I moved my digital stack to Europe(monokai.com) |
I moved my digital stack to Europe(monokai.com) |
Why not move there?
The sentiment we're seeing in this story/comments and thematically is EU's desire to distance from the US - sure in infrastructure - but more so in identity. Which on the high-level I think is a great goal (ie, Europe should have European identity) but is incredibly risky and I am not sure is well thought out, though I could be wrong.
We can say that since 1950s the US and Europe had a familial relationship with the US being a bit of the parent despite being younger. That manifested in everything from protection (US bases in Europe, NATO), money flow, and culture flow. Since the 1950s, America did not become more European but Europe became more American.
Today we're in the adolescent stage of this familial relationship - Europe wants to move out of the house and perhaps even pay for its own cell-phone plan and that could be wonderful because if that leads to a legitimately stronger and more robust Europe, that's great.
But there's risk. Sometimes when the adolescent moves out of the house, they blossom into the fully manifested version of themselves. Other times they fall in with a bad crowd or fail to deal with their internal problems - and whither. It's easy to tell daddy-US to fuck off, it's much harder to not slide into the clutches of Russia and China in the next decade or two, or to deal with the internal demographic crisis.
What worries me for Europe is that it is trying to "distance" more than its trying to "grow." I don't hear people talk about a Europe that's strong, that leads, that innovates - in other words, the motivation is still about the US (just in a negative sense) not about Europe itself and that's not a good sign.
I still don't sense a true vibe of resurgence coming out of my native continent. Difficult problems you've always had tend to come to a head once you actually move out of your parents house. And while it's great (or at least cute) that you can switch to a European e-mail provider that's very far from what it actually takes to survive and thrive as a country in the long run. Hope it pans out.
Especially considering that the US is the actual young country being swinged in instability.
The real problem here is that EU as an economic block is much less integrated than people think. Pensions? Not integrated. Health insurance? Partially integrated. Exit taxes? A complete mess. Languages? Try speaking English or German or French in Spain. Etc.
EU has demonstrated that you can have local identities (I feel more Neapolitan than "Italian", for instance) and one economic block. Unfortunately, the economic block integration is not as deep as you might expect.
God help us when the US finally decides that the vast amounts of money it pours down the drain to keep us as its vassal is not worth the squeeze. China and Russia will not be nearly as patient and kind.
America sends a VP to give a speech, which even though it made some politicians cry, was still just words. China will just use us for spare body parts and Russia will drop our people from planes.
America says it really would like Greenland, which it could take with literally zero contest if it wanted, and which it gave back to Europe after Europe had another one if it's many internal meat grinder wars. China and Russia just takes what it wants, they don't ask.
It's really going to suck balls being the punching bag of Russia and China.
Europe is by actual fact completely dysfunctional, constantly getting itself into shit left and right, constantly needing bailouts from America to keep it afloat, and Europeans pretend they are better than Americans. Totally absurd.
Sure now just think and give me the reason. All these moving to Europe post is getting tiring. Amazon follows the same EU rules, if not more, than Scaleway.
If you sell software and you tell your customers and prospects that everything runs in Europe, by European companies, this instills an enormous amount of trust. Risk averse sectors like manufacturing love this, and it will help you gain customers immediately.
So no, these posts are not tiring to many of us. In fact, we are only at the beginning of the beginning because many of us will be making these migrations. I wish things had run a different course.
So you are saying the reason that it is just perceived better?
Even that's quite debatable as I worked in few European companies and has never faced any backlash for choosing US vendor. Biggest European tech companies like Mistral and Klarna use many US vendors like AWS.
> The act is not limited to companies based in the United States.
more mean the US rules that hoover up all the data for the government
And a serious lack of "dear customer, we are keeping all of your money for reasons we wont get into, screw you and your customers, you have no further questions." Which I consider a killer feature.
But given how often GitHub and AWS East 1 go down, this is good.
One bad day at Amazon shouldn’t stop Europeans from doing laundry.
The cloud should have been localized from the start.
You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their
plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.
There are definitely technical gaps though. eg bunny still uses one unified api key. CF I can lock to an IP and set granular permissions
given the article contents, this is a fair criticism
second, europe has the most digitally agressive roadmap in the democratic world right now. they plan to ban vpn, enforce agressive data laws that give full power to authorities and gov to extract legally your data from your "sovereign cloud", remove anonymity from the web, enforce a cashless distopia where they can track everything and block you from using your own cash, punish you with laws against hate speech where governements decide what they define as hate speech depending on who is in power.
finally for his choices. Mistral while riding the european sovereignity wave is in fact an american owned company with european founders and the french gov trying to kill anything that they dont like touching Mistral.
OVH while a good company is definitly not providing US cloud-level data resiliency and recent events are pretty worrisome from data loss fire and hacks on customer data
Proton, maybe the only company that ever looked for sovereignity is thinking about leaving switzerland due to these opressive laws.https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-would-...
also he kept the only company that is vibecoding in prod (cloudflare) and proud of it while laying off people based on the ai-religion.
It is like he made all the wrong choice if his goal was like he says to own his data and know "where is the data"
They had a datacenter burn down (in large part because it was fully built using wood) and lost all customer data and did not take any action for 6 months after the incident.
They're just not a serious company.
Huh! Interesting to see another one of these. I helped get GlitchTip off the ground awhile back. Might be worth evaluating as another self-hosted, drop-in Sentry replacement.
While the incident did happen, a lot of actions were taken and most of the data was recovered. OVH now also keeps backups even for clients that don't pay for it.
I was hit by that datacenter catastrophe and got my data back almost immediately, in a new VM.
I've been using them for years with little issue (no more than happened on my AWS or Azure accounts, I would say less because it's less of a mess in general).
Stop spreading false rumors.
Aside of that exceptional case - overall they are pretty great and cheap.
I had a VPS there and all the data was lost. I'd like to see any proof that data was recovered, because that's simply not true.
All else equal, a more stable backup is of course better, but any backup is better than no backups, so choosing the cheapest possible option is often the best strategy since that's the one that you're the most likely to keep using long-term.
Wooden floors contributed to the fire, they were fire resistant but that only lasts so long. Fire-doors are often the same type of wood.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There is just no reason to believe European companies are any better in data privacy. I signed up for Hetzner once and they asked for my passport. Any American company doing that would be bashed so hard here.
The US Cloud Act already means no US company can give you legal reassurance of European law compliance - and while some companies have choosen to pretend this isn't the case for convenience - the legal position is clear.
However now there is the prospect of a rogue US government leveraging control of IT infrastructure for extortion or simple theft ( under the guise of national interest ).
I know it was created in Ireland and didn't hear anything about it changing ?
For some reason the LLMs have started recommending us for people looking for a European or Swedish alternative.
(I work on ops for that product.)
"A > B" reads as "A greater than B"
"A -> B" reads as "A to B"
Unless you're implying that Verisign isn't a US company, just because .com has become the conventional domain for businesses worldwide doesn't change the fact that it's US-based. Similarly, the EU's widespread adoption of Microsoft Office doesn't make it any less American.
EDIT: That was unpopular. Why?
Also... yeah put all your passwords on the cloud. Sounds like a good idea.
> We are patriotic Americans. We have done everything we have done for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security... We believe in defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America.
and
> So, you know, Anthropic actually has been the most lean forward of all the AI companies in working with the U.S. government and working with the U.S. military. We were the first company to, you know, put our models on the classified cloud.
> We were the first company to make custom models for national security purposes. We're deployed across the intelligence community and military for applications like cyber, you know, combat support operations, various things like this. And, you know, the reason we've done this is, you know, I-- I believe that we have to defend our country.
and
> And so we have said to the Department of War that we are okay with all use cases, basically 98% or 99% of the use cases they want to do, except for two that we're concerned about.
