expat is a sleeper agent waiting for the CIA to call. Their loyalty will always be to America and unquestionable loyalty to the White House.
And then what's gonna happen to the (already fucked)Dutch housing market?
> it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe
Only if it's bidirectional. If Americans can gentrify me out of the EU housing market with their higher purchasing power, then I should also have access to their labor market for those six figure wages to compensate. Tit for tat, as freedom of movement works in the EU. Otherwise it's just monetary colonialism. Imagine if Swedes were allowed to move to Spain but spaniards would not allowed to go work in Sweden.
Maybe build more? I know folks who already own properties hate this little trick, but its pretty effective in solving this. Maybe you've not heard but there is more people than 50-100 years ago when many buildings were built, and disproportionally more in bigger cities where most well paid work is.
There are other factors like zoning and other laws, mentality of given population etc but gist is above.
Not up to me. I'm not a politician. And like you said, property owners hate it and they are majority.
But it's just as easy to oppose gentrification from wealthy Americans without equal terms in exchange. It has the same effect on supply/demand.
Otherwise, I'll be forced to vote for the most radical and vindictive politicians out of spite to see the world burn if I see my government prioritizes wealthy foreigners and throws me under the bus.
Yes! Please yes! I’d love to see more homes built in my town near Utrecht and have supported plans to do so. It’s idyllic and we should try to help more people who want to live like this be able to do so.
Ironically my childhood home in California has a Dutch family living in it. Small world.
No, we shouldn't act like (stupid) children. We should enact a transition based on what we can do and when. I know that nuanced and complex solutions to complex problems don't fire up voters anywhere, but that's the only way to not shoot our own feet.
They should, but the entire EU economy runs on US clouds. It's hard enough to get new hardware as it is (US hardware btw), so how should the EU, especially today, move to sovereign clouds within the next few years?
I'd argue every single EU business with more than five employees would be impacted by such a decision. Just pulling the plug would be economic suicide.
Why? You talk as if you've been victimized by America. I completely understand the desire for privacy and digital sovereignty, but you're talking about escalating into a full out economic war with the US. Meanwhile you personally patron American websites (such as this one) and services.
Seems to me they’re waiting it out. Everything could change in a presidential election and the European economy wins either way. It is an economic bloc after all.
What you describe would be what’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face”
The problem with "everything could change in a presidential election" is that offers no stability. No one wants to plan around "maybe the United States goes rabid again in four years".
> Everything could change in a presidential election
Not really, not immediately, IMO. And if they could, that would be a problem in itself.
It will take some time to undo what has been done and will still be done in the current term. To change things back quickly would take both someone despotic on “the other side” willing to force things through with executive orders, and have the general support needed to weather the negative PR associated with that, and (perhaps more importantly) insufficient kick-back getting those orders quickly reverted or watered down. Even if they elect someone, and a team around them, who is willing and able to work that way, the changes made recently include changes that will make them harder to roll back on. And even if things do get magically fixed in the next term, that would just prove how quickly they could be unfixed again four years later.
The current arrangement has been torpedoed a long time ago already, with the Patriot Act (2001) (though it took many years to understand the extent of it).
> Everything could change in a presidential election
A lot can change, but not everything. Trump won twice and republican elites are fully behind him. Even if he looses, the same ideologies will continue. It happened twice, it is not a fluke but a permanent property of American politics.
Moreover, constitutional changes supreme court created are structural change. They will be super hard to undone - first they would need to change supreme court composition. The influence of money in American politics will just grow, the structural advantages of conservatives have in voting system will just grow and next conservative president will have even more space for maneuvering. (Non conservative one will likely be stopped by supreme court on some excuse.)
So, basically, outside of change actual constitution which is impossible, it will stay the same at best in the long term.
The main blocker for this was that Trump extended this to the military domain. I.e., tax US hyperscalers and Ukraine does not get US weapons/information anymore.
Becoming independent from the US in the military domain will take some work.
Outright bans would destroy European companies that rely on American companies. First they need to build their own infrastructure (which China has done).
Legislation for a ban will take years anyway, and will have sunrise/sundown provisions. This will provide ample time to build the infrastructure. But infra won't happen without mandating the transition, since market incentives will always pull against it.
Right, that’s another choice though. Everything points towards Europe embracing US tech intentionally while sidelining their own homegrown companies. And of course while making noise about it the whole time. Why?
China was really only able to build out their own infrastructure because of blocking American companies starting early on, though. Europe may just be fucked...
I agree. Beyond scale and inertia against moving (and frontier AI models) it’s not obvious to me what would be hard to replicate in Europe given regulation that mandated non-US hosting.
Most companies using hyper scalers are doing weird superstitious things at the behest of overpaid consultants. And the huge margins they take make it easier to adapt to things like higher electricity costs.
It’s technically possible, but would face
too much resistance. People don’t want to leave familiar and cheaper services, and care less about the non-immediate issue of European sovereignty.
Privacy laws are actually one of the very useful things that came out. It is difficult to do the same in the US because of the business lobby. It is crazy that US citizens data can be purchased in the “black” market and the used by the agencies. Leaving tech companies to self regulate is just not viable and it is proven time and time again they cannot do it.
bans and limits just hurt consumers and freedom of speech. data regulation is useless as you said. what china actually did is a lot better.
they ignored decades worth of friedman inspired economic "theory" and started directly investing in their own industry. most successful chinese tech companies are a joint venture between state owned, municipal and private capital. you can get loans way under market rate if you have a good business plan in a industry the government is treating as a priority.
in america every time someone like obama or biden tried they got shut down by big money interests. any investment is bad because its "picking winners and losers". subsidies are bad because the only way to pay for them is increasing taxes and thats bad for profits. europe should never go down that path.
The only answer isn't to sink to the lowest common denominator.
