Microsoft unveils finalized EU Data Boundary as European doubt over US grows Microsoft has completed its EU data boundary, however, analysts and some regional cloud players are voicing concerns over dependencies on a US entity, even with the guarantees in place. A digital trade war benefits no one. Tariffs or taxes imposed by either side risk fracturing the global cloud ecosystem... The EU Data …
Look at how the current "administration" has turned on Ukraine, on trade with the rest of the world, and - fair enough - itself.
Europe should be using this as a wake-up call that it's time for them to develop their own capabilities (military, cloud, etc) rather than sleepwalking into disaster because they spent forever bickering with that one Russian sympathiser. So, yes, a two-tier EU is now inevitable and so is vastly reducing dependency on the US.
When the guy in charge of the west starts parroting the propaganda of the east, it's time for a hard rethink.
Of course this is not surprising given that Russia is "led" by a man whose backbone support are extreme right-wing nationalists (which is of course why it is highly ironic that the Russians keep on talking about the "fascist regime in Kiev") and the US is now led by a man whose backbone support are extreme right-wing nationalists. I find it difficult to understand why anyone would be surprised that DT is perfectly willing to shit all over old alliances.
it is highly ironic that the Russians keep on talking about the "fascist regime in Kiev"
Not ironic. SoP in situations like this: blame somebody else for being what you are. It not only accuses the victim, it also directs attention from yourself especially in a case like his, the attention of your own population.
>> DT is perfectly willing to shit all over old alliances <<
Because Trump's brain has either damage or undeveloped Frontal Lobes. This area of the brain manages emotions, thinking, personality and judgement, among other things. Everything in fact that Trump is deficient. Basically his Frontal Lobes of his brain haven't developed further than that of a 3-year old having a tantrum. "Chance" and "Mush" exhibit similar traits that may be the same. Definitely a bunch of con-men related to Adolf H, whatever the cause.
I can't- and wouldn't- begin to guess at the physical state of Trump's brain development, but if one's upbringing can affect that in any way, I can't believe it wouldn't have in his case.
Everything I've heard paints Trump's father (Fred Trump Sr) as an utterly contemptible individual who basically rewarded Donald for being a sociopathic piece of shit and relentlessly mocked, bullied and degraded his older son (Fred Jr)- by all acccounts a decent person- because he *wasn't* and because he later wanted to become an airline pilot instead of following in the family business, before he died an early death through alcoholism. (*)
It's likely that Trump is someone who- unlike most normal people- never grew up beyond that self-centred, bullying child phase not merely because- like many who came from a highly-privileged background- he never needed to, but because in his case he was actively encouraged in the other direction.
Having heard Trump's genuinely shocking- and I don't use that phrase lightly- attempt to bully, degrade and shout down Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House on Friday, one thought among many I had was this was someone who really, *really* needed to have been beaten to within an inch of his life the first time he showed another human being that level of intentional disrespect.
One can debate how much of Trump was down to him being born that way, and how much was down to his upbringing. But we have the end result, regardless.
I don't look at Trump and see even the slightest possibility of a "good" person inside, waiting to be brought out. If that potential ever existed, it was driven out decades ago. At this point all we have left is that sociopathic monster- someone who strikes me not just as broken, but fundamentally incomplete as a human being.
The makers of a documentary once summed Trump up far better (and more damningly) than I ever could:-
> A sad, delusional, dangerous man.
>
> No books,
> No friends,
> No music,
> No curiosity,
> No patience,
> No integrity,
> No compassion,
> No empathy,
> No loyalty,
> No conscience,
> No courage,
> No manners,
> No respect,
> No character,
> No morality,
> No honor.
> Not even a dog.
(*) I'm very wary about speculating on the causes of that, but I can't believe that the relentless bullying and contempt from his father wouldn't have (at the very least) made it worse.
Europe would have to overturn its tax system first, because it punishes working men and productive business. It is rather a pensioners' paradise in the extremely competitive global world.
