European Systems Collective

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28006908

Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

Dutch informatics and intelligence expert Bert Hubert explains why European governments are urgently trying to get away from the American clouds and how they do it fastest. The article is in German. Here are few excerpts translated by me using Firefox Translation.

What is happening in the EU, is that the politicians are finally waking up. They should have done this five years ago.

The Dutch Cybersecurity Center NCSC has conducted an in-depth investigation of Microsoft. In an official evaluation, it has recorded mutatis mutandis: "The USA can at any time access the European data storage. But we don't think they will do that." Of course, that has always been pure wishful thinking. [...] It remains subject to American surveillance laws.

The data transfer agreement will be cancelled soon. Either the EU Commission is pulling back the adequacy decision, which presupposes that the US is a country with an adequate level of data protection [...] or the European Court of Justice will declare it invalid.

The whole of Europe should be alarmed. We have become a digital colony of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. [...] Our officials are putting European security and independence at risk just so that they can continue to use Microsoft Outlook! That sounds idiotic, but that's how I experience administrations.

We must finally redeem the many European open source programmers. [...] At some point we stopped believing that we can write good software. Now Europe only offers SAP software as an export hit, that's it. But if we invest billions somewhere, it's in European software development.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60461323

https://archive.ph/X5rh6

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/41819102

Viktor Shvets of Macquarie points out that in 2023, the US exported more than $300 billion in information and communications technology and business services, yielding a net surplus of $120 billion. US royalty and license fees (mostly tech) reached a net surplus of $90 billion, while financial services generated a surplus of $63 billion. “Expanding the scope of the trade war will be inflammatory,” he says, “but it seems the EU (and Canada) might have decided that one can only negotiate with the US from a position of strength, and services are the US’ Achilles heel.”

The Dutch Broadcasting Foundation reports (in Dutch) that European tech companies are seeing a spike in new customers. They attribute the increase to a growing desire to transition away from US-based tech companies.

It looks like new customers are mostly consumers and small businesses, but hopefully this will build momentum for larger european enterprises to consider switching. Often, a change in consumer sentiment and preferences foretells a shift at the enterprise level.

Matt Burgess writing at WIRED:

There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.

For years, there's been a bubbling concern about the behavior of the big US tech corporations around data privacy and tech lock-in. Now that's boiling over, into a near crisis about digital sovereignty and the imperative to find or build viable alternatives.

This article is a good overview of recent events fueling the movement to reduce or eliminate the utter dependence on big US-based tech companies.