this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Trump is back — and with him, the risk that the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet.

As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.

The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.

Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.

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[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Companies also probably have servers in other places, meaning perhaps they’d connect through elsewhere

Depends on company, but that worst case scenario is that all US companies would shut down all their services in Europe overnight. Every big player has datacenters around the world and if it's just the traffic between continents which is shut down then the effect is way less radical, absolute majority of Europe already connects to datacenters near them even if they use Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc services.

For example with my employer dropping every US based company would be a hell of a work, specially if it's needed in a hurry. We, as well as a ton of others, rely on Microsoft services for all kinds of communication and should that go away we'd need to make quite a few phone calls around couple of continents just to set up a common ground on where and how to start building new infrastructure and how to keep communication lines open.

Though if it were for a few hours, maybe let people see the consequences of their dependence, and what life would be like without these services

Few hours is a short time. There's some problems around the globe all the time which affect various services on various levels for few hours all the time. Few days of complete blackout and C-suits start to really sweat (plus it costs significant amounts of money via lost productivity).

if anyone knows how to block connections based on location, feel free to enlighten me

You'll need a firewall/router which can do geoblocking. Based on quick search at least pfsense seems to have some options available. If I were to try that I'd set up a pfsense on a virtual machine, set up geoblock on that and use that as a gateway for my testing devices while leaving the rest of the network as it is so that I could limit/choose what devices may behave strangely and still have normal functionality for the rest.

I assume there's a ton of other options too besides pfsense, but the key words are 'geoblock', 'firewall' and 'router' or something around that. Also I assume that most of the stuff you find explains how to block incoming traffic based on geoIP, but it should be relatively simple to adapt those for outgoing traffic as well.

[–] lemmyknow@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago

I was mainly mentioning servers outside US in the context of me blocking access to/from US personally. If US blocked it all everywhere, that woudn't be possible. You'd at best have the data up to that point in time, until the block, but no further, unless the companies update their servers physically, with, like, USBs, CDs, Floppy Disks.

As for already connecting to data centers nearby, some of my top US connections, according to NextDNS, are, ironically, from Spotify, which, afaik, is European.

Few hours is a short time Yeah, but remember this also affects everyday people. I was mainly thinking of them, I guess. Akin to a nation-wide power outage. You see just how much you depend on it, and what it'd be like without it. It may already be so ingrained in one's everyday life. To realise to what extent, can be eye-opening. Most people probably wouldn't expect, and could be surprised, by stuff mentioned, such as GPS and payments, not working. Or just something that, in the background, relies on a big US company, like Amazon servers or something

pfsense Will look into that. And also look for the keywords, see what else I can find. Let's see if I go through with such experiment