This structural issue is 10x harder than Europe's dependence on Russian gas.
One measure where to start is to fix the real estate *market*, to make it stop being a market. For example by taxing real estate capital gains at 80%; lowering rental income tax; abolishing all taxes and fees on moving a home. Real estate is the most serious problem for creation of debt, reducing work mobility, overcharging workers for rents, blowing an enormous bubble of unproductive assets - like in China recently, devaluing currency etc.
Europe would have to overturn its tax system first, because it punishes working men and productive business.
Have we been listening to Microsoft, Amazon etc scream about how incredibly and deeply unfair it is that they have to pay tax in the countries where they generate wealth by any chance?
Particularly when Pete Hegseth, the new Defence Secretary has 'paused' the US's counter cyber security for Russia:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2er34w0jgdo
"US President Donald Trump's administration is pausing its offensive cyber operations against Russia, officials say, as a diplomatic push continues to end the war in Ukraine.
The reasoning for the instruction has not been publicly stated, and it is not clear how long the halt might last. The defence department has declined to comment.
...
The halt of American cyber operations against Russia came from Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth in new guidance to US Cyber Command, officials told the BBC's US partner CBS News.
It leaves questions over the strength of the US fightback in the cyber arena against alleged Russian hacking, election interference and sabotage efforts that have targeted the Western nations which have sided with Ukraine during the war.
Hundreds or thousands of personnel could be affected by Hegseth's order, according to The Record, a cybersecurity publication which first reported the news, external. Operations aimed at strengthening Ukraine's digital defences are likely to be among those affected."
Just what Vladimir wanted for Christmas / Lent / his birthday, I expect
OOPS!, missed: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/03/infosec_in_brief/
Don Tangoman will probably view just thinking this as not showing RESPECT and as attack on US business….in the same vein as the Day One threat on taxing them according to local convention and walking back on US support for the UN’s Global Fair Taxation Drive.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/02/the-guardian-view-on-a-tax-war-the-world-must-unite-against-american-obstruction
You’re absolutely right but people with far more knowledge and experience of this stuff than most of us on here have been saying this for years.
As usual, governments work FAR too slowly to wake up to what’s going on in plain sight and most businesses are too lazy to think outside of the box.
With FISA and CLOUD Act, and Trump asking CIA to perform espionage on everybody to sustain "MAGA", where data resides is utterly useless, unless EU counters FISA and CLOUD Act with a law that inflict serious jail time to anyone who breaks EU data laws. Yet even that would close the stable after horses run away. EU should start forbidding USA entity to participate in government tenders, and store governments data. on security and sovereignity grounds. No tariffs - but a complete ban. With Trump, US companies cannot be trusted - even less than before. - especially since all of them became very cosy with Trump.
Turn MAGA into Make America Go Away - and let's see how some billionaires take it...
Microsoft has completed its EU data boundary, however, analysts and some regional cloud players are voicing concerns over dependencies on a US entity, even with the guarantees in place.
They're still an American company, still subject to the CLOUD act, so where it's stored is almost certainly irrelevant.
That sort of thing may well have worked up until now when costs, convenience and vested interests may have played a part in the EU being willing to accept dependent-upon-trust assurances and fluff agreements and arrangements from an ally to checkbox the rules.
But *if* we're now at the point where European governments have finally woken up to the danger of the US being in control of their national infrastructure no longer being a merely academic issue (not that it ever was) but a threat to national security, and if they're genuinely willing to put up with the cost and inconvenience of moving away from it for that reason, then I don't think pseudo-legalese like an "EU data boundary" is going to cut it.
Any company, any individual, trusting any cloud supplier....irrespective of the physical location of the cloud hardware.....is paying for a single point of failure for their data. Period.
How hard is this to understand?
What happened to the idea of a company owned-and controlled data centre?
What happened to the idea of an individual having their own owned-and controlled data processing?
>What happened to the idea of a company owned-and controlled data centre?