Ban or tax things from the "globalised" world that are just worker/societal/environmental protection arbitrage so they're competing for the EU market on a level playing field, then we'll see who can compete.
The EU is plenty big enough to be self-sufficient if it has to and shouldn't be afraid of risking this if abusive and exploitative companies from other places don't way to pay their way.
Tbf it could reduce hiring friction and make it easier to take a chance on a riskier hire. Also makes it easier for workers to change jobs, notice periods here can be outright insane (3 months in some cases) and even as an employee I hated them.
Longest I’ve seen in NL is 2 months, and it’s usually one. It’s common to string multiple “temporary” contracts together though.
It still increases switching cost. As a worker with a permanent contract I have to weigh new opportunities against losing that. And it has real impacts! Getting a mortgage is harder on a temp contract (doable in NL, basically impossible in Ireland)
Six months is the default probationary period in Germany, I can't remember ever seeing a job without that.
Temporary contracts are also a thing here, but if there's no objective reason for the contract to be temporary it will end after max. two years. According to Verdi ~1/13 contracts are temporary - not great, but could be much worse.
It's more simple than that; lack of investment due to various factors among which some are due to regulations, but also because the lower ROI you get in the USA due to corporate culture, higher cost in general (wages, energy, resources, manufacturing, etc.), slower economic growth and so on.
The EU isn’t a country, which is exactly why things are lacking vision and feel confusing. The EU is actually too decentralized and fragmented for its own good, contrary to what people whine about.
We need more federalism, and an actual single market
Check Swiss worker protections compared to France or Germany and then check their economy and tech companies there. Biggest Google office outside the US is in Switzerland.
It's not better worker output, it's faster movement and pivoting to rapid changing market conditions as a company, if you can get rid of slackers that abuse unions and worker protections to coast and do nothing.
Can someone explain me like im 10 - what exactly is the root problem here? Why all these dances (and wasted taxpayers money) with data living here or there? Isnt it (in general) just another unnecessary pain for good guys while relatively easy solvable issue for bad guys? What do I miss? Genuine question.
As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.
IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.
A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning.
The way this is going is definitely worrying, but what you're saying is disingenous at best.
Furthermore, even if this passes somehow, that doesn't change the fact that the US remains an unreliable partner. Now we have two governments scouring through your data instead of one.
> A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning
What are you talking about? It is the EU Commission's wish together with EPP to scan everything including E2EE, photos, videos. The original proposal even had a section about analyzing voice calls.
The EU isn’t a single entity, it’s a whole ecosystem of actors pushing their own agenda. The parliament, which represents the people, has been very clearly opposed to chat control
This seems like a very good principle to adhere to in general. Anything that is funded by the public needs to serve the public interest, in my opinion.
Putting public money into e.g. proprietary software and proprietary services that are then operated and gated by a few selected companies, for profit, with their only goal being the rent seeking via long term government contracts, is in my opinion far from being in the public's best interest.
I do not trust either but you have to at least agree that having some sort of mutually recognised data privacy framework is a good idea because the courts can enforce it then. Saying everything must be from EU is also slightly silly and we should instead have something similar like certification (cyber act ?) to ensure enough competition exists to avoid service degradation. IMO cryptography could be the answer to many privacy related issues for the cross border transfers.
Also these decisions related where the data is stored and which service is used are under control of each commercial org buying them. The risks are assessed at the end of the day and in case of any issues the providers change. Why would a publicly funded org store citizen data in the US is a question regardless of privacy laws though.
> Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.
For the skimmer/TL;DR'er, note that this article is by an advocacy group presenting their analysis of a situation, and then advocating and taking action on it: "Next Steps: Commission must repeal EU-US deal. noyb ..."
It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.
For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.
These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.
The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.
However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.
I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.
You could both be right: Shrems III could be in the works, and TLA could be presenting their legal analysis as an established fact.
In other words, (a) no, the "US Supreme Court" didn't "Just Bl[ow] Up EU-US Data Transfers" – there's nothing in the decision even remotely addressing the transfers (nor the EU!) – but (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.)
I think "noyb will also file a lawsuit in the coming weeks", from the person/group who brought us Shrems I and Shrems II, counts enough as "Shrems III could be in the works". Don't you?
The linked article does not present their legal analysis and call for action as established fact.
It's ok to disagree. If the SCOTUS decision in question had any wording to the tune of "the EU-US data transfers need to stop," it would be fitting to say that the "US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers." However it did not, so it wouldn't.
I don't know what your point is. There is no need for the US Supreme Court, in its decision to endow the President with "unitary executive" power, to elaborate all of the things they blew up to get there.
It's not like West Virginia v. EPA elaborated all the emissions regulations which were blown up by the "major questions doctrine."
My point is this: Shrems III may or may not be filed, if and when it's filed the relevant court may or may not decide to review it, if they decide to proceed they may reach many different conclusions, one of the possible outcomes being a blow-up in the EU-US data transfers. Then we will we be able, with the benefit of the hindsight, conclude that the SCOTUS decision in question indeed blew up the transfers.
But we're not there yet. At this point in time "US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers" is a prediction about the future. It is however written in past perfect tense as if it's already happened. But what's happened is the SCOTUS decision only. Whether it will, or will not, blow up the data transfers — still remains to be seen.
I'm not saying that this will not happen; all I'm saying is that "blowing up of the data transfers" will happen when an actual court will decide that it's the consequence, not when some advocacy group will decide that it's the consequence.
Alternatively, you could perhaps read the summary at the top of the article and see that the actual analysis goes as follows:
a) According to EU treaty law, the oversight on EU-US Data Transfers must be independent
b) In the current EU-US deal, the European Commission relies on the independent FTC 259 times
c) the US Supreme Court decided in Trump v. Slaughter that the US Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) may not be independent anymore
It is completely immaterial that the Supreme Grift ruling was not about the data transfers itself -- this is just some fallout from an activist court creatively reinterpreting established legal structures.