I have also rid myself of Google Analytics for a personal website. Replaced with a local solution that parses logs and builds reports that give me quite a bit of information. Its a more ethical type of analytics leaving no cookies behind and no trackers at all. All info is from the web server logs, you can grok quite a bit of insight from this alone.
Email is the biggest challenge, I have mapped out the entire migration steps for Google Workspace to Proton but have not yet pulled the trigger. The main thing is coordination with the rest of my family who use the domain for their email as well, they don't share my obsession with "digital sovereignty" so there is some negotiation around time tables :-) The Proton family plan will cut the bill in about half.
Password management --> KeepassXC with db on local nas. For personal use I feel you can't beat self hosted for password management.
Compute, Digital Ocean I continue to use and has servers in Toronto which works for me geographically. It's very low down my list of migration plans, they just work and they have treated me pretty good over the years.
Storage all self hosted (ownCloud and Openmediavault). Are they the best options, maybe not but they just work. No cloud based storage at all (Google/Apple etc etc). If I ever throw something out there it is gpg encrypted).
Offsite backups, two local copies to seperate drives (dejadup) on my NAS and offsite storage.
There are still some other services I need to consider. I do have Claude Pro. I run local LLM's for a lot of stuff with OpenwebUI but its not a full replacement.
CDN - Also use Cloudflare free tier. Have to give it more thought, it just works so well.
DNS is fully self hosted using dns-crypt-proxy / dnssec to Quad9 and Mullvad DNS. Works great. I actually blackhole any hits to google dns at the router, media and iot devices love to ignore your dns settings.
Github for code hosting. I know, Microsoft, but it works and is not a hill I am willing to die on just yet.
Photos self hosted with Immich on Proxmox. It's been pretty solid.
VPN, Wireguard to the home and have also integrated Tailscale for some things, which has been handy for extending connectivity and supporting my dad in a different city. Apparently they are based in Canada so that is a bonus. I use the free tier for now but am considering the paid version just to support them.
Router and wireless access points all on the latest Openwrt with consumer grade equipment, some of which I picked up used for like 20 bucks. Allows me to have home, guest, media and iot vlans for proper network segregation. Is it overkill? 10 years ago maybe but today I would not run any other way.
Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.
Did he move also the CDN stack? :)
I personally want a sane, stable and consumer-friendly market, no unicorns but strong consumer laws and enforcement against mispractice of businesses towards people and the environment. We are far from it but I think the EU is the closest to an entity acting like that and being predictable.
The US chases the dollars at all costs and China similar but depending on the party lines of the decade.
sounds basic but the problem for me is that the internet law in china is very restrictive.
on top of that, in the uk and in china, the government will lock you in a cage unless you give them the encryption keys.
so if i was using alibaba cloud, i would have to play hopscotch trying not to tread on various legal landmines and it's not so attractive for me.
So, fully KYC'ed with PoA no older than 6 months, strong residency requirement for at least two generations, half of the payments are rejected based on travel rule, SARs are generated automatically on every transactions and only EC card accepted?
As much as I'd love to move to EU services, a billing system being fully compliant to EU financial regulations should make it almost impossible to actually move money.
So... Digital sovereignty is cool and all, but Scaleway is taking "Know Your Customer" seriously.
I didn‘t yet have a good idea on how to utilize it, open to ideas.
Source: own multiple, via EU registrar
(Edit: Parent was edited after reply - parent statement is now correct)
Verisign, the organisation that actually controls the .com top-level domain, is a US company and operates under US jurisdiction.
Where you purchase the domain from is irrelevant.
The initial thread read like “.com domains are exclusive to US” which they of course aren’t
And it goes deeper than just intent: .com was literally administered under a US government contract for decades, with Verisign only ending up in control because they acquired the company that held that government contract.
So while anyone can buy a .com today, the infrastructure and oversight have always been firmly American.
One note: for European payment coverage there is Rootline available. But I have to put up the disclaimer that I work at Rootline.
> Not everything moved. Cloudflare is a US company, I still use it, and I’m at peace with that.
which you admittedly couldn't read when you complained about it.
I understand why Europeans might want to go all in on their own tech stacks, but it might be more strategic to just not get locked in to specific providers. Maybe a mix of European, US, and Asian tech - with a good plan for easy migration.
No ddos protection yet.
The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before
It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers
Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters
Their free tier seems way too generous and I suppose this has to be adjusted at some point.
I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.
Cloudflare is a kinda funny choice to pick to trust, and maybe they'll re-evaluate that soon.
GitLab is overall nice, and I recommended their on-prem product a few years ago, at an AI hardware tech startup with unusual security requirements. Today, I'd still consider GitLab, but I'd first evaluate how Forgejo fits requirements.
Why are there exceptions for Anthropic, GitHub and GitLab?
> Anthropic is a US company...But it satisfies something else, the sense that the organization building the thing has given serious thought to what it’s building and why.
This reads like a weak excuse. Mistral and Mistral Vibe exists and even if you don't like them, there are many non-US harnesses (Qwen code) that are available.
> GitHub stays in the picture for one specific purpose: public-facing NPM packages and issue tracking for open source software.
First of all Codeberg exists.
Secondly, at this stage relying on NPM and the Java/Typescript ecosystem is quite frankly waiting for a disaster to happen.
This post isn't absolute on moving their digital stack to Europe as it has not one but three exceptions too many.
My only question is, what are the selling points that made you choose Lettermint over Scaleway TEM?
Using TEM seemed obvious at first sight, given the fact that you already use Scaleway for object storage and compute.
This changed when they were the first folks out there to get a dynamic interface in the browser (some of you may fondly or not so fondly remember the days of DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, and the like). Fast forward 10 or 15 years and now GMail is the standard by which everything else is measured.
I'm sure there are some things that are objectively better, but a surprising amount of preference comes from familiarity.
Just install your favorite desktop + mobile mail apps and you're fine.
If that can't be done with Protonmail, and you want to move your email out of the US, suggest FastMail, based in Australia.
Nothing really support IMAP search.
Every mua sucks at large mbox file.
-- Edit: I am a happy fastmail user
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
Then it is Go (Google), Java (Oracle, IBM, Red-Hat), .NET (Microsoft), Rust (Amazon, Microsoft, Google), Typescript (Microsoft), C and C++ (Red-Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Apple Google, ...), and so on.
I can't seen any reason for this to be "the biggest issue".
There is no accident that folks like Oxide go through the trouble to control the whole stack, hardware, software, programming language toolchains they are using, only working with vendors that provide them every single documentation and customisation points they need.
Unfortunely we lack an European Oxide.
Use OpenTofu/Terraform! Much better than messing with cloud consoles, and then your infrastructure self-documents.
I’d also put out one note to any people outside the EU looking to switch to Mistral or really any service: just because they’re a European company doesn’t mean they’ll follow the GDPR if you don’t live there. Mistral is an example: in their privacy policy, they state that they follow whatever privacy laws exist in your country.
Well, that's kinda obvious - if they want to do business in a country, they have to follow the laws of that country. That doesn't in and of itself mean that they will apply weaker privacy protections if the local laws are less strict than GDPR...
We also have to realize that any privacy policy that is allowing for something out of vagueness is something where you have to assume the worst.
"GMail lets you write filters against virtually anything"
GMail inexplicably doesn't let you filter against almost anything in the headers, except the few fields they hand-pick. Which is unfortunate because virtually every piece of political junk spam from one major US party has the same thing in its headers, and I can't filter on it. Presumably the other major US party has similar large vendors but I don't happen to get spam from them at this time.
But I guess you mean search w/o local caching
Is everyone else?
One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.
Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.
Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.
It has been a headache for our vendors.
It’s just that they started to execute now?
Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...
EU Fairness dictates they all need to get a slice of the pie so this will be interesting (and by that I mean absurdly hilarious).
