A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives.
And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola.
Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany.
IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
> A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU.
Didn’t even Microsoft say that they can’t guarantee that they can follow these laws? Because the US laws take over. So, legal entities are just some smoke screen. They don’t help if the US government wants access to something.
I believe this was the Schrems 2 case from 2020 that declared that the EU US Privacy Shield was insufficient at guaranteeing the privacy of EU citizens due to the CLOUD act, which would require US companies work with the government to potentially spy on EU citizens.
I’m not sure what has happened since then or the legal status of this issue.
The US under Biden did something that made it valid again and then the US under Trump made it invalid again. Right now it's illegal for an EU company to store unencrypted personal data with any US company.
> IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.
The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world.
International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.
> The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world.
Name one country with a large military force that done more good than bad with it? Seems to come with the territory that if you have a large military force, you somehow need to use it for something as otherwise it falls into disrepair, and that "something" tends to be trying to spread your culture one way or another.
Come to think of it, seems China is the only country so far (in modern times) that haven't abused their military to enforce their will on smaller countries, basically every other superpower been abusing their military to make the world worse.
> Come to think of it, seems China is the only country so far (in modern times) that haven't abused their military to enforce their will on smaller countries
Yeah, that's my bad, I later correctly used "superpower" rather than "country" but missed that on my first usage. Was talking about "the big bois countries" :)
While I applaud the strides the EU is taking to decouple militarily, it's still a long ways away from replacing the security umbrella provided by the US military. The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure (although NATO provides a lot of interoperability between European militaries). It's no knock on Europe's efforts--it's just that the dependency on US military was almost a century in the making--it's not going to be undone overnight. But Europe is moving in the right direction--I just hope Europe stays the course and continues to take it seriously.
> The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure
That's... how EU works, intentionally? It's a decentralized union more or less, we're still independent countries with our own laws and what not, each country have their own command and control structure for their own military, on purpose.
They aren't talking about the EU per se getting a military command layer, they're talking about the problem faced by a group of sovereign entities which mostly overlaps with EU member states.
Specifically, the problem of how those states can individually choose to plug their forces into a practiced system of military coordination.
Today, they can do that with NATO, but if they want an alternative, it doesn't exist and it will be difficult to build.
Not being able to stand on our own feet is going to be a major problem because of the implied soft power. It nerfs our ability to ever have a spine on any issue.
China has spent the last couple of decades making inroads into Africa to secure raw materials, not because they want to annex anything on the continent.
It's certainly easier to do business with countries that aren't governed by a psychotic moron that likes to threaten your cost equation on a weekly basis to enrich its cronies
China is very successfully developing and competing with the US, so it is self evident that Europe should continue to do the exact opposite of everything that China is doing.
Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.
And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.
> Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.
I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders. That's why things like Amazon's "EU Cloud" isn't really interesting to anyone in EU and Europe, ultimately there is a US entity that easily folds in favor of the US government, and there isn't much you can do about it unless you stay 100% clear from US entities with your data.
Not that I think our governments in Europe are much better, time and time again they demonstrate they don't care one iota about personal privacy of individuals, so I wouldn't be surprised European companies wouldn't resist even requests.
> I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders.
I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open. I know there are some US entities who have public carnary style notices ("We have not been visited by a government agency, ..."), with the idea being that while they can compell you to not say a thing, they can't force you to say a thing. How well that would work in practise, I dunno, but it shows that some in the US anticipate the issue and at least signal to care about it.
But in the end I agree with you, the safer route for people in the EU is to not deal with this risk to begin with.
> I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open
I wouldn't rule that out either, but also to be entirely realistic, AFAIK, there been one (Lavabit) company in the last twenty-or-so years that went the way of quitting the business instead of just complying. People nowadays seem even less to give up profits in the name of principles, so I'd also wouldn't be surprised basically no one actually doesn't fold.
I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure
AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year.
Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
It's not "the company" that makes such decisions, but some senior managers or directors who do. They don't see a penny extra in their paycheck for savings money, but they are on the hook if anything goes wrong with less mainstream tech choices.
I'm amazed any company pays AWS for servers. I can get if you're paying for a service like media transcoding, but to put it in perspective, AWS normal prices are now about on par with Hetzner's 5x-increased-due-to-the-crisis new price for new servers
Given current prices I doubt anyone is itching at the bone to spec out hardware.
Idk where you would even buy registered DDR5 dims right now. Newegg shows $Request a quote money and that its built to order ... for a 64 GB stick lol.
-most companies's are not global, and so most of their customers are going to be in the same country or nearby so makes sense to keep near the serves close.
This doesn't say anything about which providers are the majority in Europe, which is what OP's study is about. Your findings (non-US companies are "more likely") and OPs findings (US companies are the majority) are both compatible.
Here is a hint: quite many companies need a certificated provider who not only is certified but also has - 99,999% overlook this fact because of ignorance - enough insurance and can theoretically be held responsible financially for services being not reachable.
EU regulation requires such settings.
While I highly value Hetzner and Strato, they don't want to deal with such companies, which is reasonable.
Also what you see is just the visible part, not the internal APIs or due to failure safety different APIs serving in a failover scenario.
Internal networks are huge. And masked or hidden behind quite some intrusion detection as well as layers of protection exactly for this reason.
In other words: you did an interesting posting however it is meaningless without knowing why these what you called churn occurs.
Usually you don't simply migrate from one cloud to another.
Accenture for example had a partnership with Amazon, and use their services. So maybe during the development phase or whatever there appears to be a spike.
In other words: it was a planend. Times series need to be observed for many years.
But nevertheless a nice posting.
It is just that sometimes "facts" from the outside lead to speculations, an insider can only chuckle about.
Before I joined a huge global bank, I thought any startup would eat them alive, think N24. Remember N24? No? Well...
I was part of the senior management, dbCORE as a hint.
Maybe repeat the study, make it run over years, or even better: observe something you know for a fact and see how things change, not the other way around. You would have needed to conduct interviews etc.
By design there is a paradigm called security through obscurity. That's why torture for example seldomly helpful. Is the poor soul lying or not? You need to verify first, in any case.
Outside observation is just that: Platon's allegory of the cave. Useful or not, you never know. That's why I laughed a bit about your disclaimer ("Limitations").
This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far.
It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.
Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?
Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.
Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)
As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products?
Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do?
Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?
I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.
I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.
Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?
Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative.
Adyen is an enormous PSP
Mollie is aiming at smaller companies.
Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)
I think this is exactly the market Mollie is tapping in at the moment: "as feature complete as Ayden, but no need to run millions by us to be a first class citizen"
> is there a real alternative that covers what they do?
Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar?
I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.
I get your point, and even in Italy we have Banca Sella (first one that comes to mind) which is a great way to collect payments with a local processor. But it's not Stripe...
Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me.
Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?
Right, because you're looking for a Stripe alternative, none of them will be.
Did you actually try searching what I told you you could use as a search term? Have you looked into Mollie, Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Quickpay, etc? The list is quite large, there are options available but again, it requires you to proactively review and compare them, not just throw your hands in the air proclaiming "It's not Stripe".
Seems you need to use multiple providers and route payments depending on card type if you want lowest rates. For example, mollie is 2.5% for Amex but Stripe is 1.5% for Amex but or others it swings other way.
> Mollie for UK
- 1.2% + 20p for standard cards
- 2.90% + £0.20 for corporate and European
- 2.50% + £0.20 for Amex
- 3.25% + £0.20 for international
> Stripe for UK
- 1.5% + £0.20 for standards cards inc Amex
- 1.9% + £0.20 for corporate uk cards
- 2.5% + £0.20 for international within Europe
- 3.25% + £0.20 for International + 2% if fx conversion
Interesting, has that changed lately? I remember sitting in a pub talking with a bunch of software engineers living and working in London, maybe 15 years ago, and we were joking about how weird it was that the American tourist tried to pay with American Express, and neither of us had seen an actual American Express card in person before that. Maybe is different nowadays, or maybe we were just in a tiny pub?
Do you know of any EU payment processor that supports recurring payments like a SaaS would need (subscriptions, subscription state tracking, automatic retries of failed payments)?
I looked but couldn't find any. Adyen does not do this on its own AFAICT, only with 3rd party addons that implement recurring payments on top of it. Mollie claims it does this but is woefully incomplete (no failed payment retries for example), and appears to be all in on slop.
I was investigating this 5 months ago and the answer their slop machine gave was:
> Does Mollie retry failed payments (dunning) and track subscription states?
Mollie does not currently provide automatic dunning or retry logic for failed subscription payments. Subscription states like active or past due are tracked, but you need to implement retry and notification logic in your system. This is a common feature request and may be on the roadmap, but no official release date is available.
