If AWS gets a letter from an American 3-letter agency to plz turn over this and that data and don't tell anyone, they're going to comply, no matter what kind of paper "privacy shield" agreement the politicians negotiated this time around.

You can name the NSA, it’s not illegal to do it (not in Europe at least —- pun intended)

I didn't mean to be vague, I meant to be general. I don't know which other agencies have this kind of unchecked power.

Probably a few we've never heard of.

Some might even have a different number of letters in their acronyms, to fly below our radars. :-)

To be a bit facetious/snarky: And we compare this to the EU's version where they're outright open about it and censor-away? "We're not being bad, this is legal censorship!"

I'm not talking about censorship but about access to private data.

AWS does not yet have a sovereign cloud in Europe, they're planning to launch in 2025: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-plans-to-invest-e7... (linked in the article)

Not with direct control from the US - with AWS there is no privacy or sovereignity difference between EU-CENTRAL-1 or US-EAST-1 - you might tick a compliancy checkbox though. But sooner or later there will be more pressure and AWS and Azure will create legally independent companies in the EU to manage clouds in the EU.

Sadly iirc the US laws that makes GDPR compliance problematic cover subsidiaries so making them independant enough is probably more or less impossible in practice.

AWS and Azure's "sovereign clouds" still effectively fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA, rendering them as sovereign as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.

How so - Lidl created something for their own demand, and started selling it to externals and found demand. Nothing protectionist in that

There are some protectionist-like tendencies in europe and that’s fine. Both laws trying to push for as much local parts as possible and buying agencies preference for local providers by tweaking purchasing terms here and there.

They’re not protectionist, they’re about self-sufficiency and about lowering dependency on third parties, and it’s a good thing in my opinion.

> Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing

please revisit the dictionary

There’s no local industry to protect if you ain’t self-sufficiency. And it’s damn hard to protect self-sufficiency long term without protectionism if possible at all.

protectionism is an optional downstream branch of self-sufficiency - being self-sufficient does not automatically imply that it will devolve into protectionism

But without protectionism self-sufficiency is very likely to fall apart. Be it Chinese manufacturing or EU agriculture.

this is also how AWS started. amazon created a setup they needed and found out that they can sell it to others as well.

It's both. Privacy and sovereignty are big issues in Europe, specifically because of the jurisdiction issues. The fact that it provides some protection for European businesses means they'll lean into it all the more. That said, I think the Europeans would be joyous if the rest of the world would eliminate their protectionist boundaries by adopting Europe's privacy laws.

All countries do that where strategically sensible - or beneficial to "friends" of the government. 300% import tax on Bombardier CSeries anyone? CHIPS act? Silicon Valley getting started with military contracts?

or: the EU is serious about citizen privacy and addressing the flagrant disregard for it that the major adtech players have shown. If LIDL can compete on price/features/performance _and_ comply with the laws, then good luck to them. Equally, if the big US companies comply, then there's nothing excluding them from the market. They're already present as you note.

After arresting Pavel Durov on specious charges yesterday? Seems more like protectionism with that context.

The EU didn't arrest Durov, France did.

Dude should have blocked that nazi channel when we asked nicely.

Yes. And it works when implemented correctly. See China.

I'm going to apologize for my ignorance upfront here, but I was under the impression that China isn't protecting local companies. It is making the companies it can directly control the only available option. Perhaps you're referring to something other than just controlling technology and information. I'd be interested in knowing more if there's something specific you had in mind

Many Chinese local companies took advantage of west technology they acquired in joint companies and Chinese government kicked off western companies.

Preventing a good part of western big tech from entering the market was protectionism too.

It’s more of a prisoners dilemma than “it works when implemented correctly.”

In general, all parties do better in freer markets and all parties do poorly in restricted markets. However, when one party in a trading system implements restrictions and the others don’t that party can gain outsized benefits versus others.

The world spent almost 50 years liberalizing trade systems, mostly with benefits at the national scale. It took 10-15 years for most of leaders to realize that China was successfully subverting the liberal system.

“it works when implemented correctly” is the wrong lessons and will lead us to widespread protectionism and make us all poorer.

The right lesson is that “bad actors need to be dealt with and excluded from the system.”

„It works when implemented correctly“ might not be the lesson you want others to learn. But looking at China, boy did it work for them.

Once you start dealing with bad actors, you'd have to kick out pretty much anybody. Did western europe played fairly with post-cold-war eastern europe? No. I hear South america have issues with US too.

In reality this works great for established powers to keep status quo. For the rest... It depends on how many rules you're willing to bend. Or how others go above-and-beyond to help you out for some reason that is not part of the system.