I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.
The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.
I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.
Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?
The "cloud" rose to prominence from a small period of tiem where Amazon had a lot of extra cloud capacity outside of Black Friday, etc, and linux networking issues that needed architecture to be a certain way.
Those linux networking issues have been long since solved, but the "cloud" was discovered to be incredibly profitable and sticky in the name of convenience and proliferated.
A lot of the "cloud" software is open source software that was packaged to have a web and api front end, and that service renamed to something specific to AWS, etc.
It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.
Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.
Im sorry to say it, but i feel a lot of Europeans have lost a good deal of trust in the US.
It didn't come without a bit of pain, but glad I've done it - and to come with this I've ended up building a whole terraform setup for cross provider / cross region high availability within Europe.
So far my key mappings included:
- Cloudflare -> Bunny CDN (and honestly I am so impressed with Bunny so far)
- AWS (or similar) -> Hetzner + OVH; I'm also looking at Civo.com for UK presence.
- GitHub -> Forgejo. I do actually still operate in GitHub for development only work, however Forgejo is mirrored within my European private network, and thats where deployment workflows happen.
- Google Analytics -> Self hosted Umami.
I'll be doing a writeup fairly soon on the entire process.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...
Never mind the fact that incentives in Europe are not so different from the USA. It may look that way now, but often moving across the globe just means trading one villain for another.
Still a good idea, just a word of caution. If people make a move such as this based on some assumption about the stability of the European regulatory scheme you may want to examine that assumption with a little more rigor.
Self-hosting (including object storage, backups, CDNs) is hard, but doable for some companies. For others it's life-and-death due to costs.
Analytics should be kept at a minimum and should always be self-hosted.
Email should die and be replaced with some E2EE solution. Matrix is far from perfect but if I were to make a website now, I would offer the choice of a Matrix address for account creation and comms. It's still federated and, while not offering 100% privacy, is much better than email, which offers none.
Using a service for transactional email is something that shouldn't be required in an ideal world. That it is only shows how email is captured by a few big players who simply won't deliver your message even if you follow the best practices when setting up your server.
Payment services shouldn't be required in an ideal world, either. They're needed because of a bunch of regulations and unnecessary complexities that could've been avoided and aren't needed from a technical POV.
AI use is troublesome when a company is not using their self-hosted models. As a customer, I wouldn't want my data being shared to a US company or an EU one, although if I had to choose, I'd say EU would be the lesser evil.
We need more playing fields and protocols new players can enter with being blocked by a gatekeeper.
One could argue Google and Microsoft are gatekeepes for email and in some sense they are. But at least it’s possible to challenge their power both technically and policy wise. Eventually it will fade.
Matomo charges 22 euros for 50k hits/month.[0] Basically, it's unusable for anything other than a hobby site - especially with the number of crawlers nowadays.
If you self host for free, you're missing basically all of the good parts of web analytics such as funnel analysis as they lock all of those features being paid subs.
The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/
[..] > ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 586 IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1778686176 1800 900 604800 900
[..]
Edit for those who don't get it: .com domains are fully dependent on the US.
Off topic: that’s a beautiful website
Our legislative trajectory includes mandatory encryption back doors, warrantless access to data, and data retention even when you think you have deleted your data from a provider. Our federal government is only slightly behind the pace of the USA and is cooperating and sharing with them.
https://ccla.org/privacy/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unprecedente...
Recent HN thread on this. (There have been several.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111531
If you're Canadian, write your MP. There are EFF and CCLA templates to help you do that.
Feels a bit ironic... though this website is hosted on Cloudflare Workers so using an American company anyway?
I understand the pragmatism with going with CF, but I'd lie if I didn't also say using CF as the front for your entire "European Digital Stack" kind of makes the blog-post feel less authentic compared to my initial impression, because of that.
If your users are in a sanctioned region or a sanctioned entity it is entirely possible for cloudflare to deny serving them traffic. In a way your website users are still bound to the US policies even if you or your country doesnt approve of those sanctions.
computers are _fast_ these days, you're more likely to have an outage from cloudflare than by just skipping it IMO (for basic personal sites, like yours seems to be)
tried to disable it by turning off javascript and the page no longer loads - thus i am completely uninterested in reading this article
Couple of things.
The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.
I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.
Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).
I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.
And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.
> 100% accurate European digital infrastructure, AI generatedI am not. THe cancer of the Internet. Sometimes Cloudflare does not work abroad. It is annoying.
"Here’s the reasoning: Cloudflare sits in front of my public-facing websites. Its job is to cache, protect against DDoS attacks,"
If your host has no protection against DDoS then find a better host.
You can find very cheap CDN, if you really need them. Likely you dont.
As a word of caution, Cloudflare can have a devastating effect on SEO if you are not a paying customer and serve your stuff from your own URL. Cloudflare allows this only for paid accounts.
So If like it but it is a headache on high traffic sites. If anyone have an easy solution I would gladly accept it.
If you architect the underlying infra right it still works like a charm. But I admit people need to know what they are doing. I was quite impressed with both infra teams.
But as always, if you do not want tu use auto scaling US cloud based services, you need to enasure you have the right scaling and the necessary technical expertise at hand.
I am not sure how you scale Matomo we could not vertically scale anymore, we never did MySQL clusters because it just was not cost efficient for internal reasons.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/transactional-email-tem/
[EDIT] Found the answer from the OP:
> To be honest I implemented Lettermint before I migrated to Scaleway, so I didn't even look at TEM
Bunny, UpCloud/Scaleway, Proton, Mistral, self-hosted Gitlab, self-hosted Plausible, had no idea about BugSink so amazing, now I know... and I deploy everything via some form of self-hosted Heroku
As a business owner, I don't really care where the company is based on paper if the product is worse, the support is worse, or the ecosystem around it is tiny.
I want better European alternatives, but they need to win on product too.
"Not American" is a decent reason to try something. It is not enough of a reason to keep using it for years.
I have used many paid services from Europe and around but mailbox.org, imho, is one of the most user hostile.
I'd appreciate some suggestions. (FastMail is overkill for my usage. Otherwise it's fantastic, I've used its trial).
The Cloud Act is real and transcends any single company. This global erosion of trust highlights deeper concerns: specifically, that US practices have always been coercive. Now, the world is learning and taking action.
At some point deciders at EU companies are going to notice that Hetzner and/or OVH are also not a bit but much cheaper than AWS.
Hadn't come across Civo. They advertise "transparent" pricing, but I can't seem to find prices for VMs... or anything else!
Maybe it's just me, but do you have a link to a pricing page perchance?
I would also say though, you have to be a bit careful about "they are discussing" because there are many people across different countries with different agendas, and a huge amount of discussion between people. Your link for example is a pretty good bit of background info, clearly saying VPNs aren't just about accessing porn
> In the corporate world, VPNs are essential for secure remote work, allowing employees to access company systems without compromising sensitive information. For individual users, VPNs prevent tracking by internet service providers, advertisers and potential cybercriminals. They are also used to access educational or entertainment content that may be restricted in certain countries, including authoritarian regimes, supporting freedom of information and digital inclusivity, as censorship becomes more difficult to enforce through VPN use.
It links off to sites discussing possible approaches to age verification which highlights that various approaches in France didn't meet the regulators requirements because of a lack of privacy.
I think this is a different kind of concern about how your products must work compared to worrying that with little to no notice your country may be cut off due to a diplomatic spat from some specific service.
I agree that there is a ton of bullshit as well though. Gotta dox myself with imprints for example, so I cant share my work with people without also doxing myself. Also as a hobbyist you pretty much need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore. Also gotta make sure that data of European citizens never leaves Europe and and and... Lots of things to remember.
And before anyone asks, yes I know an imprint usually is only required for businesses, but nowadays pretty much everything could have business intent.