It's expensive and potentially more unreliable - unless you are also experts in cyber security and power and communication systems redundancy.
Ok if you're a major bank or a government - but expecting every small business to have multiple geographically separated data centers might be a distraction from running their day to day business
... they can keep their data on their hard drives or in their server rooms.
They will still be using US OSs and US software of course. Tch.
One issue to examine is how much data any company needs to maintain access to. Probably not very much. The rest can reside in an archive. Most companies do not need anything as grand as a data centre, or much shared storage space. I suspect most waste space due to content bloat - a 'record everything' mentality because they can.
Only if they choose to
Except that, by ignoring people who've been warning about this for decades (yes, I do mean decades), we (collectively) have allowed things to get to the point where there isn't much choice.
We (collectively) allowed MS to blatantly stuff national standards bodies to approve it's "open in name only" data formats as an international standard - I read it at the time, it's a pile of steaming manure and no-one should have passed it, but MS stuffed all the committees with paid shills to vote it through (and I recall complaints afterwards that these committees were then unable to function as the MS shills didn't turn up after that vote leaving the committees without a quorum).
But that's relatively minor.
We (collectively) allowed them to blatantly cripple Windows on the desktop from working well with non-MS servers - thus crippling the competition such that it fizzled out. And we stood by while they blatantly crippled windows servers so they didn't work nicely with anything but Windows on the desktop. And we stood idly by while they knitted everything ever more tightly together (using private keys to make open standards anything but open) to make it ever harder to replace any single component. And now we reach where even I didn't think we would - an MS ecosystem that's so entangled and entwined that it's really REALLY hard to replace parts of it with something else.
And that is the reality. In business, the MS ecosystem "just works" - at least well enough to convince the people with the purse strings that it would be too expensive to consider anything else. So everyone uses MS because everyone else uses MS - and unless you are something the size of the government of a large country then you won't have the resources to sponsor development of something to adequately compete with it. And something like the government of a large country will typically not have the political will to do so.
Yes, I hate that. I don't personally use any MS software or service willingly or knowingly. But as an individual I can easily manage using (e.g.) Libreoffice. As a business it's a lot harder - especially as MS do their utmost to make compatibility hard so that (e.g.) documents done with Libreoffice won't come out the same in Word (and vice-versa).
The tech billionaires will demand Trump punish countries that try to enforce restrictions on their social media products (see also Vance's "freedom (for us) to propagandise" rant).
Our response should be to repeal those parts of the IP laws that the US insisted we adopt to make it illegal to use software to work around "digital locks" such as those in printers, or on the Google and Apple stores etc. This would be a much better approach than a tariff tit-for-tat as it would lower costs rather than raising them ( not so easy to charge app writers 30% if they don't need your permission ), and hit those Trump supporters where it matters - a large part of the US tech industry profits rely on using these laws to suppress competition.
IMO the Trump revolution is all about transferring money from everyone else to the billionaires, everything else is bells & whistles to keep their supportes happy until they no longer matter. Not unlike Russia, as others have pointed out.
IMO the Trump revolution is all about transferring money from everyone else to the billionaires, everything else is bells & whistles to keep their supportes happy until they no longer matter. Not unlike Russia, as others have pointed out.
Not like Russia! Ours will be the bigliest kleptocracy in the world!!!
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Are the only thing these corporations can understand. Tangerine Palpatine threatened they broligarchs and the bent a knee.
I have a horrible idea. Let’s have the EU force the tech bros to put their money makers where their mouth is. If they want to play in the market, have them place their code for their software in escrow. Any violation invalidates their IP, essentially making it open season to nationalize and defaulting to EU management as essential infrastructure. Imagine the big players losing market shares along with their minds.
A horrible slippery slope straight to hell but and interesting threat.
A lot of the comments here voicing concern over an American company hosting data in Europe sounds like the concerns voiced in the USA over TikTok. These are realistic concerns. Does any think Donald Trump and his government is more trustworthy than Xi Jinping and the Chinese government?
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