From your link, note though:
> If your subscription payment does not succeed, Mollie may attempt it again up to 5 times (once a day), depending on the failure reason. After all retries have been exhausted, the subscription will be cancelled.
If there's a payment issue, I would not consider cancelling the subscription 5 days after the first failure as reasonable. I would expect the subscription to go into "past due" state, and to keep retrying.
Interesting things. What is your opinion on Helcim (though it seems to be US/Canadian?) but your comment made me do a bit of digging because I think that I know fairly well about the server side of things but I still somewhat believed that stripe was the cheapest options in general. Thanks for making me get into this rabbit hole I suppose, I do like these rabbit holes though :-D
So do you have more information about normal payment processors in general which are more competitive than Stripe. The comment below by @khurs for example shows that Stripe is actually a bit cheaper than Mollie for Amex cards (which you respond with the point that most European demographic doesn't use Amex cards etc.)
but I am non-european, non-US so I have no skin in the game and I wish to support those which are mutually beneficial to me in terms of providing me a very decent deal and hopefully good support as well. So what do you suggest me some more resources about and would there be anything better than Stripe.
I absolutely know that AWS and others are so overpriced that I sometimes even used to wonder why people might buy it if OVH and Hetzner exists (before price increase, perhaps it can still be price competitive sometimes though)
But interestingly, I didn't believe the same for Stripe, so I am re-thinking my belief about Stripe and payment processing in general too (which to be fair, tangentially might also perhaps be the same way some people might feel about AWS). So I'd be curious to learn more! :-D
Edit: just did some more digging and as an Indian, we have UPI payments which there are some providers of but there is an option iirc for us to directly have a bank account and do a lot of payment processing so much more easier with UPI ourselves and basically pay 0% for Indian specific traffic as India heavily uses UPI (its really good to be honest!) and there are some providers like carefree/razorpay as well which can accept UPI on their side at 1.6-2% if you want API and are just starting out
But I am curious about accepting European/American/Canadian cards though. It seems that carefree/razorpay are recommended if targetting Indian markets and Helcim for American/canadian and Adyen/Mollie are recommended for European centric markets. So I'd be curious to hear your opinions about it.
You're not choosing between "Hans with a server in his closest in Germany" and Stripe here, you're choosing between two almost equally established companies that just happen to have different geographic locations and different names. Companies like Adyen are even older than Stripe by some years, and there are tons of examples like this.
That's why I meet with them. I have the mobile number of the ceo of Mollie and can call him in the weekend; compared to the US, we are DEFINITELY not big. But haven't had issues since using them since 2006.
For payments I've used Mollie, which is EU based and has good DX. It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service. Adyen is also good.
You're a bit generic on other fronts but Scaleway is an excellent EU-based cloud provider. Haven't missed anything from AWS so far.
> Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
Why would you even want such a product? Managed postgres for cheap in the low 10s of Euros will scale to lots of users.
If your problem is scaling you have the best problem in the world, and one that most cloud vendors offer solutions for out of the box.
Neon is a great solution..which fits a handful of use cases.
US definitely enjoys an apex position in cloud services, but there's little to no core irreplaceable products beyond leading edge AI in European offerings.
Cloudflare might be an exception if latency, ddos protection and global reach are important.
Adding for somewhat completeness sake those are 13 anycast IP addresses with upwards of 2000 servers responding to them. The US has about 500 to 700 of those servers. The EU about 600 servers and the rest of the world 600 to 900 but I do not have exact numbers. One of the root DNS server admins would have to chime in for more accurate numbers. I am fairly certain that the EU servers belong to companies in the EU not that it entirely relates to the overall management hierarchy but I don't know their management structure.
Africa and the middle east have the least, something like ~100 or so.
Some DNS servers can cache their zone information [1].
The anycast is for the /24 those IP addresses share (first.three.octects.0/24)
But if you look those /24 are Arin.
Dig +trace shows the recursive lookup (forwarders) used for your NS.
They almost always end up Arin and arpa. I've troubleshot some connection issues between different data centers and transit providers and found root hint oddities I just escalate to my supervisor
That part makes sense to me. If one has ever tried to announce an ARIN IP in the EU or a RIPE IP in the US they will send warnings that the allocations will be pulled back if that is not fixed. Been there, done that. The root servers were created in the US. To have RIPE IP addresses I would imagine would require ARIN to set up some partnership but there again that gets into management and politics in their organization that I am unaware of. Every time I start to read any of their minutes they lose me after the first paragraph.
If the concern is that the US would somehow break the root servers and disrupt many trillions of dollars of trade I guess that is technically possible but probably unlikely given the amount of trade, tariffs, tax revenue that would impact would end anyone's political career and things would be reverted quickly in my opinion.
> If one has ever tried to announce an ARIN IP in the EU or a RIPE IP in the US they will send warnings that the allocations will be pulled back if that is not fixed.
ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, AFRINIC, LACNIC. If you have announced addresses from one in the others region and have not received warnings it's just a matter of time. ARIN is the most vigilant. There was a time they used to do ping sweeps and nag people about not utilizing their addresses which led to my putting a 1U server on a /17, /19 and some smaller networks with Labrea responding to pings for all of it. They stopped doing that which led to people hoarding IPv4 space and now putting a monetary value on it which is dumb dumb dumb.
Surely that not the case. Check any public BGP looking glass: Arelion/Telia uses RIPE space in the USA, Lumen/Level uses APNIC space in Europe and so on.
ARIN are the most aggressive about it. Maybe others just don't care any more. They certainly used to. I would never hear the end of it. Perhaps others pushed back enough to stop that practice elsewhere.
There are plenty of alternatives to Stripe. Just search for card processors. If you’re a high-risk merchant, or your product falls into a high-risk category, Stripe will probably reject you. That’s why there’s a big market for other processors to step in.
For cyber security examples there are real movement in europe - ciphercue is trying to create a directory of alternatives which is gaining traction - https://ciphercue.com/directory/eu
Maybe going beyond cyber alternatives is whats needed
Asking for a complete replacement is how people get locked in. The way governments end up with m365 by putting out an RFP with the exact feature list of m365. Of course then you limit yourself to only one option.
I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.
It's not about complete replacement. People don't buy a Golf because they googled "Toyota European version" and decided the limitations are acceptable, or because it has all the same buttons as a Hyundai. They do it because Volkswagen and a number of other European manufacturers make genuinely good, competitive cars.
Stripe is stupidly expensive ; I have Mollie and Ingenico with tailored deals which make Stripe seems like the dumbest thing you can do. I don't know what their defaults are, but I tried to reason with Stripe and they said i'm too small; no problem with these two. And I can drive to their HQ and ask what's up if anything is up, which I would prefer even at higher fees.
Stripe, AWS and many of the "defaults" people use are extremely expensive, but since it's mostly VC-funded startups who foots the bills, no one seem to care. But once you're doing bootstrapped/long-lived stuff, you need to start caring, and once you see the terms and prices of other things, you start to realize how ridiculously over-priced AWS, Stripe, et al actually are.
There are a LOT of processors/acquirers, just most don't want to work with small companies and somehow developers are so really not developers that stripe won because 'better api' even though you get overcharged for everything.
Stripe doesn't just process payments.
Are there comparable alternatives on the side of Developer Experience and the amount of services that you can build on top of Stripe? I have never found in any other product the level of care for devs and founders that Stripe has.
I'm clearly not talking about "pay by card" and basic payment processor interactions.
There isn't going to be "EU tech" as long as US can access the EU market as freely because for the mainstream anything it doesn't make sense to have a duplication effort for the EU. USA is/was easier to start business and get funding, you can access Europe just as well from there so why bother with the European based stuff if you are targeting a broad market?
After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for European base and EU is trying hard to clean up the field with things like EU-inc, digital Euro, common markets etc but its not happening fast enough to make a difference today.
Maybe if all goes well and Trump can finish his term or even invades Greenland then EU can have its "tech", but for now its happening slowly because its primarily driven by the hypothetical risks that are convincingly real but but costly to act on.
> USA is/was easier to start business and get funding
I think this would highly depend on the country. With a solid business plan, I could easily get funding via banks and literally start a company with the press of a button in web portal, in Sweden. Similarly, Estonia seems to have made it ridiculously easy as well. In Spain it's slightly harder, I have to fill out some forms, but with stable income, very easy to get a bank loan even for business ideas that probably shouldn't.
Sure, you won't attract multi-trillion VCs that route, but is that exclusively what you're talking about? How much easier can it be to start the company than the press of the button, since you seem sure it's much easier in the US than all the countries in the EU?