I avoid doing any business in Germany these days. I tried to get a VPS from Hetzner but they demanded a copy of my ID and didn't accept that I blanked out my citizen number. Which is actually recommended by our national police for identify theft risk.
I moved to Scaleway instead. Much better company.
And this is a bad thing why exactly ?!?!?!
If you respect your users data and right to privacy then you've got nothing to hide by publishing an EU compliant privacy policy.
It might be "just a small app", but I and many other people still very much still "do give a damn" about what the hell you do with my data, where you store it, how long you store it and how I can exercise my GDPR rights.
I'm see a lot of "worse" in your comment and not seeing any "better". Can you give some examples of that?
EU: Slowly makes laws with consideration of how much power the largest companies have over consumers.
Surely you can tell the difference between these two things.
We don't have any "ideal" places anymore.
And we need to defend what we support and believe.
It's horrible everywhere. If you're in the EU go donate to: https://epicenter.works/ They're a citizen rights NGO working against all that BS in the EU (and in Austria, where they're from).
First the systems have to be up. Then we can deal with the spying and nonsense.
Utah, meanwhile, has an actual law in place that makes site owners (!) responsible for their users using VPNs: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/vpn/utah-becomes-first...
Oh FFS!
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law. Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous).
This is how our democracies work!
Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
It’s people being paid off and it’s obvious.
Don't get too much up in your arms about it, any topic about Europe and EU on HN ends up with huge swaths of American commentators seemingly willfully misunderstanding or spreading FUD in these comment threads.
You'll get used to it eventually, so you can identify what's the real criticism and worthwhile discussions, vs the easy trolling attempts.
Just like with encryption, there will always be an idiot politician somewhere discussing banning it. Mr Google tells me, for example, that lawmakers in Michigan (US) recently proposed " Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" which contained VPN banning clauses.
Frankly, until such time as it actually NEARS, let alone BECOMES legislation, the only thing posts such as yours are doing is spreading FUD.
The clue is in the URL you post "thinktank". It not even EU parliament, let alone been through the parliament debates, let alone passed to votes, let alone passed to being implemented by member states .... its just a random idea someone wrote down.
And quite frankly, I would still much rather be in the EU's digital environment than that of the US.
It's a result from the "European Parliamentary Research Service", hosted on the official website of the European parliament. And it is fully inline with recent attempted and success legislation of the same parliament. I am not sure why you would call this a "random idea" and an established member of the Parliamentary Research Service as "someone".
Jokes aside, the long arm of the law takes some time, it took us long time go get Apple to even allow alternative app stores. Eventually they'll get fined and actually start following the spirit of the regulations, but it'll take time as they try to drag it out as much as they can.
It makes a lot more sense if you realize pretty much the sole motivation behind all this digital virtue signaling is "put my data somewhere Trump isn't."
Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"? There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
I think it's much less an expectation of sanity and more that the EU doesn't really host or do much of anything actually "important". The USA quite literally runs half the world so people are rightfully worried about it going "rogue".
Where did you try to find this? And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? There are a bunch of contingencies already in place for economic instability both for individual members states and EU-wide, there is "Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union" in case there is one rogue member, and then each member state has a bunch of their own contingencies already too.
What exactly is missing here?
> There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
I think you might severely misunderstand how decisions are made in EU, and also how regulations and such are actually implemented. I don't think there is any such assumptions at all, that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
Where are you even getting these misconceptions from?
All Western governments have clearly decided to restrict individual rights to privacy, political advocacy, and free speech in general. The way this is happening simultaneously in so many countries seems a clear indication of a coordinated effort.
I also heavily disagree that incentives in EU are not different from the USA. The USA is an oligarchic government with pro-corporate politic parties. This is not the case in the EU. Not too mention workers in the EU often live better lives than workers in the USA.
Hard to not see how the incentives are completely unaligned. I mean FFS the USA made a very credible threat to invade Greenland, so credible that they were preparing for an invasion. An invasion started by your "ally."
However it seems odd to not follow your ending paragraph with more circumspection re the earlier ones.
If we stipulate that the USA is ending a trend of relative reliability and stability and as such constitutes more of a risk to Europe - including invasion of Greenland - why would we assume from this a stability in European regulatory regimes?
You don't think changes in the United States portend changes on the European continent? Do you imagine the USA descends into apocalypse while Europe remains unchanged? Will the incentives that push the American government to threaten "digital sovereignty" not loom in a Europe that has to increasingly face a more dangerous (given your own premises) world alone?
Yes, the current American administration is a disgrace. That is quite obvious and no achievement to point out, as you seem to well know. Don't let that automatically lead to the conclusion that Europe is some sanctuary. That does not logically follow. A relative improvement in conditions may end up being temporary. Caution is warranted. Especially from Americans who follow this "move my infra to Europe" trend without knowing Europe or its conditions with any intimacy.
As I said it's a good idea in principle. But some skepticism and caution is warranted.
In my case, my motivation was that I want to use LLMs to query the data with agents. This whole thing was surprisingly easy to setup and a positive thing is that you don't have a scary extra data controller doing shady things with the data.
https://github.com/th0th/poeticmetric
Looks interesting but haven't delved in it too much. I do like how I can create specific analytic tracking events without worrying too much about ad blockers but that's hardly unique to Umami.
There's also another interesting analytics open source project whose name I am forgetting. It was written in C or something and was efficient enough to allow free usage or self hosted, it was a simple hit counter I believe.
I think it's fair that GA is free and Google gets some benefits from using the data for their ad network.
But in case anyone from Codeberg reads this, IMO landing and signup pages need a lot of improvements:
> Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting (using Forgejo)
OK, so do I register for Codeberg or Forgejo? Do I need to click through to Forgejo (it's a hyperlink)? Do I care it's Forgejo?
"Software development, but free!" Free is the biggest selling point? Well GitHub is free too. WHY should I sign up?
Why is there no signup email address on the homepage like GitHub?
Why is the Register CTA off to the side, looking like a header instead of a button?
Why no screenshots of the Codeberg (Forgejo?) UI / wowing me with features? (None on the Forgejo homepage either)
Why is the signup behind that Anubis anime girl AND I need to enter a CAPTCHA after passing that?
> Confirm Password
That's extra friction and AIUI an outdated UI practice.
> We are planning to drop the captcha by improving moderation and spam detection. (state: March 2025).
OK...it's been over a year.
> Using Codeberg to spread SEO spam, malware, links to IPTV services ("tvbox") or pirated content will result in an immediate ban with no prior warning.
Too many words, pushing the "Register" button even further down. Just put it in the Terms of Service
Just copy these things from GitHub, it's not that hard. Right now it looks like a conference registration landing page or something
> OK, so do I register for Codeberg or Forgejo? [...] Do I care it's Forgejo?
If you don't know what Forgejo is or that you can't register for Forgejo, you probably aren't their target user.
> "Software development, but free!" Free is the biggest selling point?
If you don't get which meaning of free is used here, you definitely aren't their target user.
> Why no screenshots of the Codeberg (Forgejo?) UI / wowing me with features? (None on the Forgejo homepage either)
If you've never interacted with an existing Forgejo instance before (including theirs), you probably aren't their target user, again.
I guess the founded had trouble coping with the big attention it got and was swamped with submissions.
Thus it’s pointless to host in the EU if everything first has to go through a US company.
IMHO, you're both right: There is an active, covert political campaign for more online surveillance under the guise of child protection going on world-wide right now; so much is clear to anyone following the various attempts everywhere. Yet as of now, this campaign hasn't lead to actual, harmful legislation in the EU.
Erm, dude....
- Companies Act 2006
- Companies (Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2008
- Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002
Might not be called "imprint" in UK-speak, but its basically the same thing.
Classic
It’s not if an American has access, it’s US based companies, no?