> (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.
Given that the closing paragraph contains the sentence "given that the US still exercises massive pressure on the EU to keep personal data flowing, noyb will also file a lawsuit in the coming weeks, aiming to allow the CJEU to annul the current deal" I think it's pretty clear that it will.
So the US Supreme Court is doing here more and better for
EU citizens (!!!) than the EU commission and EU courts are.
Because the EU officials constantly keep on lying to EU
citizens how our data is safe in the USA, which it clearly
is not, even aside from Trump's brown shirts, the ICE snipers
that have already killed US citizens in shootings. The world
is a very strange place, but one good thing is that Trump's
criminal gangster organisation has not undermined the whole
US court system yet. And he is now too old and too demented
to do so, so they will rally behind hugely uncharismatic
losers such as eyeliner-boy "can't stop it with my make-up"
Vance or "I change my opinion all the time" Mr. Rubio.
The US supreme court is correcting the lies the American government made when they assured the EU and its citizens that they can be trusted with their data. It's not just the EU lying, both sides are awful at this.
I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise. It makes sense, because banning EU companies from using AWS/GCP/etc. would bankrupt the EU into a recession, but the way they're going about these things is very annoying.
That said, if the USA would actually keep its promises and adopt legislation that solves the reasons why the EU cannot give out a decent competency decision, the problem would go away entirely.
The Biden administration set up a precarious body within the government to resolve the issue rather than go through the normal lawmaking process, probably because it wouldn't go through.
> I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise
We are too afraid of change and having to take responsibilities. Delegating to the US worked for decades, and it’s very hard to accept that we’ve done a mistake and need to take some risks ourselves. I feel it’s the same issue we have at European countries level.
But also, the EU is still a patchwork of entities that do not have a common vision of what the future should be. Hopefully losing our largest ally will push towards a closer, more federalist union. There is still so much work to do to unify the single market. I’m watching closely what is going on with the 28th regime[0] for that purpose
> the EU is still a patchwork of entities that do not have a common vision of what the future should be
For many, that's a feature, not a bug. The EU follows a democratic system consisting of many different countries with different types of government and different ideologies. It's not a unified federal government, as much as some people would like it to be.
The whole 28th regime concept seems extremely flawed to me. I understand the desire from a business perspective, but as a citizen I do not want a company to opt out of national legal protections and obligations by operating under some fantasy government. Unless this concept will be subject to the strongest, best-enforced regulations and tax rates equivalent to the highest tax rates within the Union, I do not want this project to happen, and I predict I'm far from the only one.
> but as a citizen I do not want a company to opt out of national legal protections and obligations by operating under some fantasy government.
There is no opt-out, if the proposal is accepted the country members would define a new legal form. You would still have national oversight, legal obligation and protection. But you would get access to a new company form that is recognized in and common to all member countries.
But yes, if you do not want more unification then it's likely not something you want to see. I personally believe that we are currently handicapping ourselves with the current, unfinished single market. I want to see an actual EU federation, where we develop a share vision, take risks together, and simplify the flow of capital and people between country members.
The other concept I'm following with interest is uniting European stock exchanges
> We are too afraid of change and having to take responsibilities
It's unclear whether Europe can continue to exist with its current social guarantees without American security guarantees. It isn't a matter of subsidy. Just scale. Building a parallel security establishment will leave America and Europe poorer. But Europe's cost will be its welfare state.
Maybe, we will see. I'm doubtful we need to fully replace the US. I don't believe that we will actually see Russia do a ground invasion of the EU, so for example the massive militarization Germany is going for doesn't make too much sense IMHO. If things continue to go in that direction that will indeed be ruinous. What we need is more, better coordination and team work between the member countries
Nah. They are simply giving more power to Trump, power that he did not used to have and should not have. That is it. Supreme court is are advancing their own ideological goals and rewriting parts of constitution they don't like.
It has a tendency of doing so, but in this case the body that was supposed to patch over the requirements for EU data transfer was flawed in its design.
The reason this house of cards was necessary in the first place is that the American government does not want to grant foreign citizens the rights necessary to ensure the privacy guarantees the EU requires.
American courts deciding that institutional independence is bad now is awful for American citizens, but it's not supposed to be very relevant to the EU like this.
Current AI companies with trillion USD valuations, models which costed them billions USD to train and now have total addressable market few hundred approved entities are very close to being a fad.
I wonder how many billions in lobbying money Schrems has cost various big companies.
The treaties and deals he has managed to torpedo by forcing courts to uphold privacy laws is insane (and impressive).
Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch. Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.
Switching to EU companies is easy. Switching to EU companies that don't have American companies as sub-processors is a lot harder.
What's hard? Just switch.
The point they're making is that it's hard to find purely European alternatives. Part of the problem is that companies don't advertise when they somehow still depend on American infra.
Think the issue is that it was supposed to be a 'world wide web', but increasingly there's caveats to that.
The fact that they can't compete can be solved fairly easily by implementing strong trade barriers and legal penalties. Use Salesforce inside of a building in Prague instead of SAP? Police raids and charges of sanctions circumvention up the org chart.
This is even worse. For instance, in a medical university, we recently were told we need a smartphone and install an app from Google store (!!!), in order to read emails sent out by officials at the medical university. I protested to that but they had a deal already with the private company and their signature meant they had to keep on being addicted to that private company, so now I am locked out of receiving emails since for redirect you also need to have that app installed once. I don't have a smartphone though and I find it outrageous that people are forced to install it AND forced to use Google Store, for publicly funded (!!!) universities here in central Europe. Some lobbyists are currently getting very rich. I call it theft of taxpayer's money though.