Seden is a success story, just as Estonia but instead doing that and god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US and be clear on the situation across all the EU since US is a 3rd party with much clear rights and obligations towards EU. AFAIK that's why the EU wants to have a 28th regime.
So is the US easier than the EU or not? Now you're saying Sweden is a "success story", does that mean it's easier than the US then?
> god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US
What? That doesn't make any sense. If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU, than just starting a Swedish company and selling directly to Danes inside of the EU.
This is starting to sound like someone who never done intra-EU B2B or B2C at all. Where are you getting this from?
Sweden is a success story by European standards but meh by US standards.
> If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU
Starting a US company from EU costs a few hundred dollars depending on the broker etc. and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients). This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US. So it depends.
Maybe things are easier from Sweden but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example? Do you by chance require residence and have residence-related obligations and costs? Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
> then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example? Do you by chance require residence and have residence-related obligations and costs?
You can open a company in another EU country, but if you don't live there, your domestic tax agency may/will interpret the company to be under their jurisdiction based on your residency. Now you have double the paperwork, and likely a more complex tax situation to deal with.
> Starting a US company from EU costs a few hundred dollars depending on the broker etc
And in Sweden it's free, if that somehow would stop anyone anyways.
> and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients
Agreed, if you have US clients, US customers and generally like the vibe of the US, then makes a lot of sense to incorporate in the US. For basically anything else, it doesn't.
> This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example
You misunderstand what "EU single market" is referring to if you think it's supposed to mean pensions and similar stuff is shared across the entire EU. Of course it isn't, and no one of us who actually live and work here have that fundamental misunderstanding you seem to have.
> example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US
Your arguments here make zero sense. Say I'm a Swedish resident, open up a company in Sweden and hire a Finn, now I need to ensure this employment is fully legal. Same goes if the company is in the US, and in fact, would add additional things to do, as suddenly it's not only within EU and EEA, but the legal entity is outside.
> but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example?
I don't know why you would? EU and Europe isn't like the US in that it's many states under one country, we're all different countries with our own laws and so on, there is no "EU-law" or whatever, it's just an umbrella for us to unite under. Why on earth would an German start a company in Greece, if there is nothing particular about Greece in their business? The question doesn't even make sense.
> Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
Ireland and Malta are the "Delaware of Europe" which are popular to incorporate, but generally, I think people prefer to own businesses in countries where they already live, incorporating on the other side of the continent just doesn't make sense.
Not automatically. If the loan is in your name, or you personally guaranteed it, you still have to pay even if the business fails. If it's only in the company's name, usually the company is liable, not you personally. There's also insolvency/"second chance" options, but that’s a legal process, not automatic.
Basically, depends on how you setup the company in regards to liabilities (which I'm guessing is true in the US too), and the exact terms of the loan.
The problem is that many of europe's top talent moves to USA, and also that American funding for European startups is huge, and many are made to relocate/IPO in USA too.
Totally agree. As you said, the gap is significant and closing it requires a lot of effort and investments to cover a risk that could eventually cool down if the general situation stops being this critical.
> a risk that could eventually cool down if the general situation stops being this critical
Exactly, EU must guarantee that there's no going back even if the next US president is likable, cooperative politician and not this thing that Trump is. Otherwise all your investment can perish if switching to MS, Oracle or Palantir or something becomes acceptable again 2-3 years.
A Trump invasion or something just as hard to fix needs to seal the deal.
"What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.
Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes.
However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.
If the company I work at was forced to leave AWS and put all of our engineering teams to work on this, maybe we would finish it in 6 months, being very optimistic.
If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down.
Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.
> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate.
This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.
I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.
> For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.
> Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first
True. Also: the landing page and all the other corporate boasting are often run by a marketeer or similar, who knows nothing about the technical part. They just have a design, and outsource implementation. So it just ends up somewhere.
> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?
LLM text is like an optical illusion for the language part of your brain, only instead of the payoff being "Oh, cool! The dots aren't actually moving!" it's "Oh, 'cool'. You weren't actually trying to tell me anything worth my time."
Yes, because it sounds reasonable at the beginning, then the further you go, the less sense it makes. Ultimately you look up the stuff that felt weird initially, and found the reason why it sounded so weird.
If I never actually noticed it, it wouldn't be slop, that I'd agree with. But in this case, I did notice, so it is slop.
They pointed out that the article is suggesting a completely wrong solution.
If the article was written by a human it would be valuable feedback for the author. Because the article was written by a LLM it was just the commenter being tricked to be engaged by generated noise.
I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts.
On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.
I think the reason for this is that if you're targeting folks for whom Europe-sovereignty resonates as an important factor, those will also care about sovereignty and self-sufficiency in general, and thus just skip your SaaS and go right for (semi) self-hosting.
While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters.
You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.
Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
> If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by blocking their access to that tech (it has happened).
The "sovereignty" part here is a net positive for anyone living in the EU. Net negative for anyone living in the US of course, because being in a dominant position does favour the US.
The default stance should be that nothing you do is private on the internet. If we're talking spying then no service in any country will be secure unless fully encrypted with audits. Any country with an intelligence agency can force companies in their jurisdiction to give them access to data otherwise.
Not sure what you are trying to say, except that it confirms my point: if a company in say, Germany, uses Microsoft and Google services for all their communications, then the US (!) can just get access to all their data.
Now if that company was using services based in Germany, then only Germany could access that data, which is obviously much less of a sovereignty problem (Germany interfering with Germany's affair is just a normal government).
Sure for a German company in Germany that's perfectly reasonable, but we're not talking about each country in Europe having their own copy of AWS/Stripe/Search.
In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands because that is where the infrastructure is. They also happen to be countries with world class intelligence agencies.
We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
> but we're not talking about each country in Europe having their own copy of AWS/Stripe/Search.
We're not talking about having hyperscalers in each country, but I could totally imagine each country having infrastructure.
> In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands
Having the choice between 3 European countries is already a lot better than giving all the data to the US. The US has been a lot more hostile to European countries than "the intersection of hostility from France/Germany/Netherlands".
> We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
Sure, I agree with that. But one doesn't prevent the other. Typically it's not practical to run LLMs in a privacy-preserving manner, so it's a lot better (in terms of sovereignty) to run a server in a place you trust than in a hostile country.
> Having the choice between 3 European countries is already a lot better than giving all the data to the US. The US has been a lot more hostile to European countries than "the intersection of hostility from France/Germany/Netherlands".
History shows conflict seems to be inevitable. You can't assume all European nations will be friendly forever. I'm American, but my hope is that this knee-jerk reaction to just move everything possible to EU has more thought behind it. Improving upon what we currently have especially with respect to privacy so that everyone in the world may benefit rather than just clone American tech and calling it a day.
- IF you can choose to rely on one of [France, Germany, Netherland], then you would need to be in conflict with all three to be screwed.
- IF you can choose to rely on a service in your country, it's better for sovereignty.
Overall, it's all better for competition. The best would be competing services sharing an open core (or even everything).
> this knee-jerk reaction to just move everything possible to EU
The thought is that if you are in the EU, in terms of sovereignty you are better off giving your data to EU services. US companies give their data to US services, so of course it is much less of an issue there. And Americans are not the last to complain when US companies give their data to non-US companies...
I live in an EU country and care deeply for the right to erasure and our consumer rights. The EU legislature does some good things on that front. I "care" for EU tech companies as much as I can care for any company currently. I think technological sovereignty is and will be important moving forward, for our economic resilience, infrastructure stability, among other things.
BTW "EU nationalist" just sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Which is why we’re putting our entire digital identification infrastructure in the hands of Google and Apple. EU technological sovereignty is a kafkaesque affair, and that’s putting it mildly.
I concur, except about the "putting it mildly" part. The digital ID stuff feels kafkaesque, sure, but not more. It's good lobbying at play, and I'm sure we'll find a way moving forward.
Assuming that most Europeans would be loyal to the EU is like assuming that most US Americans are loyal to Donald Trump (or Biden). But in reality a big enough proportion of Europeans see the EU as a hostile foreign influencing force.
Or, to put it another way, do you think any Americans use Microsoft or Apple products out of patriotism or fear of being dependent on technology from other nations?
> But in reality a big enough proportion of Europeans see the EU as a hostile foreign influencing force.
Yeah, I have to doubt your perceived reality here. Can you name some of these "hostile foreign influences"?
The big competitor to Apple is Google, whereas the big competitor to Microsoft is Linux/FOSS IMHO. I'm sorry to be blunt, but in the current political climate I couldn't care less what any Americans are using and for whatever reason. EU citizens on the other hand sure got a few reasons during the last decade due to foreign American politics.
> Can you name some of these "hostile foreign influences"?