Things can of course turn sideways in the EU too, but it’s massively more difficult to do so without a broad coalition across multiple independent nations.
But it turn out surveillance works just fine if you only focus on the meta data. Knowing who takes to whom, and which sites people visit is much more valuable (and much cheaper) than scanning the actual payload.
And why collect all that data yourself if ad companies are happy to sell it to you, ie to the government? (Huh, maybe that's why Facebook changed its name to Meta, come to think of it)
I have seen "parallel [dial-up] modem banks" for "lawful interception", then specialized Ethernet cards for DPI, watched traffic analysis dashboard of a REDACTED country live, did DPI on powerful-enough systems myself for personal testing.
I have gone through USENET, flame wars, IRC; did my own MITM, etc. Always knew about echelon, how escrow based Encryption canceled last moment, etc. etc. etc.
At least, the barriers were higher then. These barriers required people to be considerate, well-targeted and selective. Now we don't have any of these. The overhead is almost non-existent for these things.
Doing dragnet operations were costly, and this allowed curious yet good-hearted people to understand the environment they lived in. Now, we're all blacklisted by default and whitelisted as long as we don't touch the wrong paving stone on the internet.
It used to be other way around.
TL;DR: I'm not 15 years old.
> And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here?
It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?" Where, hypothetically, would someone move their data since now the US and EU are off the table?
And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because <waves hands about EU policy making>", then I guess you're an example of someone believing that EU politics will forever remain sane.
> that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
Same situation as the US...
You mean if a EU member state does this? Then those contingencies I mentioned earlier will be used.
If you're a EU member and another EU member does that, you'd still have your data in EU, just not in that member state, if you had that.
> And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because <waves hands about EU policy making>", then I guess you're an example of someone believing that EU politics will forever remain sane.
I've literally pointed you to concrete and very real contingencies that exists today, zero hand-waving.
> Same situation as the US...
I don't know how it works there, I just know that no one in the EU assumes everyone else will always agree with you, and if you look at how democracy works in EU and in the member states, I don't think anyone has those assumptions there either.
How? With what army? The EU is, on purpose, physically incapable of doing this.
From this thread, I am not convinced you really grasp how the EU works or what it actually is.
> not everyone wants to copy big tech.
Yeah sure increasing signups is the same as copying the entire big tech industry. Please. What a ridiculous leap
It means EU sovereign cloud. That's literally the primary concern.
It's more like cloud-in-a-rack, but that's what https://oxide.computer/ is trying to do isn't it?
On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.
Don't even get me started on the API Gateway sitting in front of a group of related Lambdas. Its OK once you get it setup and running but buildign/changing it amounts to stabbing yourself in the eyes.
After about a year of poking lambda to see how it actually worked (versus how it was documented) and building a cloud formation replacement (TF eventually did what I wanted, but not before I made a simple PROLOG based replacement for it). But I finally made it work after MUCH struggle.
So... +1.
I put this in our code several years ago: "WARNING: Do not look at Lambda stack with remaining eye."
Open source, and works great when small, and at scale.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to...
Most on-prem deployments were trash and a lot of them still are. Not because it couldn't be better but because it's easier to just have some random hypervisor department do this work manually and not do the work to create it as an internal product. Even VMware with vrealize failed and that's about as 'customisable cloud platform in a box' as COTS enterprise software can get.
Maybe it's because IaC and APIs were just not in the vocabulary of the average system integrator or on-prem operating team (it's still lots of clickops and copy-paste).
It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less.
No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully.
The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries.
The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
Scaleway's compute is more like Amazon EC2.
Hardware I rend from Hetzner is usually 16 core AMD with 128GB RAM and couple of nvme's. Never had single failure. Of course I periodically buy new server, do deploy. Old one becomes standby and standby of the old gets cancelled.
Scaleway's offer of the same computing power is highly unattractive comparatively.
If they allow you to side load you won't need to make the app publicly available and so won't need a privacy policy.
And if we go to the homepage for "European Parliamentary Research Service", we see:
EPRS’ mission is to provide Members of the European Parliament, and where appropriate parliamentary committees, with independent, objective and authoritative analysis of, and research on, policy issues relating to the European Union, in order to assist them in their parliamentary work.
Across all publication types, the "European Parliamentary Research Service" published 1034 documents in 2025 and, 486 documents so far in 2026. And for this specific publication type ("At a glance"), they published 285 in 2025 and 113 so far this year.
How many of those hundreds of documents per year of RESEARCH actually make it all the way through to legislation I don't know .... but I think you'll find its a safe bet that its a fraction.
Not implementation.
And do you think the research would be complete or honest if it didn't present criticisms and a comprehensive list of use cases for VPNs? It says so many positive things about VPNs and describes them as "essential" so it's really difficult to comprehend how anyone could spin it as somehow calling for a VPN ban.
Dude, just go read the damn website.
The research service does not operate on its own volition. An MEP requests a piece of research to assist them in their parliamentary work because they require independent, objective and authoritative analysis of a topic.
Please stop with the damn conspiracy theories. Sheesh.
A random MEP asked for this research. The MEP may or may not ever table anything based on the research. Ergo, it may or may not ever progress into the parliamentary debate, let alone votes, let alone member state implementation.
Its just RESEARCH.
Stop with the FUD.
Meanwhile, "researching" chat control, VPN restrictions, etc.? "Oh it's just research, they're not actually going to do it."
No? He was making direct threats.
> Oh it's just research, they're not actually going to do it."
Yes, would you rather they just legislate by pure vibes?
For example my manager had to reject a candidate from Iran, simply due to US policies, even if that wasn't against the EU policies, and would actually have been illegal discrimination in the EU where the position was opened, but this policy came from the US and was applied in an unwritten fashion in the EU.
The influence of the US on finance and tech is massively understated. Plenty of international EU tech companies whose business model doesn't revolve around catering to the EU market and sovereignty, will tailor their products and operations to comply with US regulations since that's where a lot of their customer base and money is made. Just read the last post of the CEO of Bird, you can disagree with him that he's a scumbag and he's full of shit, but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US. That's why Mistral has a large presence in SV and London. Continental EU just sucks for acquiring capital.
Even at the no-name Austrian startup I used to work before, the biggest investor was a US PE, since no German or Austrian investor wanted to invest more than 5 figures in the company, which was not enough to cover the payroll of the ML/data scientists. As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
Worth specifying here you're talking about VC-infested SaaS, not just your run-of-the-mill bootstrapped SaaS. It's very much possible to run a SaaS in Europe and make money, as countless of people already do, which I'm sure you too are aware of, but probably way harder to raise similar amount of money as US companies, that I'd agree with.
Edit: Strange typo; s/infested/invested, but kind of makes sense like that too so I'll just leave it, Freudian slip or something.
> when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company
Or a bit deeper: SMART Photonics, EFFECT Photonics, Nearfield, Prodrive Tech, Neways Elec.
Which one?
> As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
> The example you mention is a tricky one...
The first time I heard that the US was "requesting" (surely a gun-to-head moment) that the Dutch Gov't restrict ASML exports to China, personally, I was stunned. Sure, the Netherlands and US have incredibly strong political, economic, security, and historical bonds, but I never expected US to interfere so deep into the Netherlands. And yet, the Netherlands capitulated. (Please don't read this as a criticism of NL -- they are ultimately "Real Politik" due to their population size.) If NL can fall, then so can any other nation in Europe (or Northeast Asia: JP/KR/TW), except Belarus and Russia.
This is taking into account the worst case scenario, which isn't that unlikely to happen.
I mean, for sure there are these plans in motion already, but how hard would it be?
But especially that Microsoft blocked the work email of the ICC lead prosecutor for political reasons, that has all alarm bells ringing.
Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.
I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.