Imho, the missing component here (in both the EU and US) is an individual right to access covered services.
Where "access" is specifically defined as full functionality on a device of an individual's choice, and offers safe harbor for example options. Like HTML over HTTP (without javascript) or REST APIs.
This should be built on top of existing accessibility requirements, with the goal of preventing not having a Google / Apple smartphone from being an access barrier.
"Covered services" should be defined two-fold, either by market share above a certain threshold or services that are required for normal life/studying/work (and tied to any public funding).
It should be default illegal for entities to make bargains with Google/Apple (or app developers) that exclusively rely on certified devices, except for extremely limited special circumstances.
What country? Which university?
I don't know where you are, and I'm not an expert, but a job requiring specific technology typically means it is your employer's responsibility to provide that technology. So if they signed a contract that mandates you have a smartphone, you can use your own if you like, but I think they are legally required to provide you with one if you choose not to buy one. In fact in most cases, I think they should prefer that (since the security of your personal device is very much none of their business).
I think this is kind of a ticking time bomb with a lot of companies depending on personal devices for 2FA.
They might be a student, in which case the rules might be much less in their favor.
oh, of course. How did I not think of that!
"après moi le déluge" - said every public sector purchase decision maker ever.
Which is exactly the point of the whole "sovereignty" debate: on one hand there's a lot of slop about "national interest" and "privacy" and "features" and such, and on the other hand management decides for whoever offers something (anything) cheaper and with a golf tournament on top. And then everybody moans and complains about the situation.
European companies just ignore privacy and make their lawyers write increasingly contorted cya statements. I’ve worked in several and the idea we shouldn’t be using American hyperscalers (remember, the CLOUD act means hosting in Europe is useless) gets laughs.
the issue with EU companies is often the mindset: https://julien.danjou.info/blog/europes-cloud-problem-isnt-t...
As tech worked who has worked in US FAANGs (still in europe)... the difference is immense.
EU companies simply can't compete and will never be able to compete until they change the mindset. And the change must be pervasive, across all aspects (including IC compensation).
Oh boy, that server story is painful to read. That ain't universal across providers. I work at european data center and was a tech and the worst SLA is like next business day and even then if our hardware is at fault, you won't be waiting for the next day for us to start taking action on it. And if you have a feeling you're left in dark, you can even pick up the phone at middle of the night to call our support and either get some status or light some fire that will prioritize the process in the pipeline (well, to actually DO something other than cold reboot at night time you may need to purchase SLA that will require involvement of higher support level at nighttime/holiday)
There are some things that I'd like to be improved in technical support side, but we are way better in "human reachability", responsiveness and "blame game" point of view than US hyperscalers.
As someone who also works for a US company with very large EU customers and partners I can attest this is completely true. Most European people on HN seem to be in the startup/SME space, so this won’t resonate, but the key point is that people who work for US companies also have zero incentive to switch to an EU company due to the mindsets we see locally.
if the EU furniture maker has the correct mindset and the EU tech company does not then it seems to me the conclusions fall apart
>European tech imported the product ambition. It forgot to import the customer obsession that’s supposed to come with it.
The French furniture maker didn't import the customer obsession. I agree that U.S tech in these particular subsets are better at the EU doing it, and that needs to be fixed but you can't really talk about how great U.S tech is when you can also point at thousands of horrifying lack of support stories from them also.
U.S Tech has a good mindset for replacing hardware when it fails, they have a good workflow for that. The idea that they have good support however should be tempered by regular reading of some sort of online tech news aggregator.
> The gap is the same “playing not to lose” instinct I wrote about with French tech: do the minimum, follow the procedure, don’t get blamed
Oof, Exhibit B: Arianespace.
Yeah the problem with EU is that once "compliance" becomes the only reason, lethargy kicks in. Their players stop competing because they have no incentive to, the compliance will keep them afloat.
I would assume the same here. If they are forced to move to EU just because of compliance, the alternatives would remain poor quality.
This is simplistic to the point of meaninglessness
Doing business with the US is just impossible these days. If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners.
I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out
pariah: outcast, disliked
piranha: carnivorous fish
Also piranha: Brazilian Portugese slang for hooker.
Accidental accuracy
Do they mob potential Johns?
> piranha: carnivorous fish
Nice callout.
Neither here nor there, but many (most?) fish are carnivorous.
I think the key difference with piranhas is that they eat humans. Most carnivorous fish eat other fish or water-dwelling creatures.
Name checks out.
Pesca pescatarian - would be a cuisine made entirely of fish that eat other fish?
Apparently not piranhas, they seem to be omnivorous!
Pearà: very peppery cream from Verona, served best with boiled meat
Sounds right
everybody loves piranha!
paraná: a state/river in southern Brazil
Paranaueee!
As long as US dollar remains the reserve currency, others will have to suck up to the US. This is why moving away from the USD is critical. Beyond that, people should pull their investments away from the US. This is difficult, however: US is the market that offers most returns (as to for how long, that remains to be seen), but it takes only a initial dominos falling.
The concern is not so much that the US will lose friends moreso that other business partners will become more prominent. The US has a lot of social capital to burn. I’m not certain that somebody hasn’t calculated how much they can get away with…
Sadly nothing will change.
- Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.
- Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.
- Majority see these but just move on
- 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat
- Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.
- Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks
- Its f*king broken system
The EU will rely on US tech forever because it is literally not possible to create an EU alternative in that business climate. There are no major EU clouds, nor are there any major EU software services and there never will be because the EU is the worst place in the entire world for startups (try starting a company in Germany or France).
> nor are there any major EU software services and there never will be
SAP and Spotify come to my mind first. Some ex-EU services include Skype and Booking.com (latter might still be counted as EU service depending on definition).