The name is the European Union. It is the foreign entity to Europeans. If you doubt that there is a big portion of Europeans who aren't pro-EU, then I guess you doubt that there are Americans who aren't pro-Trump?
Anyway, there were referendums in many countries on the subject of joining the EU, and you can look at those and see that not 100% of the population voted yes.
So it is a false assumption that Europeans would by default have any loyalty or goodwill towards the EU, although I'm sure that a big portion of them do. Especially in some countries.
Well, call me surprised! Which democratic election ever achieves a one-sided 100%?
Still, the majority of the EU population seems to in favor of the EU, whereas the majority of the US citizens are pro-Trump, or they were during the last election at least. So I don't really understand what you're arguing for here.
If the location of something is a part of what you use to decide what to use, then if it's in the EU which is your preferred location, it no longer is "an inferior option", it might end up your only option.
But clearly you don't care, so understandably that choice doesn't make sense for you, that's all fine and good. But still you have to understand other people/organizations than you might have different requirements? Or is that a very foreign concept?
You switch from talking about Europe to talking about the EU half way through. The article was about Europe (excluding Russia and a few others).
> there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated
Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both.
There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare.
> On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.
Computer software is so incredibly cheap in a business setting (that includes public sector) compared to all other tools and expenses, that it always makes sense to pay for and use the most feature complete software you can get.
There are not many big vendors that are EU first apart from SAP, SuSE and a handful more. Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.
> I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired
I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue.
Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.
Well it's because few people have "European-ness" as a strong personal value. Some people have strong values around open-source, or even around the specific country, but the sense of being European and valuing European things is just not very widespread, so in absence of a specific personal value, they pick the cheapest/biggest/most-known option which is usually American.
This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.
> It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.
This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double.
However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality.
Interesting read. Canada would be even more US-skewed.
Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).
Cool, but, the thing is… even though CF is genuinely very good at what they do, I do not think that they have real moat. Nor does any other CDN provider have it.
The top 5 CDNs in terms of popularity are all US-based companies. However, Bunny and other providers are growing and becoming real market competitors.
Switching from Microsoft, Amazon, or heavy Google-based infra to on-prem or other vendors is much more complicated than switching the CDN.
CDNs are a very replaceable component. Basically a DNS record update away, and a bit of config.
My anecdotal evidence from France and Germany is that there is very much a trend to look for non-U.S. alternatives which is somewhat recent. It is related to the current government, not really politically motivated but more of a "no guarantees/cannot rely on this partner anymore" thinking coupled with a bit of "WTF annex Denmark, really". Many companies have task forces or projects to investigate moving tech stacks and in the past this was not even an agenda topic (despite strategic advantages and potential cost savings).
There needs to be more free DDOS offerings and inbuilt DDOS from vm providers.
There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default.
Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.
Good article because it clearly exposes the methodology and the shortcomings of the measurements (mostly the front CDN of a ~20k number of old continent entities of apex/www domain).
Europe right now is the ultimate US vasall. Germany is the leader here; France and Netherlands are much more self-conscious but also way too dependent on US corporations. The worst part is that in Germany with Merz in charge, this will not change. He is a good puppy for the USA.
It's a distraction. Websites are relatively easy to migrate, Office and AD not so much. Isn't it really a case of measuring what you can see vs what really matters?
Looking at serving is very skin deep. The cloud is easy. What about the stack? MySQL hailed from Sweden, now owned by Oracle. The Linux Foundations is in the states. Nginx - F5 (US). There are many Europeans working on site or remotely for US tech.
Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I am an American, and I don't like what I am seeing the last few years, but further balkanization doesn't seem to be a sound strategy.
> Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on?
I don’t see the US as willing to do the necessary stuff for that to happen honestly. Last threats on Greenland were this week, as were last threats on Spain.
Wait to see what they are using for emails and for most of their internal docs (containing any kind of secrets)!
I know companies that will tell you "I'm not gonna put any of my data in cloud, especially not American ones" but they are perfectly fine using any major cloud based office suite (mail, docs, chat/video apps, ecc ecc) where they voluntarily and deliberately load any kind of data.
TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco...
There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc.
I find it laughable.
Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform.
Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that?
Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what?
Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise.
But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is.
People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again.
And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?
Let the yellow man put some more tariffs on imports from the EU. Let him ban EU citizens from Visa/Apple/Microsoft when they disagree with MAGA. Maybe give east Europe to Russia, the west half can be the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states.
As long as there are no options we have no freedom.
Here in Spain it seems better. We don't have tons of alternatives for web services, so lots end up on the typical clouds, but email hosting it seems every region has at least one ajuntament that runs their very own email servers. Helps that the country politically and socially is a bit decentralized since the beginning of the republic, but I was (pleasantly) surprised how many local governments here actually manage their own emails.
There was a HN submission with a map of email servers for local governments around in Europe (the world?), might have been a Show HN but I'm unable to find it now. It was an interactive map with a ton of local governments around in Europe, might have been bigger in scope too but mostly remember the European map as I was mostly focusing on Spain. Maybe someone else have better luck and could link it here? Might have been a month or two ago maybe.
A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives.
And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola.
Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany.
IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
> A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU.
Didn’t even Microsoft say that they can’t guarantee that they can follow these laws? Because the US laws take over. So, legal entities are just some smoke screen. They don’t help if the US government wants access to something.
They did say that last year: https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/07/25/microsoft-ex...
I believe this was the Schrems 2 case from 2020 that declared that the EU US Privacy Shield was insufficient at guaranteeing the privacy of EU citizens due to the CLOUD act, which would require US companies work with the government to potentially spy on EU citizens.
I’m not sure what has happened since then or the legal status of this issue.
The US under Biden did something that made it valid again and then the US under Trump made it invalid again. Right now it's illegal for an EU company to store unencrypted personal data with any US company.
> IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.
As it pertains to military, just wait a few years I think.
The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world.
International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.
> The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world.
Name one country with a large military force that done more good than bad with it? Seems to come with the territory that if you have a large military force, you somehow need to use it for something as otherwise it falls into disrepair, and that "something" tends to be trying to spread your culture one way or another.
Come to think of it, seems China is the only country so far (in modern times) that haven't abused their military to enforce their will on smaller countries, basically every other superpower been abusing their military to make the world worse.
> Come to think of it, seems China is the only country so far (in modern times) that haven't abused their military to enforce their will on smaller countries
Philippines would disagree with this one.
Yeah, that's my bad, I later correctly used "superpower" rather than "country" but missed that on my first usage. Was talking about "the big bois countries" :)
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While I applaud the strides the EU is taking to decouple militarily, it's still a long ways away from replacing the security umbrella provided by the US military. The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure (although NATO provides a lot of interoperability between European militaries). It's no knock on Europe's efforts--it's just that the dependency on US military was almost a century in the making--it's not going to be undone overnight. But Europe is moving in the right direction--I just hope Europe stays the course and continues to take it seriously.
> The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure
That's... how EU works, intentionally? It's a decentralized union more or less, we're still independent countries with our own laws and what not, each country have their own command and control structure for their own military, on purpose.
They aren't talking about the EU per se getting a military command layer, they're talking about the problem faced by a group of sovereign entities which mostly overlaps with EU member states.
Specifically, the problem of how those states can individually choose to plug their forces into a practiced system of military coordination.
Today, they can do that with NATO, but if they want an alternative, it doesn't exist and it will be difficult to build.
You mean decades; especially if they keep up waffling.
This is funny because "waffen" is the German word for "weapons"
what Europe option anyway ???? other than US another power that can fill up the space is China
or are european saying china is better than US ????
Well for one thing, China wasn't adamant about annexing territory belonging to a European nation like half a year ago.
their eyes are firmly on Africa.
Not being able to stand on our own feet is going to be a major problem because of the implied soft power. It nerfs our ability to ever have a spine on any issue.
China has spent the last couple of decades making inroads into Africa to secure raw materials, not because they want to annex anything on the continent.
Renewed calls just today! Give us Greenland or we pull out of Europe entirely.
It's certainly easier to do business with countries that aren't governed by a psychotic moron that likes to threaten your cost equation on a weekly basis to enrich its cronies
...and you're saying this as a point to why dealing with China is easier?
I don’t remember the last time China threatened to invade Denmark?
I do remember the last time the USA did. It was hours ago at a NATO summit.
s/China/Taiwan?
or Tibet?
You are comparing sensational trolls with actual geopolitical history.
Trolling or not, we take it seriously when the US threatens our territorial sovereignity (speaking as a European 100 percent behind Denmark)
Taiwan and Tibet are eminently not in Europe.
Should we casually throw around all places the US invaded too?