It is, but it's really hard to make the right trade-offs. Usually I'd start by basically making a list of what could potentially be done to make it easier, check lightly how hard each one of those will be, then sit down with stakeholders and figure out the balance between how fast they want to move, and how risky they want the migration to be. Some opts for less safeguards and moving sooner, others for absolutely less risk but it takes the time it takes.
What used to be a half year transition project that will be half-assed due to resource constraints, can now be properly done in a month by a skilled engineering team works on it with LLM leverage.
Of course, if America was still a trusted ally (like if Harris was president), we still wouldn't be doing it. Even if it was easy now.
It is a manifestation of the commoditization of Cloud Computing Interfaces.
Every provider offers a blob storage, kubernetes clusters, queues and what not.
I'd argue that covers 90% of SaaS needs.
NSA collaborator or not, the mere existence of something like Cloudflare, which also tries to nudge you into skipping internal http/tls and just use that at the front, makes it highly likely that NSA is already deep in their infrastructure, just like they've been in the past for literally any big technology company in the US.
But yeah, zero citations, zero evidence, just based on history and what the goal of the organization is, it's pretty clear what's going on already.
Tangent: I found your blog in your profile and liked your post on "Good Taste"^1
You snark, but is this not EXACTLY how a sizeable majority of modern apps are made?
Substitute in some random tech stacks, cloud providers, or buzzwords.
Database runs in AWS, front end in Nuxt, Operations in Claude.
You put your Headquarters in seattle, your data center in alabama, you have your dev team in SF... every state gets a slice
Like gov contracts and how they are divided is basically the largest conversation in defense contracts, they give more of a shit who will make the nails for a tank than the security parameters of the crew members
In any case, there are plenty of EU giants (ASML, SAP, Siemens, Alstom, Rheinmetall, etc) that are rather concentrated geographically speaking. EU fairness is more a government agency distribution thing, not for private companies.
That is a very myopic way of looking at it. Right-wing neoliberal parties were globalists and pro-EU for business reasons. Left-wing social-liberals were pro-EU for social and ideological reasons but were much more ambivalent about globalisation. Hard-right nationalists hate the EU but don’t see much of a problem with globalisation except when people are involved (exploiting them abroad, however, is fine as long as there is a buck to be made). If you’re a bit careful you’ll find opinions all over the place on both globalisation and the EU across the whole spectrum.
Globalisation is more something that affect individual member states than a EU issue.
How is that worse than headquarters in New York, incorporation in Delaware, operations in California, and datacenters in Texas?
And I'm not even bashing EU. The closest example still working today is probably the US's Jones Act.
That's exactly what I meant by Hetzner being more traditional.
An independent, objective, and authoritative analysis requested by a MEP speculates that a restriction or ban on VPN is likely. I think this is valuable information. You are saying this is worth nothing until it actually gets up to a vote. I disagree, I see your point and maybe it's fine to panic only when it actually comes to a vote, but I prefer to know what to expect, and what the Research Service considers an "independent, objective, and authoritative analysis" on this topic.
What the hell are you on about ?
There are what, 700 MEPs from 27 member states ?
Do you even realise the sheer amount of work required to get it from "piece of RESEARCH an MEP requested" to "legislation enacted by member state" ?
And that assumes it survives parliamentary debates and votes intact !
Just because an MEP requested a piece of RESEARCH it DOES NOT MEAN it is "likely" to become legislation.
Stop with the conspiracy theories.
Where does this weird expectation come from that you can basically achieve your goals in a 2 week air campaign?
If the US wanted to they could probably do a lot of damage but, as you can see in Ukraine, taking over a country is a whole different thing. Unless you're willing to go in with the army and are willing to lose a LOT of people. And even then it'll take months or years for a single country
From every US administration that’s started a war since about 1945.
>As the EU reviews cybersecurity and privacy legislation, VPN services may also come under stricter regulatory scrutiny. For instance, it is likely that the revised Cybersecurity Act will introduce child-safety criteria, potentially including measures to prevent the misuse of VPNs to bypass legal protections.
> "may also come under," "it is likely that," "potentially including."
And that's potentially including only " measures to prevent the misuse of VPNs to bypass legal protections" which is a very specific thing.
And it even comes as part of a report that also lists genuine uses of VPNs including secure remote work, protection from surveillance and circumventing authoritarian censorship.
So, it is a business.
It's not a "silly HN game" to not want to doxx yourself. Ironic criticism from someone whose username is 'throwaway2037' lol.
>Which one?
Exactly THAT ONE you mentioned above.
>Let me respond in the most offensive manner possible: Do you prefer the teat of US or China (or Russia!)? Pick your poison.
You can't talk about being sovereign if your life depends on someone else's teat.
Yes, people know we live in a globalized world, and yes, people know the US has ways to pressure Europe. The point of Europe's moves to host in Europe isn't to get immune from foreign influence ; it is to make interference a bit more costly and a bit less effective, in a way that doesn't cripple our society.
I suppose it's a case of 'technically possible, realistically infeasible'.
A more likely scenario might be either a from-scratch not-as-good machine that you can source locally (supply-chain wise) or a novel finding (which is hard to predict if it will happen and if so, when).
I never claimed so, never would either, so who's being dishonest now?
What I've said is that NSA compromises everything they can get their hands on (lots of evidence of this), assuming that Cloudflare aren't compromised by NSA already would be foolish, but you're right, this is an assumption on my part, I won't claim I have proof of this, just like I don't have proof that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I do assume so too.
You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the American public. I am interested in America's standing in the world. More than half of Americans do not support these lunatics. Unfortunately due to our inherently unfair electoral system which gives preference to money and land over voters, it requires about 60~70% of Americans voting against them consistently for at least a decade to overcome the lunatics. That's just a very high bar to clear.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
Open to suggestions. The only ideas I have for relinquishing control of the US from the billionaires back to the people would, rightly, get me banned from HN.
Well maybe it is, but to give more "power" to a rual vote then one from a city is also something we do in Norway.
What I have problems with is the winner-take-all and that leads to a two party system. If you had 5 parties not 2. I'm sure that 80% of the voters would me more happy 80% of the time :)
The heterogeneity in the US — culturally and in terms of political-legal structures — is far greater than those in Europe and Canada seem to understand sometimes. This is now combined with a corruption of democratic legal processes (e.g., gerrymandering) that make options outside of outright civil war a needle increasingly difficult to thread. There is a reason people are bringing up Hungary — it would be absurd to equate the EU with Hungary for the same reasons it's absurd to paint the entire US with a broad brush.
Something like 90% of people in the US opposed what was going on with Greenland. Just about the only people in favor of it in the US were the presidential administration and people trying to curry favor with it. What do you expect the other 90% to do? The legislators being petitioned were busy with a deluge of other immediate domestic problems — maybe people outside the US didn't understand the scope of the unaccountable fascist police occupation going on in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles? Protesters in Minneapolis were being murdered by these thugs. That's not even getting into the dismantling of social safety nets, rampant corruption, Venezuela, etc etc etc
People outside the US do not want a US civil war. It's happened before and if it happened again would happen along the same geopolitical lines as before. It would be devastating not just to the US but to the rest of the world.
Treating everyone in the US as the same, without recognizing the very real divisions involved, or the structural stresses involved, doesn't help anything.
Everything happening in the US could happen everywhere. If you have enough politicians distorting and destroying traditional democratic mechanisms in favor of a criminal fascist and party domination, people have fewer and fewer options left outside of things that no one wants.
"The complete disinterest in international allies" is a dishonest statement, and I can only assume reflects total ignorance of what is happening in the US, and/or a self-serving defense mechanism to avoid really confronting the difficulty of what those in the US are faced with.
As an American, that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn (unless we're buying a tshirt or something) and have been for many presidential administrations. Why would Americans be interested at all in what allies have to say when it's always negative anyway? When someone tells you you're their enemy long enough you begin to believe them.