Europa, the official web portal of the tech sovereign European Union, will have to change their CDN provider (Amazon's CloudFront).
https://europa.eu
So will https://wero-wallet.eu - you know, the European alternative to VISA/MasterCard.
Unless that site collects personal information, it's fine isn't it? This isn't about where stuff is hosted, it's about privacy.
IPs are personal information afaik
That has gone back and forth numerous times over the decades, particularly in legal cases concerning unlicensed content sharing. I think the consensus ATM is that they generally aren't on their own, largely because most network access is through shared NAT arrangements.
At most an IP address (definitely v4, v6 depending on your arrangement) identifies a household or office, not an individual, and “it seems someone hacked the wireless, or one of my smart devices, or a rouge plugin turned me into a residential proxy, etc.” muddies the water further, often an IP address identifies nothing more than which mobile data provider or VPN provider the user was connected through.
As a simple for instance: No one warns when all that is collected is the calling hosts' apparent IP address in their web server or other service logs. Only once entries with record of the address are explicitly linked to other PII (i.e. if URLs contain PII like names, addresses, etc, so those are logged alongside the calling address) is it an issue - and even then the recording of that information in the wrong places is the problem (in the HTTP logs example, what is that data about the user even doing existing in URIs?) not the calling IP address.
You are somewhat confusing two distinct concepts. IP addresses are considered to be personal data because they can be linked to single individual and controller is allowed to give this personal data to someone who can do the linking (e.g. police who can then request logs from ISP or NAT connection logs from the company).
Now it doesn't mean it will always link to single individual, but unless controller can be sure that there are always at least 2 people behind the IP and the devices on that side do not keep enough information to ever link IP+timestamp+destination service to single individual, the controller essentially must assume that IP address is personal data.
This is different from civil liabilities. National courts determine what is the threshold for that. For example in Finland the court has ruled that if the owner of the car cannot name the person who parked the then the presumption is that they did it and are responsible for parking contract breach (KKO 2026:24). National courts could end up with similar ruling for civil liability for sharing content, i.e. assumption that the IP owner either is the person who shared it or knows who they did it & if they refuse to name the person then presumption is that they did it.
Ah, of course. Interesting.
Yes, they are
Can they even use a CDN now?
We have European CDNs
BTW I honestly think they could get away with running a few instances of Varnish/Vynil and call it a day.
The EU keeps trying to manifest the missing european data infrastructure via data regulation instead of outright bans and limits on american companies, the way China did it.
The EU should cut all ties with the US, tax US products and impose costly (and difficult to get) visas to American citizens wanting to visit.
It won't do any of this because it has no balls and no vision.
We're doomed and it's our fault.
Alternately, it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe. The Dutch American Friendship Treaty accidentally enables this and has become quite popular, but is only for one country.
I am not too sure about that. Every US expat is a sleeper agent waiting for the CIA to call. Their loyalty will always be to America and unquestionable loyalty to the White House.
Well I suppose Europe can start its own manzanar if it comes to it.
Emigrants aren’t really known for their patriotism.
And then what's gonna happen to the (already fucked)Dutch housing market?
> it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe
Only if it's bidirectional. If Americans can gentrify me out of the EU housing market with their higher purchasing power, then I should also have access to their labor market for those six figure wages to compensate. Tit for tat, as freedom of movement works in the EU. Otherwise it's just monetary colonialism. Imagine if Swedes were allowed to move to Spain but spaniards would not allowed to go work in Sweden.
Maybe build more? I know folks who already own properties hate this little trick, but its pretty effective in solving this. Maybe you've not heard but there is more people than 50-100 years ago when many buildings were built, and disproportionally more in bigger cities where most well paid work is.
There are other factors like zoning and other laws, mentality of given population etc but gist is above.
>Maybe build more?
Not up to me. I'm not a politician. And like you said, property owners hate it and they are majority.
But it's just as easy to oppose gentrification from wealthy Americans without equal terms in exchange. It has the same effect on supply/demand.
Otherwise, I'll be forced to vote for the most radical and vindictive politicians out of spite to see the world burn if I see my government prioritizes wealthy foreigners and throws me under the bus.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Wow, if only it were possible to build new homes. Might mean less parking though!
Anyway, the number of Europeans starting companies in California suggests something is deeply wrong in Europe.
Incidentally DAFT is nominally bidirectional, but as usual the US makes it more onerous. There’s a similar agreement with NL and Japan, actually.
>Wow, if only it were possible to build new homes.
Can we do it in your back yard?
I like how people assume every country has unlimited free space for housing and all you have to do is just build more.
Yes! Please yes! I’d love to see more homes built in my town near Utrecht and have supported plans to do so. It’s idyllic and we should try to help more people who want to live like this be able to do so.
Ironically my childhood home in California has a Dutch family living in it. Small world.
Respect
No, we shouldn't act like (stupid) children. We should enact a transition based on what we can do and when. I know that nuanced and complex solutions to complex problems don't fire up voters anywhere, but that's the only way to not shoot our own feet.
They should, but the entire EU economy runs on US clouds. It's hard enough to get new hardware as it is (US hardware btw), so how should the EU, especially today, move to sovereign clouds within the next few years?
I'd argue every single EU business with more than five employees would be impacted by such a decision. Just pulling the plug would be economic suicide.
Time to dust off that sampling profiler and make code way more efficient, simple and well architected.
Why? You talk as if you've been victimized by America. I completely understand the desire for privacy and digital sovereignty, but you're talking about escalating into a full out economic war with the US. Meanwhile you personally patron American websites (such as this one) and services.
> no balls and no vision
Seems to me they’re waiting it out. Everything could change in a presidential election and the European economy wins either way. It is an economic bloc after all.