Are you suggesting Trump is “trolling” Greenland?
And admittedly I didn’t realize Taiwan was in Europe. Sorry.
“Guys, he’s obviously just trolling—he would never actually do that, it would be insane!”
-MAGA Right before Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, militarily occupy US cities, annul various amendments, start the Iran War, etc.
Greenland invasion is just a joke
no one take Trump seriously
Suppose a dementia patient with a gun declares that they are ready to shoot the tooth-fairy, which has been stalking them to steal their molars.
You might not take their words as a true statement of fact, but the situation going on is still pretty damn serious!
Oh yes, we take him very seriously. He has started two wars just this year.
China is very successfully developing and competing with the US, so it is self evident that Europe should continue to do the exact opposite of everything that China is doing.
As an American, it helps that the US is actively self-sabotaging.
Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.
And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.
> Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.
I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders. That's why things like Amazon's "EU Cloud" isn't really interesting to anyone in EU and Europe, ultimately there is a US entity that easily folds in favor of the US government, and there isn't much you can do about it unless you stay 100% clear from US entities with your data.
Not that I think our governments in Europe are much better, time and time again they demonstrate they don't care one iota about personal privacy of individuals, so I wouldn't be surprised European companies wouldn't resist even requests.
> I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders.
I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open. I know there are some US entities who have public carnary style notices ("We have not been visited by a government agency, ..."), with the idea being that while they can compell you to not say a thing, they can't force you to say a thing. How well that would work in practise, I dunno, but it shows that some in the US anticipate the issue and at least signal to care about it.
But in the end I agree with you, the safer route for people in the EU is to not deal with this risk to begin with.
> I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open
I wouldn't rule that out either, but also to be entirely realistic, AFAIK, there been one (Lavabit) company in the last twenty-or-so years that went the way of quitting the business instead of just complying. People nowadays seem even less to give up profits in the name of principles, so I'd also wouldn't be surprised basically no one actually doesn't fold.
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I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure
https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...
The main reason is that they are based locally, they charge in EUR, you can get the VAT back, and they are much more affordable than AWS.
AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year.
Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
Hi there, I hope it's okay that I comment here since you mentioned us at Hetzner. Please see Hetzner Docs; https://docs.hetzner.com/general/billing-and-account-managem... To enter the VAT ID on your account, go to https://accounts.hetzner.com/account/masterdata and then to "Profile" and to "Contact details". --Katie
> AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year.
Hetzner can do the same as long as you have a valid VAT code.
You mean EU-Vat. And if don't have your business registered in Germany.
I'm still amazed my company is paying £10k per month for AWS when they could have one or two servers on Hetzner do the whole thing.
It's not "the company" that makes such decisions, but some senior managers or directors who do. They don't see a penny extra in their paycheck for savings money, but they are on the hook if anything goes wrong with less mainstream tech choices.
I'm amazed any company pays AWS for servers. I can get if you're paying for a service like media transcoding, but to put it in perspective, AWS normal prices are now about on par with Hetzner's 5x-increased-due-to-the-crisis new price for new servers
Hetzner increased their prices a lot last month. It makes having hardware on premise worth thinking about again.
Given current prices I doubt anyone is itching at the bone to spec out hardware.
Idk where you would even buy registered DDR5 dims right now. Newegg shows $Request a quote money and that its built to order ... for a 64 GB stick lol.
I think primary reasons are that:
-data is kept in EU,
-lower latency for SSH if nearer
-most companies's are not global, and so most of their customers are going to be in the same country or nearby so makes sense to keep near the serves close.
This doesn't say anything about which providers are the majority in Europe, which is what OP's study is about. Your findings (non-US companies are "more likely") and OPs findings (US companies are the majority) are both compatible.
I had a glimpse at your posting.
What exactly were you looking for? APIs?
Here is a hint: quite many companies need a certificated provider who not only is certified but also has - 99,999% overlook this fact because of ignorance - enough insurance and can theoretically be held responsible financially for services being not reachable.
EU regulation requires such settings.
While I highly value Hetzner and Strato, they don't want to deal with such companies, which is reasonable.
Also what you see is just the visible part, not the internal APIs or due to failure safety different APIs serving in a failover scenario.
Internal networks are huge. And masked or hidden behind quite some intrusion detection as well as layers of protection exactly for this reason.
In other words: you did an interesting posting however it is meaningless without knowing why these what you called churn occurs.
Usually you don't simply migrate from one cloud to another.
Accenture for example had a partnership with Amazon, and use their services. So maybe during the development phase or whatever there appears to be a spike.
In other words: it was a planend. Times series need to be observed for many years.
But nevertheless a nice posting.
It is just that sometimes "facts" from the outside lead to speculations, an insider can only chuckle about.
Before I joined a huge global bank, I thought any startup would eat them alive, think N24. Remember N24? No? Well...
I was part of the senior management, dbCORE as a hint.
Maybe repeat the study, make it run over years, or even better: observe something you know for a fact and see how things change, not the other way around. You would have needed to conduct interviews etc.
By design there is a paradigm called security through obscurity. That's why torture for example seldomly helpful. Is the poor soul lying or not? You need to verify first, in any case.
Outside observation is just that: Platon's allegory of the cave. Useful or not, you never know. That's why I laughed a bit about your disclaimer ("Limitations").
This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far.
It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.
Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?
Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.
Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)
As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products?
Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?
I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.
I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.
Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?
Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative. Adyen is an enormous PSP Mollie is aiming at smaller companies.
Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)
The UK Government just replaced Stripe with Ayden for most payments, so good suggestion.
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...
There was a thread about it, and Ayden will not talk to you if you sell less than $5mm/yr using online payments.
I think this is exactly the market Mollie is tapping in at the moment: "as feature complete as Ayden, but no need to run millions by us to be a first class citizen"
I've never been so confused implementing something. I sat there thinking, this is it? There is nothing else to do? How can this be it?
It does have all the features and API craziness other processors offer but you don't have to use any of it.
This could be Adyen's opportunity for a growth spike if they seize it
Unfortunately service reliability of Scaleway was terrible last time we used them.
> is there a real alternative that covers what they do?
Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar?
I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.
I get your point, and even in Italy we have Banca Sella (first one that comes to mind) which is a great way to collect payments with a local processor. But it's not Stripe...
Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me. Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?
Right, because you're looking for a Stripe alternative, none of them will be.
Did you actually try searching what I told you you could use as a search term? Have you looked into Mollie, Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Quickpay, etc? The list is quite large, there are options available but again, it requires you to proactively review and compare them, not just throw your hands in the air proclaiming "It's not Stripe".
Seems you need to use multiple providers and route payments depending on card type if you want lowest rates. For example, mollie is 2.5% for Amex but Stripe is 1.5% for Amex but or others it swings other way.
> Mollie for UK
- 1.2% + 20p for standard cards
- 2.90% + £0.20 for corporate and European
- 2.50% + £0.20 for Amex
- 3.25% + £0.20 for international
> Stripe for UK
- 1.5% + £0.20 for standards cards inc Amex
- 1.9% + £0.20 for corporate uk cards
- 2.5% + £0.20 for international within Europe
- 3.25% + £0.20 for International + 2% if fx conversion
[0]https://www.mollie.com/gb/pricing#psp-block
[1]https://stripe.com/gb/pricing. (scroll down for list)
Almost only Americans use Amex though, unless you exclusively target the US market, you can skip it and basically not miss out on a single customer.
In UK Amex are relatively big.
They do cards with airlines where the customer can earn free flights and other such reward schemes to attract customers.
Interesting, has that changed lately? I remember sitting in a pub talking with a bunch of software engineers living and working in London, maybe 15 years ago, and we were joking about how weird it was that the American tourist tried to pay with American Express, and neither of us had seen an actual American Express card in person before that. Maybe is different nowadays, or maybe we were just in a tiny pub?
Do you know of any EU payment processor that supports recurring payments like a SaaS would need (subscriptions, subscription state tracking, automatic retries of failed payments)?
I looked but couldn't find any. Adyen does not do this on its own AFAICT, only with 3rd party addons that implement recurring payments on top of it. Mollie claims it does this but is woefully incomplete (no failed payment retries for example), and appears to be all in on slop.
Fake news?
> Mollie will retry the failed payment up to 5 times.
https://docs.mollie.com/docs/recurring-payments
Oh, interesting, I stand corrected!
I was investigating this 5 months ago and the answer their slop machine gave was:
> Does Mollie retry failed payments (dunning) and track subscription states? Mollie does not currently provide automatic dunning or retry logic for failed subscription payments. Subscription states like active or past due are tracked, but you need to implement retry and notification logic in your system. This is a common feature request and may be on the roadmap, but no official release date is available.