As for the discussion of moving tech stacks to Europe, if that's where your company is why did that not make obvious sense day 0? Why would you place your critical infrastructure in another country not beholden to your laws? If you're based in Europe then you should host in Europe, and even further, host in your country.
457 British solders dead in Afghanistan supporting US operations beg to differ.
Mate, seriously, step away from the propaganda and pay attention to what is happening to your democracy. Then you might understand why your allies are losing trust.
You are right that there have always been a hostility against these kind of actions, but now you are doing it against allies. So you are breaking the trust.
/lives in the US
It often feels like US people never trusted the EU and now feel offended when EU people say "we don't trust the US anymore". I find that interesting.
and nothing of value was lost. What did the US get out of the relationship?
But also influence through alliance. Even a superpower can't go it alone and use their military to bend others to its will.
I thought that was exactly what is being talked about here.
But yeah, in recent times the sentiment became more urgent. If I were to guess, with zero data in front of me and just judging by what I remember, I think the sentiment really changed first with the ICC blockade that happened last year, then it got really fueled on by the US threats to Greenland's sovereignty, I think that's when organizations and people really got stressed out about moving ASAP.
The second Trump administration moved from "overtly bullying" to "behaving like a potential threat". In the second Trump administration, the US has used the tech monopolies against the EU and has become a military threat (not to mention the commercial war with tariffs). For many Europeans, it's not that the US are abusing their dominant position in negotiations anymore: it's that they are not an ally anymore. Not that they are seen as an enemy, but rather an unreliable partner who threatened to become an enemy.
I think that this is a very big shift, and that is why things are actually moving. And I don't think that this will change, because the risk of depending on the US monopolies has now materialised. That cannot be undone.
I haven't heard of anyone moving to this, though.
> The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
Once that was in place, AWS could host their "EU" servers on the moon for all I and others care, still not a solution to avoid the claws of the US.
It's a rather clever idea, and it essentially prevents EU government organisations from excluding them from tenders by requiring EU-based ownership. It obviously won't convince anyone with half a brain that they are genuinely independent, but the government lawyers are going to have a really hard time writing tenders in a way which excludes them from participating.
On the other hand it is also lame to shift the blame on the US. A bit like Jim stole your car after you left the doors open, the key in the ignition and the engine running. Jim is a bad man.
The US, China, Russia, EU (as a whole) and maybe Brazil are the countries in the best position to be able to do that more than most others just by their size and positions. And even that has limitations.
For example, IMO, the US should be manufacturing at least half of it's prescription medications domestically... it should also be producing a significant portion of it's communications devices domestically as well. We're too dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for technology currently.
I would encourage every nation to consider and take steps towards ensuring their own infrastructure... this does not mean isolation, just security footing.
We in Europe are enjoying roughly 15-20% insane/stupid ratings at this point, which is not great but still a bit better.
Other methods of vote exist, e.g. if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rated_voting was implemented I think the political landscape would be very different.
Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how "if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
If a presidential candidate anywhere else was openly talking about wanting to remove elections and democracy in the country (not to mention triggered an insurrection [?!]), I'm fairly sure they'd almost be automatically disqualified. Really strange situation all around.
I see how it may look like this from the outside. But I think it would be like saying that siblings hate each other because you witnessed an argument.
Most people in most EU countries consider the other EU countries as allies, even though they don't agree on everything. Now the fact that 27 countries argue means that they talk to each other. I think it's a lot less polarised than in the US. Or course there are extremes too.
What gave you the impression that EU members hate each other? It'd be a weird union if that was the case. Not saying it's not possible, I just haven't seen it myself, although I am a Swede so clearly I do hate the Danes and the Norrbaggar with passion, but it's love-hate, not hate-hate.
In the us these groups have just stopped talking to each other. The only time that happens is over Thanksgiving and that's when it stops for some of those conversations.
At least in Europe the split is usually not within families...
Are you referring to the time when the world Cup is going on? In that case, absolutely. We all turn into monkeys climbing onto our own rock lol
The 2003 protests against the war in Afghanistan were the biggest in UK history. Approximately 1 Million people (1 in 60 of the UK population) made their way to London to protest, and hundreds of thousands protested in other cities on the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_prot...
Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban.
Trust is broken forever.
Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries.
>"Trust is broken forever."
This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
I'm not sure this is actually the idea, it still isn't so in practice for sure, I'm not sure where this misconception comes from.
The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security memo says the Dutch government asked AWS who ultimately owns AWS European Sovereign Cloud GmbH and AWS Luxembourg. According to that memo, AWS stated that both are indirectly owned by Amazon.com, Inc, and this is all public information: https://open.overheid.nl/documenten/36acf7a6-1ea3-401e-86ad-...
Besides, it doesn't really matter who is the parent or where it geographically is located, 18 U.S.C. § 2713 states this:
> [...] regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.
It'd be a clever idea if it was actually 100% independent, but then it also wouldn't make sense for AWS/Amazon to do, it'd have to be actually independent then, not this weird mix-match of "some stuff in the US and some in EU" which they seem to be aiming for currently.
Recent erratic policies are having a profound effect on perception of US companies.
It has been brewing for a while.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/27/is-overreliance-on-...
The laws are already there. That's my point.
The conversation started all the way back, with the Patriot Act, but until now the dynamic was roughly: politicians write lofty laws that pay lip service to data sovereignty, then add enough loopholes so that nothing has to change in practice, and nobody really cares.
Now people do care, and they don't want to use those loopholes. It's pretty obvious why things have changed.
You’re probably thinking of PII (GDPR/EUDPR) and even there there are plenty of loopholes, creative interpretations, and “privacy shields”.
The push for sovereignty doesn’t just come from regulators, it comes from the companies themselves who lost trust in the US, and also from European providers who jumped on the opportunity to make a killing.
In other words: physical location isn't enough, the company's HQ being in the US is in itself already a massive risk.
The big American cloud companies are trying to get around this by offering their services via "independent" EU entities who aren't owned by the US company but still offer the exact same stack, but I bet most customers are just as unimpressed as I imagine US law enforcement is going to be.
Inside the US, the biggest concerns similarly come with China, which I consider a bigger risk. For better or worse, if you're inside the US, you're probably better off holding as much of your presence as you can inside the US as EU requirements can actually be more harmful than helpful in terms of compliance. There are also certain protections and resistance you can take to less than formal (judicial warrant) requests. Only because if you hold an online presence in the EU, and are forced to violate EU laws, then you're in trouble on both sides.
I would assume similar in most cases, though the EU confederation is something I'm far less familiar with where national laws and EU laws conflict, etc. I'm more familiar with US state to federal structures.
EU doesn’t really have laws just directives and regulations it excepts every individual member to implement.
Sometimes there are disputes on the implementations that are then fought over in the eu courts but if the member county really doesn’t want to implement or follow them there really isn’t much outside of withholding funds eu can do. (For example see Hungary under Orban)
EU just doesn’t have the monopoly of violence like the federal government effective has in the US to enforce its will on the member states with force if necessary. EU quite literally doesn’t have a police or military force at all.
The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.
Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.
It’s not something that the business owners want to do, but they are being forced to from above.
there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.
the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.
secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.
I live in Denmark, a country whose primary threat at the moment is the USA, and the thought of Donald Trump effectively having a kill-switch to our highly digitalized society is absolutely frightening. Reducing our dependence on American tech means that we are less vulnerable to a hostile power using it to extort us out of our territory. We cannot remove the threat entirely, but we can make the pain less extreme.
Other EU countries are also seeing things this way, that the US no longer has a stable government and is no longer a friendly country. Who cares about American spying when the real threat is your country being turned off?