What you describe would be what’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face”
The problem with "everything could change in a presidential election" is that offers no stability. No one wants to plan around "maybe the United States goes rabid again in four years".
> Everything could change in a presidential election
Not really, not immediately, IMO. And if they could, that would be a problem in itself.
It will take some time to undo what has been done and will still be done in the current term. To change things back quickly would take both someone despotic on “the other side” willing to force things through with executive orders, and have the general support needed to weather the negative PR associated with that, and (perhaps more importantly) insufficient kick-back getting those orders quickly reverted or watered down. Even if they elect someone, and a team around them, who is willing and able to work that way, the changes made recently include changes that will make them harder to roll back on. And even if things do get magically fixed in the next term, that would just prove how quickly they could be unfixed again four years later.
For the worst, you mean ?
The current arrangement has been torpedoed a long time ago already, with the Patriot Act (2001) (though it took many years to understand the extent of it).
> Everything could change in a presidential election
A lot can change, but not everything. Trump won twice and republican elites are fully behind him. Even if he looses, the same ideologies will continue. It happened twice, it is not a fluke but a permanent property of American politics.
Moreover, constitutional changes supreme court created are structural change. They will be super hard to undone - first they would need to change supreme court composition. The influence of money in American politics will just grow, the structural advantages of conservatives have in voting system will just grow and next conservative president will have even more space for maneuvering. (Non conservative one will likely be stopped by supreme court on some excuse.)
So, basically, outside of change actual constitution which is impossible, it will stay the same at best in the long term.
I agree with everything you have written here, however even in the face of that it makes “economic” sense for the EU to wait it out.
If it means "be strategic and start making necessary long term adjustements without entering useless temporary pissing contests" I agree.
If it means "wait and change nothing long term, hope it will be better" I dont.
I think a lot of European nations have been reevaluating their relationship with the US. Digital sovereignty in particular is a burning topic.
The main blocker for this was that Trump extended this to the military domain. I.e., tax US hyperscalers and Ukraine does not get US weapons/information anymore. Becoming independent from the US in the military domain will take some work.
Europeans should cut ties with their own fascist, Russian sympathizers leading the polls first, then worry about Americans.
We can and should do both at the same time
some would even say its one broad stroke of brush that somehow ends up covering both
I agree, Europe taking care of it's shit for once rule solve a lot of problems for America
Outright bans would destroy European companies that rely on American companies. First they need to build their own infrastructure (which China has done).
Legislation for a ban will take years anyway, and will have sunrise/sundown provisions. This will provide ample time to build the infrastructure. But infra won't happen without mandating the transition, since market incentives will always pull against it.
The time to start this process is now.
Europe has Jolla and Fairphone (who could surely work out something with GrapheneOS). Seems like the problem is will.
European wallet and bank apps don’t even support them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730729
Right, that’s another choice though. Everything points towards Europe embracing US tech intentionally while sidelining their own homegrown companies. And of course while making noise about it the whole time. Why?
China was really only able to build out their own infrastructure because of blocking American companies starting early on, though. Europe may just be fucked...
What kind of 'infrastructure' did China have when they had "fallen out" with Google (in 2010?), that the EU does not have now ?
I agree. Beyond scale and inertia against moving (and frontier AI models) it’s not obvious to me what would be hard to replicate in Europe given regulation that mandated non-US hosting.
Most companies using hyper scalers are doing weird superstitious things at the behest of overpaid consultants. And the huge margins they take make it easier to adapt to things like higher electricity costs.
It’s technically possible, but would face too much resistance. People don’t want to leave familiar and cheaper services, and care less about the non-immediate issue of European sovereignty.
Privacy laws are actually one of the very useful things that came out. It is difficult to do the same in the US because of the business lobby. It is crazy that US citizens data can be purchased in the “black” market and the used by the agencies. Leaving tech companies to self regulate is just not viable and it is proven time and time again they cannot do it.
bans and limits just hurt consumers and freedom of speech. data regulation is useless as you said. what china actually did is a lot better.
they ignored decades worth of friedman inspired economic "theory" and started directly investing in their own industry. most successful chinese tech companies are a joint venture between state owned, municipal and private capital. you can get loans way under market rate if you have a good business plan in a industry the government is treating as a priority.
in america every time someone like obama or biden tried they got shut down by big money interests. any investment is bad because its "picking winners and losers". subsidies are bad because the only way to pay for them is increasing taxes and thats bad for profits. europe should never go down that path.
FWIW the EU is a basically a large subsidies-handing body. They do pick winners (like with solar companies) but it did not work.
When those in charge of handing out the subsidies are both corrupt and incompetent, it's tough to make it work.
Unless of course, the point of the EU subsidies is just to be a wealth transfer program from the taxpayers to politically connected corporations.
Ban, limits, and regulation won’t solve a country with too many worker protections. The EU simply can’t compete in the modern globalized world.
The only answer isn't to sink to the lowest common denominator.
Ban or tax things from the "globalised" world that are just worker/societal/environmental protection arbitrage so they're competing for the EU market on a level playing field, then we'll see who can compete.
The EU is plenty big enough to be self-sufficient if it has to and shouldn't be afraid of risking this if abusive and exploitative companies from other places don't way to pay their way.
slashing worker protections would do what exactly?
Tbf it could reduce hiring friction and make it easier to take a chance on a riskier hire. Also makes it easier for workers to change jobs, notice periods here can be outright insane (3 months in some cases) and even as an employee I hated them.
It reduces risk for employers by piling it onto employees, who are also probably in a worse position to bear it.
Arguably this is the reason it should be borne by the government, not companies. This is one option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
Is a 6 month probationary period not good enough to take a chance?
Longest I’ve seen in NL is 2 months, and it’s usually one. It’s common to string multiple “temporary” contracts together though.