From your link, note though:
> If your subscription payment does not succeed, Mollie may attempt it again up to 5 times (once a day), depending on the failure reason. After all retries have been exhausted, the subscription will be cancelled.
If there's a payment issue, I would not consider cancelling the subscription 5 days after the first failure as reasonable. I would expect the subscription to go into "past due" state, and to keep retrying.
Can't help you as I've not used it. If it's a new feature feedback might accomplish something.
I keep being told Stripe supports 3D Secure (or whatever the marketing name for it is this week) too :)
They may but it's not out there in the wild.
Interesting things. What is your opinion on Helcim (though it seems to be US/Canadian?) but your comment made me do a bit of digging because I think that I know fairly well about the server side of things but I still somewhat believed that stripe was the cheapest options in general. Thanks for making me get into this rabbit hole I suppose, I do like these rabbit holes though :-D
So do you have more information about normal payment processors in general which are more competitive than Stripe. The comment below by @khurs for example shows that Stripe is actually a bit cheaper than Mollie for Amex cards (which you respond with the point that most European demographic doesn't use Amex cards etc.)
but I am non-european, non-US so I have no skin in the game and I wish to support those which are mutually beneficial to me in terms of providing me a very decent deal and hopefully good support as well. So what do you suggest me some more resources about and would there be anything better than Stripe.
I absolutely know that AWS and others are so overpriced that I sometimes even used to wonder why people might buy it if OVH and Hetzner exists (before price increase, perhaps it can still be price competitive sometimes though)
But interestingly, I didn't believe the same for Stripe, so I am re-thinking my belief about Stripe and payment processing in general too (which to be fair, tangentially might also perhaps be the same way some people might feel about AWS). So I'd be curious to learn more! :-D
Edit: just did some more digging and as an Indian, we have UPI payments which there are some providers of but there is an option iirc for us to directly have a bank account and do a lot of payment processing so much more easier with UPI ourselves and basically pay 0% for Indian specific traffic as India heavily uses UPI (its really good to be honest!) and there are some providers like carefree/razorpay as well which can accept UPI on their side at 1.6-2% if you want API and are just starting out
But I am curious about accepting European/American/Canadian cards though. It seems that carefree/razorpay are recommended if targetting Indian markets and Helcim for American/canadian and Adyen/Mollie are recommended for European centric markets. So I'd be curious to hear your opinions about it.
It's not that they cannot be found.
But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?
You're not choosing between "Hans with a server in his closest in Germany" and Stripe here, you're choosing between two almost equally established companies that just happen to have different geographic locations and different names. Companies like Adyen are even older than Stripe by some years, and there are tons of examples like this.
That's why I meet with them. I have the mobile number of the ceo of Mollie and can call him in the weekend; compared to the US, we are DEFINITELY not big. But haven't had issues since using them since 2006.
I'm italian too.
For payments I've used Mollie, which is EU based and has good DX. It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service. Adyen is also good.
You're a bit generic on other fronts but Scaleway is an excellent EU-based cloud provider. Haven't missed anything from AWS so far.
> Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
Why would you even want such a product? Managed postgres for cheap in the low 10s of Euros will scale to lots of users.
If your problem is scaling you have the best problem in the world, and one that most cloud vendors offer solutions for out of the box.
Neon is a great solution..which fits a handful of use cases.
US definitely enjoys an apex position in cloud services, but there's little to no core irreplaceable products beyond leading edge AI in European offerings.
Cloudflare might be an exception if latency, ddos protection and global reach are important.
Most of the 13 root dns servers are American. They're distributed geographically but still owned by American entities
Adding for somewhat completeness sake those are 13 anycast IP addresses with upwards of 2000 servers responding to them. The US has about 500 to 700 of those servers. The EU about 600 servers and the rest of the world 600 to 900 but I do not have exact numbers. One of the root DNS server admins would have to chime in for more accurate numbers. I am fairly certain that the EU servers belong to companies in the EU not that it entirely relates to the overall management hierarchy but I don't know their management structure.
Africa and the middle east have the least, something like ~100 or so.
Some DNS servers can cache their zone information [1].
[1] - https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone
The anycast is for the /24 those IP addresses share (first.three.octects.0/24) But if you look those /24 are Arin.
Dig +trace shows the recursive lookup (forwarders) used for your NS.
They almost always end up Arin and arpa. I've troubleshot some connection issues between different data centers and transit providers and found root hint oddities I just escalate to my supervisor
That part makes sense to me. If one has ever tried to announce an ARIN IP in the EU or a RIPE IP in the US they will send warnings that the allocations will be pulled back if that is not fixed. Been there, done that. The root servers were created in the US. To have RIPE IP addresses I would imagine would require ARIN to set up some partnership but there again that gets into management and politics in their organization that I am unaware of. Every time I start to read any of their minutes they lose me after the first paragraph.
If the concern is that the US would somehow break the root servers and disrupt many trillions of dollars of trade I guess that is technically possible but probably unlikely given the amount of trade, tariffs, tax revenue that would impact would end anyone's political career and things would be reverted quickly in my opinion.
> If one has ever tried to announce an ARIN IP in the EU or a RIPE IP in the US they will send warnings that the allocations will be pulled back if that is not fixed.
Who are "they" in this case?
ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, AFRINIC, LACNIC. If you have announced addresses from one in the others region and have not received warnings it's just a matter of time. ARIN is the most vigilant. There was a time they used to do ping sweeps and nag people about not utilizing their addresses which led to my putting a 1U server on a /17, /19 and some smaller networks with Labrea responding to pings for all of it. They stopped doing that which led to people hoarding IPv4 space and now putting a monetary value on it which is dumb dumb dumb.
Surely that not the case. Check any public BGP looking glass: Arelion/Telia uses RIPE space in the USA, Lumen/Level uses APNIC space in Europe and so on.
ARIN are the most aggressive about it. Maybe others just don't care any more. They certainly used to. I would never hear the end of it. Perhaps others pushed back enough to stop that practice elsewhere.
There are plenty of alternatives to Stripe. Just search for card processors. If you’re a high-risk merchant, or your product falls into a high-risk category, Stripe will probably reject you. That’s why there’s a big market for other processors to step in.
Adyen is a big payment processor from the Netherlands which many EU retailers already use. Even with some worldwide customers.
UK government too
For cyber security examples there are real movement in europe - ciphercue is trying to create a directory of alternatives which is gaining traction - https://ciphercue.com/directory/eu
Maybe going beyond cyber alternatives is whats needed
Asking for a complete replacement is how people get locked in. The way governments end up with m365 by putting out an RFP with the exact feature list of m365. Of course then you limit yourself to only one option.
I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.
It's not about complete replacement. People don't buy a Golf because they googled "Toyota European version" and decided the limitations are acceptable, or because it has all the same buttons as a Hyundai. They do it because Volkswagen and a number of other European manufacturers make genuinely good, competitive cars.
OVH is much more developed on the managed side, they even have managed k8s as a service.
And you know their infra generally works, you know when it's not on fire.
And when it is, well you are not going to be the only one down.
Stripe is stupidly expensive ; I have Mollie and Ingenico with tailored deals which make Stripe seems like the dumbest thing you can do. I don't know what their defaults are, but I tried to reason with Stripe and they said i'm too small; no problem with these two. And I can drive to their HQ and ask what's up if anything is up, which I would prefer even at higher fees.
Stripe, AWS and many of the "defaults" people use are extremely expensive, but since it's mostly VC-funded startups who foots the bills, no one seem to care. But once you're doing bootstrapped/long-lived stuff, you need to start caring, and once you see the terms and prices of other things, you start to realize how ridiculously over-priced AWS, Stripe, et al actually are.
Neon was actually developed in Europe -- but by Russians, not Europeans. (Source: I interviewed with them around the acquisition.)
What services do you need from Hetzner? It sounds like there's an available business niche here. Serverless?
Out of curiosity. There aren't any payment card processors other than Stripe? I thought I saw bunch of them.
There are a LOT of processors/acquirers, just most don't want to work with small companies and somehow developers are so really not developers that stripe won because 'better api' even though you get overcharged for everything.
Stripe doesn't just process payments. Are there comparable alternatives on the side of Developer Experience and the amount of services that you can build on top of Stripe? I have never found in any other product the level of care for devs and founders that Stripe has. I'm clearly not talking about "pay by card" and basic payment processor interactions.
There isn't going to be "EU tech" as long as US can access the EU market as freely because for the mainstream anything it doesn't make sense to have a duplication effort for the EU. USA is/was easier to start business and get funding, you can access Europe just as well from there so why bother with the European based stuff if you are targeting a broad market?