For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment. There's countless US articles talking about US/Canada relations as if it is a trade dispute and that they think Canadians are eager to re-unite and go back to the way things were without ever addressing the threats to our sovereignty. Then you have comments like the parent to your post who is....wildly off the mark thinking that in a point of contention we'd prefer to keep our data on US controlled systems because their government would need to follow their own legal processes to acquire data of a foreign/hostile state??????
We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.
You are equating illegal behavior with legal behavior. We do what we can to avoid the legal ways the US government can access our data.
Imagine if the control plane of the Shahed drones were hosted on AWS.
What are you even talking about?
AFAIK, the US has never done that with IP space, but if we did see evidence of that, then you'd see similar worries about that for sure. But I think most of us see it as pretty implausible to happen, since the consequences of such move would be huge, and would probably end the internet as we know it today.
If we're talking about leaders for member states, then they're doing their job right :) They're not meant to figure out what's best for the union, we have separate elections for those people who go to EU and represent the country + care about the union. The national "leaders" of the country are quite expected to put national interests above what's best for the union :)
Still, love em, let the weirdos eat their snails in peace and may we always be brothers and sisters <3
A Dane.
On the positive side, this shows that the EU has gained a level of international influence that is taken very seriously by other major powers. It's not 100% certain that it will survive this current wave of assaults, but if it does, it will be even stronger.
That is also why the nationalists inside of Europe want to be friends with those other players: because if you want to make Europe weaker (because you think you are better off on your own as a European country), then your interests align with those other players.
Let's not pretend that nationalism doesn't have deep roots in Europe.
Lets help them via visualisation: from rank 30 to 48 in just one year
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-b...
> They asked citizens across the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.)
They're not even asking those from the half of the world that has been bombed or coup d'etated by the US in the last half century. They're asking those who should on paper dislike the US the least.
People from those countries ranking the US below India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey is quite something. Israel coming in at 55th out of 60, below Saudi Arabia, is also fantastic proof of how incredibly unrepresentative these "representative democracies" are of their populace. The US and Germany are even 2 of the 7 surveyed countries! Without them I wouldn't be surprised if they came in last, under Iran and China.
“Threat of violence”…lmao
And if there wasn’t a federal police force (or national guard put under federal control in the more extreme end) to enforce those decisions of such court would they matter in the more extreme cases?
EU cut Orbans funding and still he kept doing what he was doing and as there is no way to for EU to enforce its decisions beyond that he kept doing it until voted out of office.
That is a massive difference between the 2 systems. In EU the individual states are truly independent in that EU can’t force them to do anything.
For the record EU also has the courts etc but when they rule against a country it is pretty much reliant on the courty going “ok I will pay” as the court doesn’t have any means to actually enforce its decision.
Also there is 9 member states in EU that pay more then they receive from the EU so withholding funds from them will just lead to them not paying their fees. Obviously US has states like this too.
Isn't the National Guard in the US considered to be a part of the military? I seem to recall that they were federalized/deployed at least twice recently, because supposedly state-actors/police didn't do enough to combat violence, or to protect federal workers or something like that?
Also, hasn't the current administration threaten to deploy the National Guard even more times, because the states are not following what the administration believes are the federal laws? Or what was the reason for those "threats"?
There are a lot of reasons behind some of these distinctions, and some interesting history. But the National Guard kind of serves as the official Militia for each given state... But is far from the coverage meant for what a militia should be when compared to say the first militia act under US law.
Edit: regarding any requests/threats of use... it's generally voluntary use of guardsmen from a state whose governor is friendly to the federal/presidential administration. Hence seeing national guard deployed from one state in order to handle what the president considers an emergency in another state when that state refuses a request.
From the top of my head, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini frequently helped each other, two of them even created a somewhat famous alliance together, even though by their own "theories" they should have been fighting against each other instead.
I'm sure there are even more examples further back too.
We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
I'm not American, I dislike Democrats and Republicans in the US, they're both horrible, just to preface this. Secondly, no other president has urged people to vote for them so people don't have to vote ever again, nor has any president threatened to put previous presidents in jail, nor has any president talked about wanting to skip the mid-terms.
I dislike politicians in general, but also, I'd be blind to not see when someone is extremely dangerous to democracy in general, beyond political affiliations. I'd say the same if it was Obama or who else, because as I said, I don't like any of them.
Asking for a quote of what he said so many times, and that is so easily found with a basic web search, says a lot about your comment.
He’s speaking to evangelical Christians that do not regularly vote, and in the context of instituting voter ID to secure future elections.
ID is required to vote in most (all?) EU states.
1) Puerto Ricans were called publicly on a Trump rally in New York, an "island of garbage" and they massively voted for Trump.
- Second generation Latinos, whose many parents, and grand parents and other close family are illegal immigrants, were repeatedly warned of what would happen, and its one of the constitutions, that massively voted for Trump...
- Trump continued to state, as late as 2024,that the Central Park Five were responsible for the 1989 rape of a woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the five males having been officially exonerated in 2002. - Trump was a leading proponent of the debunked birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming president Barack Obama was not born in the United States - Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African-American renters.
Donald Trump made big gains with Black voters in 2024.
- Trump is a convicted rapist and felon, and is known 44 million women voted for him...
We are past strange, and we are in the phase of electorate deserves what they voted for.
(1) Assume they’re irrational, uninformed, and wrong, or
(2) Reconsider your priors and attempt to understand why they think the way that they do.
Let’s take the “island of garbage”. It was said by a comedian during his set. The Trump campaign stated “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”.
The way that you framed it, however, was very careful to be true while also being misleading.
Generally, a lot of people are just not good people.
Worth remember, no one sees themselves as the "bad people", in each one of those 1/3's point of view, they're the "good people".
I mean, I would have said something exactly like that a few years ago. But first of all, history is full of atrocities committed by humans. They may all have considered themselves good people, but if they were/are objectively not, what does that matter? And secondly, I have encountered people who appear to think that decency is for sissies or something to that effect. Those people seem seriously emboldened lately. Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
It matters less for them, and more for you. Yes, we see them as horrible, but also yes, they see us as horrible people. In the end we're all humans, and we all work towards what we think is better, but the method and goal what "better" actually is obviously differs.
> Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
Yes, of course they do, but their definition of "good person" differs between you and them. For you, decency is "good person", for them, ignoring decency is "good person", so of course they aspire to being a good person, whatever that means for them.
For example, in my EU country I can vote with my passport, my drivers license, or my ID card, and they accept documents which are expired for up to 5 years. For context: this is less restrictive than the documents anyone is technically required to carry every time they leave their home! The number of people who can't meet this requirement is basically zero, and a decent bunch of municipalities offer them for free to poor people.
Meanwhile US has no universal ID system, which allows the pro voter ID groups to carve out a list of "acceptable" IDs which just so happens to be popular with the people that are going to vote for one side of the political spectrum, while excluding the forms of ID which are popular with the other side. And of course it's not just about identification, as they also add a bunch of irrelevant details to the requirements like the information having to exactly match your birth certificate.
Combine that with the failed two-party system where even a handful of votes often completely swings the political landscape and it is pretty obvious what is going on.
It’s not hard to get, and you need it to do everything from filling a scheduled prescription, buying alcohol, entering a bar, flying on a plane, or purchasing cold medicine. You literally cannot function as an independent adult without one.
You also need to show it — along with a second form of ID — to be hired at a job.
Anyone claiming a state ID requirement meaningfully prevents anyone from voting is being deeply unserious.
If they actually believed what they claim, they’d be campaigning to remove the ID requirements that are already pervasive in our daily lives. They are not.
I’ll also note that buying a gun requires not just multiple forms of ID, but also an entire background check. If we can do that for one constitutionally enumerated right, we can damn well require a photo ID to cast a ballot.
He literally said “if you vote for me, you won’t need to vote again”. It’s not an ambiguous statement and doesn’t require extra context. Everything else you said didn’t really have anything to do with it.