It still increases switching cost. As a worker with a permanent contract I have to weigh new opportunities against losing that. And it has real impacts! Getting a mortgage is harder on a temp contract (doable in NL, basically impossible in Ireland)
Six months is the default probationary period in Germany, I can't remember ever seeing a job without that.
Temporary contracts are also a thing here, but if there's no objective reason for the contract to be temporary it will end after max. two years. According to Verdi ~1/13 contracts are temporary - not great, but could be much worse.
This seems like companies will struggle to eliminate roles they no longer need if the person filling it has been around more than 2 years.
The two year limit doesn't apply if the company has an objective reason for making the role temporary, e.g. external dependencies.
You pick it. From what I keep hearing, it's a cure-all. /s
free the "animal spirits"?
/s
It's more simple than that; lack of investment due to various factors among which some are due to regulations, but also because the lower ROI you get in the USA due to corporate culture, higher cost in general (wages, energy, resources, manufacturing, etc.), slower economic growth and so on.
The EU isn’t a country, which is exactly why things are lacking vision and feel confusing. The EU is actually too decentralized and fragmented for its own good, contrary to what people whine about. We need more federalism, and an actual single market
Reduced worker protections -[somehow]-> better worker output. /s
the [somehow] is pretty clear: exploitative working conditions.
Check Swiss worker protections compared to France or Germany and then check their economy and tech companies there. Biggest Google office outside the US is in Switzerland.
It's not better worker output, it's faster movement and pivoting to rapid changing market conditions as a company, if you can get rid of slackers that abuse unions and worker protections to coast and do nothing.
Can someone explain me like im 10 - what exactly is the root problem here? Why all these dances (and wasted taxpayers money) with data living here or there? Isnt it (in general) just another unnecessary pain for good guys while relatively easy solvable issue for bad guys? What do I miss? Genuine question.
As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.
IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.
> As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
EU is working on mandating scans of all your private encrypted messages right now. EU data protection is marketing for the gullible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719
A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning.
The way this is going is definitely worrying, but what you're saying is disingenous at best.
Furthermore, even if this passes somehow, that doesn't change the fact that the US remains an unreliable partner. Now we have two governments scouring through your data instead of one.
> A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning
What are you talking about? It is the EU Commission's wish together with EPP to scan everything including E2EE, photos, videos. The original proposal even had a section about analyzing voice calls.
The EU isn’t a single entity, it’s a whole ecosystem of actors pushing their own agenda. The parliament, which represents the people, has been very clearly opposed to chat control
No news to me. Reactionary authoritarians are a threat to freedom everywhere.
> Public Money, Public Code
This seems like a very good principle to adhere to in general. Anything that is funded by the public needs to serve the public interest, in my opinion.
Putting public money into e.g. proprietary software and proprietary services that are then operated and gated by a few selected companies, for profit, with their only goal being the rent seeking via long term government contracts, is in my opinion far from being in the public's best interest.
I do not trust either but you have to at least agree that having some sort of mutually recognised data privacy framework is a good idea because the courts can enforce it then. Saying everything must be from EU is also slightly silly and we should instead have something similar like certification (cyber act ?) to ensure enough competition exists to avoid service degradation. IMO cryptography could be the answer to many privacy related issues for the cross border transfers.
Also these decisions related where the data is stored and which service is used are under control of each commercial org buying them. The risks are assessed at the end of the day and in case of any issues the providers change. Why would a publicly funded org store citizen data in the US is a question regardless of privacy laws though.
Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
It's well overdue to take seriously and put all our efforts behind the many (various but little known) local-first initiatives.
See for instance: https://elfaconsortium.eu/ It's a race against time.
> Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.
Irony is not bad faith.
For the skimmer/TL;DR'er, note that this article is by an advocacy group presenting their analysis of a situation, and then advocating and taking action on it: "Next Steps: Commission must repeal EU-US deal. noyb ..."
It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.
For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.
These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.
The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.
However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.
I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.
You could both be right: Shrems III could be in the works, and TLA could be presenting their legal analysis as an established fact.
In other words, (a) no, the "US Supreme Court" didn't "Just Bl[ow] Up EU-US Data Transfers" – there's nothing in the decision even remotely addressing the transfers (nor the EU!) – but (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.)
I think "noyb will also file a lawsuit in the coming weeks", from the person/group who brought us Shrems I and Shrems II, counts enough as "Shrems III could be in the works". Don't you?
The linked article does not present their legal analysis and call for action as established fact.
It's ok to disagree. If the SCOTUS decision in question had any wording to the tune of "the EU-US data transfers need to stop," it would be fitting to say that the "US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers." However it did not, so it wouldn't.
I don't disagree with the linked-to analysis.
I don't know what your point is. There is no need for the US Supreme Court, in its decision to endow the President with "unitary executive" power, to elaborate all of the things they blew up to get there.
It's not like West Virginia v. EPA elaborated all the emissions regulations which were blown up by the "major questions doctrine."
> I don't disagree with the linked-to analysis.
I meant that it's ok for you and me to disagree.
> I don't know what your point is
My point is this: Shrems III may or may not be filed, if and when it's filed the relevant court may or may not decide to review it, if they decide to proceed they may reach many different conclusions, one of the possible outcomes being a blow-up in the EU-US data transfers. Then we will we be able, with the benefit of the hindsight, conclude that the SCOTUS decision in question indeed blew up the transfers.
But we're not there yet. At this point in time "US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers" is a prediction about the future. It is however written in past perfect tense as if it's already happened. But what's happened is the SCOTUS decision only. Whether it will, or will not, blow up the data transfers — still remains to be seen.
I'm not saying that this will not happen; all I'm saying is that "blowing up of the data transfers" will happen when an actual court will decide that it's the consequence, not when some advocacy group will decide that it's the consequence.