After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for European base and EU is trying hard to clean up the field with things like EU-inc, digital Euro, common markets etc but its not happening fast enough to make a difference today.
Maybe if all goes well and Trump can finish his term or even invades Greenland then EU can have its "tech", but for now its happening slowly because its primarily driven by the hypothetical risks that are convincingly real but but costly to act on.
> USA is/was easier to start business and get funding
I think this would highly depend on the country. With a solid business plan, I could easily get funding via banks and literally start a company with the press of a button in web portal, in Sweden. Similarly, Estonia seems to have made it ridiculously easy as well. In Spain it's slightly harder, I have to fill out some forms, but with stable income, very easy to get a bank loan even for business ideas that probably shouldn't.
Sure, you won't attract multi-trillion VCs that route, but is that exclusively what you're talking about? How much easier can it be to start the company than the press of the button, since you seem sure it's much easier in the US than all the countries in the EU?
Seden is a success story, just as Estonia but instead doing that and god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US and be clear on the situation across all the EU since US is a 3rd party with much clear rights and obligations towards EU. AFAIK that's why the EU wants to have a 28th regime.
So is the US easier than the EU or not? Now you're saying Sweden is a "success story", does that mean it's easier than the US then?
> god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US
What? That doesn't make any sense. If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU, than just starting a Swedish company and selling directly to Danes inside of the EU.
This is starting to sound like someone who never done intra-EU B2B or B2C at all. Where are you getting this from?
Sweden is a success story by European standards but meh by US standards.
> If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU
Starting a US company from EU costs a few hundred dollars depending on the broker etc. and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients). This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US. So it depends.
Maybe things are easier from Sweden but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example? Do you by chance require residence and have residence-related obligations and costs? Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
> then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example? Do you by chance require residence and have residence-related obligations and costs?
You can open a company in another EU country, but if you don't live there, your domestic tax agency may/will interpret the company to be under their jurisdiction based on your residency. Now you have double the paperwork, and likely a more complex tax situation to deal with.
> Starting a US company from EU costs a few hundred dollars depending on the broker etc
And in Sweden it's free, if that somehow would stop anyone anyways.
> and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients
Agreed, if you have US clients, US customers and generally like the vibe of the US, then makes a lot of sense to incorporate in the US. For basically anything else, it doesn't.
> This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example
You misunderstand what "EU single market" is referring to if you think it's supposed to mean pensions and similar stuff is shared across the entire EU. Of course it isn't, and no one of us who actually live and work here have that fundamental misunderstanding you seem to have.
> example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US
Your arguments here make zero sense. Say I'm a Swedish resident, open up a company in Sweden and hire a Finn, now I need to ensure this employment is fully legal. Same goes if the company is in the US, and in fact, would add additional things to do, as suddenly it's not only within EU and EEA, but the legal entity is outside.
> but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example?
I don't know why you would? EU and Europe isn't like the US in that it's many states under one country, we're all different countries with our own laws and so on, there is no "EU-law" or whatever, it's just an umbrella for us to unite under. Why on earth would an German start a company in Greece, if there is nothing particular about Greece in their business? The question doesn't even make sense.
> Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
Ireland and Malta are the "Delaware of Europe" which are popular to incorporate, but generally, I think people prefer to own businesses in countries where they already live, incorporating on the other side of the continent just doesn't make sense.
In Spain, if you fail at the business, do you have to pay back the bank loan?
Not automatically. If the loan is in your name, or you personally guaranteed it, you still have to pay even if the business fails. If it's only in the company's name, usually the company is liable, not you personally. There's also insolvency/"second chance" options, but that’s a legal process, not automatic.
Basically, depends on how you setup the company in regards to liabilities (which I'm guessing is true in the US too), and the exact terms of the loan.
EU population: 450 million + 70m UK
USA population: 348 million
The problem is that many of europe's top talent moves to USA, and also that American funding for European startups is huge, and many are made to relocate/IPO in USA too.
+ some smaller European countries not in the EU such as Norway.
Companies also move to the US (e.g. Stripe) or are bought big American companies (e.g. Deepmind)
Also, many of the successful European companies are bought up by US companies.
Totally agree. As you said, the gap is significant and closing it requires a lot of effort and investments to cover a risk that could eventually cool down if the general situation stops being this critical.
> a risk that could eventually cool down if the general situation stops being this critical
Exactly, EU must guarantee that there's no going back even if the next US president is likable, cooperative politician and not this thing that Trump is. Otherwise all your investment can perish if switching to MS, Oracle or Palantir or something becomes acceptable again 2-3 years.
A Trump invasion or something just as hard to fix needs to seal the deal.
"What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.
Its absolutely baffling to me how reluctant EU businesses seems to be in actually wanting data sovereignty. So short sighted.
Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes.
However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.
If the company I work at was forced to leave AWS and put all of our engineering teams to work on this, maybe we would finish it in 6 months, being very optimistic.
If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down.
Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.
> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate.
This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.
I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.
> For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.
Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
> Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first
True. Also: the landing page and all the other corporate boasting are often run by a marketeer or similar, who knows nothing about the technical part. They just have a design, and outsource implementation. So it just ends up somewhere.
> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?
LLM text is like an optical illusion for the language part of your brain, only instead of the payoff being "Oh, cool! The dots aren't actually moving!" it's "Oh, 'cool'. You weren't actually trying to tell me anything worth my time."
Yes, because it sounds reasonable at the beginning, then the further you go, the less sense it makes. Ultimately you look up the stuff that felt weird initially, and found the reason why it sounded so weird.
If I never actually noticed it, it wouldn't be slop, that I'd agree with. But in this case, I did notice, so it is slop.
They pointed out that the article is suggesting a completely wrong solution.
If the article was written by a human it would be valuable feedback for the author. Because the article was written by a LLM it was just the commenter being tricked to be engaged by generated noise.
> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
Yes, it's INFURIATING. I hate, hate, hate this. :(
Can we start flagging shit like this, please?
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I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts.
On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.
I think the reason for this is that if you're targeting folks for whom Europe-sovereignty resonates as an important factor, those will also care about sovereignty and self-sufficiency in general, and thus just skip your SaaS and go right for (semi) self-hosting.
While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters.
You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.
Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
> If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by blocking their access to that tech (it has happened).
The "sovereignty" part here is a net positive for anyone living in the EU. Net negative for anyone living in the US of course, because being in a dominant position does favour the US.
The default stance should be that nothing you do is private on the internet. If we're talking spying then no service in any country will be secure unless fully encrypted with audits. Any country with an intelligence agency can force companies in their jurisdiction to give them access to data otherwise.
Not sure what you are trying to say, except that it confirms my point: if a company in say, Germany, uses Microsoft and Google services for all their communications, then the US (!) can just get access to all their data.
Now if that company was using services based in Germany, then only Germany could access that data, which is obviously much less of a sovereignty problem (Germany interfering with Germany's affair is just a normal government).
Sure for a German company in Germany that's perfectly reasonable, but we're not talking about each country in Europe having their own copy of AWS/Stripe/Search.
In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands because that is where the infrastructure is. They also happen to be countries with world class intelligence agencies.
We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
> but we're not talking about each country in Europe having their own copy of AWS/Stripe/Search.
We're not talking about having hyperscalers in each country, but I could totally imagine each country having infrastructure.
> In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands
Having the choice between 3 European countries is already a lot better than giving all the data to the US. The US has been a lot more hostile to European countries than "the intersection of hostility from France/Germany/Netherlands".
> We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
Sure, I agree with that. But one doesn't prevent the other. Typically it's not practical to run LLMs in a privacy-preserving manner, so it's a lot better (in terms of sovereignty) to run a server in a place you trust than in a hostile country.
> Having the choice between 3 European countries is already a lot better than giving all the data to the US. The US has been a lot more hostile to European countries than "the intersection of hostility from France/Germany/Netherlands".
History shows conflict seems to be inevitable. You can't assume all European nations will be friendly forever. I'm American, but my hope is that this knee-jerk reaction to just move everything possible to EU has more thought behind it. Improving upon what we currently have especially with respect to privacy so that everyone in the world may benefit rather than just clone American tech and calling it a day.
Not sure you understood my point.
- IF you can choose to rely on one of [France, Germany, Netherland], then you would need to be in conflict with all three to be screwed.
- IF you can choose to rely on a service in your country, it's better for sovereignty.
Overall, it's all better for competition. The best would be competing services sharing an open core (or even everything).
> this knee-jerk reaction to just move everything possible to EU
The thought is that if you are in the EU, in terms of sovereignty you are better off giving your data to EU services. US companies give their data to US services, so of course it is much less of an issue there. And Americans are not the last to complain when US companies give their data to non-US companies...
Well, where do you live?
I live in an EU country and care deeply for the right to erasure and our consumer rights. The EU legislature does some good things on that front. I "care" for EU tech companies as much as I can care for any company currently. I think technological sovereignty is and will be important moving forward, for our economic resilience, infrastructure stability, among other things.
BTW "EU nationalist" just sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Which is why we’re putting our entire digital identification infrastructure in the hands of Google and Apple. EU technological sovereignty is a kafkaesque affair, and that’s putting it mildly.
I concur, except about the "putting it mildly" part. The digital ID stuff feels kafkaesque, sure, but not more. It's good lobbying at play, and I'm sure we'll find a way moving forward.
Assuming that most Europeans would be loyal to the EU is like assuming that most US Americans are loyal to Donald Trump (or Biden). But in reality a big enough proportion of Europeans see the EU as a hostile foreign influencing force.
Or, to put it another way, do you think any Americans use Microsoft or Apple products out of patriotism or fear of being dependent on technology from other nations?
> But in reality a big enough proportion of Europeans see the EU as a hostile foreign influencing force.
Yeah, I have to doubt your perceived reality here. Can you name some of these "hostile foreign influences"?
The big competitor to Apple is Google, whereas the big competitor to Microsoft is Linux/FOSS IMHO. I'm sorry to be blunt, but in the current political climate I couldn't care less what any Americans are using and for whatever reason. EU citizens on the other hand sure got a few reasons during the last decade due to foreign American politics.
> Can you name some of these "hostile foreign influences"?
The name is the European Union. It is the foreign entity to Europeans. If you doubt that there is a big portion of Europeans who aren't pro-EU, then I guess you doubt that there are Americans who aren't pro-Trump?
Anyway, there were referendums in many countries on the subject of joining the EU, and you can look at those and see that not 100% of the population voted yes.
So it is a false assumption that Europeans would by default have any loyalty or goodwill towards the EU, although I'm sure that a big portion of them do. Especially in some countries.
> not 100% of the population voted yes.
Well, call me surprised! Which democratic election ever achieves a one-sided 100%?
Still, the majority of the EU population seems to in favor of the EU, whereas the majority of the US citizens are pro-Trump, or they were during the last election at least. So I don't really understand what you're arguing for here.
If the location of something is a part of what you use to decide what to use, then if it's in the EU which is your preferred location, it no longer is "an inferior option", it might end up your only option.
But clearly you don't care, so understandably that choice doesn't make sense for you, that's all fine and good. But still you have to understand other people/organizations than you might have different requirements? Or is that a very foreign concept?
You switch from talking about Europe to talking about the EU half way through. The article was about Europe (excluding Russia and a few others).
> there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated
Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both.
There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare.
> On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.
Computer software is so incredibly cheap in a business setting (that includes public sector) compared to all other tools and expenses, that it always makes sense to pay for and use the most feature complete software you can get.
There are not many big vendors that are EU first apart from SAP, SuSE and a handful more. Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.
> Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.
That's a bit of a feature, I don't think the EU should want TooBigTech monopolies. Doesn't mean that there cannot be successful services in Europe.
> I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired
I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue.
Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.
Well it's because few people have "European-ness" as a strong personal value. Some people have strong values around open-source, or even around the specific country, but the sense of being European and valuing European things is just not very widespread, so in absence of a specific personal value, they pick the cheapest/biggest/most-known option which is usually American.
This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.
> It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.
Its. You know. Look around. What our elites and noble families concot. Wirecard. etc.
This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double.
However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality.
Source: I have access to better data.
Interesting read. Canada would be even more US-skewed.
Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).
As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>.
Cool, but, the thing is… even though CF is genuinely very good at what they do, I do not think that they have real moat. Nor does any other CDN provider have it.
The top 5 CDNs in terms of popularity are all US-based companies. However, Bunny and other providers are growing and becoming real market competitors.
Switching from Microsoft, Amazon, or heavy Google-based infra to on-prem or other vendors is much more complicated than switching the CDN.
CDNs are a very replaceable component. Basically a DNS record update away, and a bit of config.
My anecdotal evidence from France and Germany is that there is very much a trend to look for non-U.S. alternatives which is somewhat recent. It is related to the current government, not really politically motivated but more of a "no guarantees/cannot rely on this partner anymore" thinking coupled with a bit of "WTF annex Denmark, really". Many companies have task forces or projects to investigate moving tech stacks and in the past this was not even an agenda topic (despite strategic advantages and potential cost savings).
There needs to be more free DDOS offerings and inbuilt DDOS from vm providers.
There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default.
Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.
Good article because it clearly exposes the methodology and the shortcomings of the measurements (mostly the front CDN of a ~20k number of old continent entities of apex/www domain).
There was a post here on hn that showcased EU tech map which you can use to check for alternatives, ie for Gmail https://europeantechmap.eu/alternative-to/gmail?pricing=free...
There aren't many completely european solutions, but there are more than zero.
Europe right now is the ultimate US vasall. Germany is the leader here; France and Netherlands are much more self-conscious but also way too dependent on US corporations. The worst part is that in Germany with Merz in charge, this will not change. He is a good puppy for the USA.
It's a distraction. Websites are relatively easy to migrate, Office and AD not so much. Isn't it really a case of measuring what you can see vs what really matters?
EU companies own like 20% of EU compute, and a huge portion of that was from a russian asset being spun out.
So only in 2 smaller countries the "majority" is US served? That's what I read in that graphic
Curious what the percentage would be when you include Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Shopify...
France and Germany are also kinda big, at least for the size of the country.
Looking at serving is very skin deep. The cloud is easy. What about the stack? MySQL hailed from Sweden, now owned by Oracle. The Linux Foundations is in the states. Nginx - F5 (US). There are many Europeans working on site or remotely for US tech.
Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I am an American, and I don't like what I am seeing the last few years, but further balkanization doesn't seem to be a sound strategy.
> Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on?
I don’t see the US as willing to do the necessary stuff for that to happen honestly. Last threats on Greenland were this week, as were last threats on Spain.
Wait to see what they are using for emails and for most of their internal docs (containing any kind of secrets)!
I know companies that will tell you "I'm not gonna put any of my data in cloud, especially not American ones" but they are perfectly fine using any major cloud based office suite (mail, docs, chat/video apps, ecc ecc) where they voluntarily and deliberately load any kind of data.
Europe has reduced itself to a backwater. Surrounded by hostiles
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Let me repost another comment of mine.
TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco...
There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc.
I find it laughable.
Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform.
Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that?
Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what?
Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise.
But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is.
People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again.
And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?
So just lie down and take it?
Let the yellow man put some more tariffs on imports from the EU. Let him ban EU citizens from Visa/Apple/Microsoft when they disagree with MAGA. Maybe give east Europe to Russia, the west half can be the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states.
As long as there are no options we have no freedom.
No, we have a tech scene, Spotify, games, Telia Carrier. At least Sweden is world leading in tech and telecom and defence. (Ericsson, SAAB)
But then okay, say you want to do more.
Then do more. Not some letter from EU.
There is a focus here on office and javascript... why?
Okay if you want an EU M365, good luck.
We were and are the best.
As ever, there's a relevant xkcd
https://xkcd.com/932/
Mail (SMTP) is even worse.
See https://mxmap.be/ and follow the links for other countries.
Self-hosting mail infra is a forgotten skill, indeed
Here in Spain it seems better. We don't have tons of alternatives for web services, so lots end up on the typical clouds, but email hosting it seems every region has at least one ajuntament that runs their very own email servers. Helps that the country politically and socially is a bit decentralized since the beginning of the republic, but I was (pleasantly) surprised how many local governments here actually manage their own emails.
Interesting fact. Is there a list of local government mx servers?
There was a HN submission with a map of email servers for local governments around in Europe (the world?), might have been a Show HN but I'm unable to find it now. It was an interactive map with a ton of local governments around in Europe, might have been bigger in scope too but mostly remember the European map as I was mostly focusing on Spain. Maybe someone else have better luck and could link it here? Might have been a month or two ago maybe.
And it's a damn shame because we have awesome hosting in the EU.
OVH is great value, Scaleway can handle lots of traffic, hetzner is so cheap...
So it's "nobody gets fired to buy IBM" all over again.
Interesante
Woow
“American website hosting companies are disproportionately exposed to market shock from their European customers”
Where would those European customers go? China? Africa?
I was suggesting that website hosting isn’t a particularly hard problem with no moat. European customers could go literally anywhere.
AI slop be AI sloppin'.
AI slop
Right on the front page...
whatsapp has entered the chat
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