Alternatively, you could perhaps read the summary at the top of the article and see that the actual analysis goes as follows:
a) According to EU treaty law, the oversight on EU-US Data Transfers must be independent
b) In the current EU-US deal, the European Commission relies on the independent FTC 259 times
c) the US Supreme Court decided in Trump v. Slaughter that the US Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) may not be independent anymore
It is completely immaterial that the Supreme Grift ruling was not about the data transfers itself -- this is just some fallout from an activist court creatively reinterpreting established legal structures.
> (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.
Given that the closing paragraph contains the sentence "given that the US still exercises massive pressure on the EU to keep personal data flowing, noyb will also file a lawsuit in the coming weeks, aiming to allow the CJEU to annul the current deal" I think it's pretty clear that it will.
So the US Supreme Court is doing here more and better for EU citizens (!!!) than the EU commission and EU courts are. Because the EU officials constantly keep on lying to EU citizens how our data is safe in the USA, which it clearly is not, even aside from Trump's brown shirts, the ICE snipers that have already killed US citizens in shootings. The world is a very strange place, but one good thing is that Trump's criminal gangster organisation has not undermined the whole US court system yet. And he is now too old and too demented to do so, so they will rally behind hugely uncharismatic losers such as eyeliner-boy "can't stop it with my make-up" Vance or "I change my opinion all the time" Mr. Rubio.
A big loser team.
The US supreme court is correcting the lies the American government made when they assured the EU and its citizens that they can be trusted with their data. It's not just the EU lying, both sides are awful at this.
I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise. It makes sense, because banning EU companies from using AWS/GCP/etc. would bankrupt the EU into a recession, but the way they're going about these things is very annoying.
That said, if the USA would actually keep its promises and adopt legislation that solves the reasons why the EU cannot give out a decent competency decision, the problem would go away entirely.
The Biden administration set up a precarious body within the government to resolve the issue rather than go through the normal lawmaking process, probably because it wouldn't go through.
> I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise
We are too afraid of change and having to take responsibilities. Delegating to the US worked for decades, and it’s very hard to accept that we’ve done a mistake and need to take some risks ourselves. I feel it’s the same issue we have at European countries level.
But also, the EU is still a patchwork of entities that do not have a common vision of what the future should be. Hopefully losing our largest ally will push towards a closer, more federalist union. There is still so much work to do to unify the single market. I’m watching closely what is going on with the 28th regime[0] for that purpose
0: https://the28thregime.eu/
> the EU is still a patchwork of entities that do not have a common vision of what the future should be
For many, that's a feature, not a bug. The EU follows a democratic system consisting of many different countries with different types of government and different ideologies. It's not a unified federal government, as much as some people would like it to be.
The whole 28th regime concept seems extremely flawed to me. I understand the desire from a business perspective, but as a citizen I do not want a company to opt out of national legal protections and obligations by operating under some fantasy government. Unless this concept will be subject to the strongest, best-enforced regulations and tax rates equivalent to the highest tax rates within the Union, I do not want this project to happen, and I predict I'm far from the only one.
> but as a citizen I do not want a company to opt out of national legal protections and obligations by operating under some fantasy government.
There is no opt-out, if the proposal is accepted the country members would define a new legal form. You would still have national oversight, legal obligation and protection. But you would get access to a new company form that is recognized in and common to all member countries.
But yes, if you do not want more unification then it's likely not something you want to see. I personally believe that we are currently handicapping ourselves with the current, unfinished single market. I want to see an actual EU federation, where we develop a share vision, take risks together, and simplify the flow of capital and people between country members.
The other concept I'm following with interest is uniting European stock exchanges
> We are too afraid of change and having to take responsibilities
It's unclear whether Europe can continue to exist with its current social guarantees without American security guarantees. It isn't a matter of subsidy. Just scale. Building a parallel security establishment will leave America and Europe poorer. But Europe's cost will be its welfare state.
Maybe, we will see. I'm doubtful we need to fully replace the US. I don't believe that we will actually see Russia do a ground invasion of the EU, so for example the massive militarization Germany is going for doesn't make too much sense IMHO. If things continue to go in that direction that will indeed be ruinous. What we need is more, better coordination and team work between the member countries
> don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad
Because not trusting them is very expensive. But unfortunately, it's necessary.
> The US supreme court is correcting the lies
Nah. They are simply giving more power to Trump, power that he did not used to have and should not have. That is it. Supreme court is are advancing their own ideological goals and rewriting parts of constitution they don't like.
It has a tendency of doing so, but in this case the body that was supposed to patch over the requirements for EU data transfer was flawed in its design.
The reason this house of cards was necessary in the first place is that the American government does not want to grant foreign citizens the rights necessary to ensure the privacy guarantees the EU requires.
American courts deciding that institutional independence is bad now is awful for American citizens, but it's not supposed to be very relevant to the EU like this.
EU needs to decide if it wants to do data processing or not.
If it’s a yes, it needs datacenters and get a lot more energy.
If no, it needs to transfer data to US for training/inferencing on it.
or wait for the bubble to burst and come out on top.
The internet is a fad and will pass any day now.
One of them creates jobs, one of them removes jobs. Some societies that care about idk... people?... only want one of those things
besides compare all the money that went into one vs the other.
Current AI companies with trillion USD valuations, models which costed them billions USD to train and now have total addressable market few hundred approved entities are very close to being a fad.
This. The US is playing the right move with solar panels, wait for the bubble to burst and then swoop in. Let China take the early losses.
Lol that is like saying let's wait AI out, not build fabs, TMSC will sell em cheap in 2030!
>If it’s a yes, it needs datacenters and get a lot more energy.
It can outsource its data centers abroad too like it did with its manufacturing industry.