this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025

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201

Trump can pull the plug on the internet, and Europe can’t do anything about it (www.politico.eu)

submitted 21 hours ago by babysandpiper@sopuli.xyz to c/world@lemmy.world

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] r_deckard@lemmy.world 21 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Talk about clickbait ...... Article title: trump can pull the plug on the internet and europe can't do anything about it (my emphasis) First line: the U.S. could unplug Europe from the digital world (not "pull the plug on the internet") And then further down: "The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers."

So first, it's "the internet", then it's "unplug europe from the digital world", then it's "europe's dependency on US cloud providers"

So it's NOT "the internet", and it's NOT "unplug europe", it's disconnect european customers from US cloud providers.

Methinks Monseiur Pollet doesn't understand very much about the internet.

[–] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

But honestly, disconnection from the US cloud providers is a lot bigger than you seem to think. A ton of governmental services are hosted on US cloud providers. Pulling that plug would mean blackout for a crapload of governmental services, which we have grown to depend on.

[–] SloganLessons@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

It would also mean a huge hit on their own tech sector, if not near wipeout.

It’s one of those situations that, sure, they could, just like a monkey could purposely snap the branch where he and his friend are sitting on and both fall.

As for Europe, yes, it would be a painful transition, but eventually it could build its own infrastructure anyway

[–] CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 9 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Cloud computing can be replaced (albeit it’s a hard process, sorta like detox). Good luck starting an independent ICANN and DNS zones.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 6 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

It'd take some time to organise a replacement organisation but it's not like those systems collapse when the central service goes down. We do have our own root servers and the internet can survive a month or two of not being able to register new tlds or assign subnets.

On the flipside, I wonder how US multinationals would fare without SAP.

[–] Zenith@lemm.ee 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

My partner is a primary architect of AWS to build a replacement the size and scope that could replace US cloud computing isn’t reasonable unless they already have been developing this for years behind the scenes. The people who understand these systems at scale are few and far between

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 2 points 1 hour ago

There's no "behind the scenes" there are plenty of EU-based cloud providers. Including SAP though that's not why I mentioned them.

[–] JennyLaFae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 3 hours ago

I believe many EU nations are already divesting from US companies and products, both at governmental levels and citizen boycotts. I recently read one of the countries was switching their government's computers to linux/foss

[–] vane@lemmy.world 14 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I hope he will do it so EU politicians stop feeding foreign corporations with tax money.

[–] peteyestee@feddit.org 2 points 10 hours ago

Honestly you're probably right.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 26 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

The US officially giving tech execs military ranks is.... interesting. One of the stronger reasons to avoid companies like Huawei, was that the CCP had direct military ties / agents working within Huawei. The argument in favour of US tech companies in comparison, was that while they may have agreements with the US military, they were at arms length. Now they aren't, and the rationale seems to be attempting to shift to "just trust us", while they openly start major wars/conflicts and support genocidal actions in the middle east.

idk. If I were involved in the decision making for any critical area, I'd avoid the hell out of foreign controlled anything in my regular stacks at this point. Even if it means you have some efficiency hits until there may be an in-country provider available. It wouldn't matter who the other country is at this point, as the US going awol is something most wouldn't have 'bet' on like a decade ago, but here we are.

[–] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 7 hours ago

I'm more shocked that Europeans trusted the US that much knowing how goddamned stupid people are here. We were already an oligarchy 10 years ago.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 10 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I work for a publicly traded company.

We couldn't switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

I don't think the shareholders give a rat's ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It'd take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we're going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment's notice.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 9 hours ago

Yep one of the big drivers is flexibility in capex vs opex. They’ll shape the contract whichever way you want but on prem is straight to capex. I think. I’m not an accountant.

[–] peteyestee@feddit.org 6 points 10 hours ago

It's literally organized crime.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 164 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

This sounds a lot like, “build your own servers and topple another US industry.”

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 74 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Another short-term decision by America could lead to more long-term loss of wealth and influence.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 9 points 17 hours ago

"Stop shooting ourselves in the feet!"

So many decisions being made are very isolationist, and that never works well for the one shutting everyone else out. But who looks at history, right?

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 19 hours ago

Honestly, as an American living in Silicon Valley, I would be overjoyed if Europe became the primary kickstarter for open source alternatives to the existing US corporate infrastructure, that bends to the knees of the Federal government. Even here at home, myself and some of my co-workers aren't too keen on the existing status quo tools because there are too many caveats - from rent seeking subscriptions to the inability to verify if something is tampered with.

In the same way Valve saw how having all their eggs in the Windows basket led them to dive head first into linux development, I hope the EU's realization of the risks in the US tech sector lead it to developing unified, well funded OSS alternatives. I would certainly install them.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 102 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Misleading title. It's really about cloud services. And Europe is already working on making itself independent of American cloud services.

[–] Mothra@mander.xyz 13 points 18 hours ago

Thanks for sparing me the clickbait

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[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 43 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Just some stupid doom bait.

If it would get to cable cutting between US and Europe then we have much bigger problems than slow web apps. If Europe would ever get to that it definitely has enough cloud providers for essential services. Around 90% of all bandwidth is entertainment.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 14 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

who said slow web apps. EU hosting providers could step in probably, but where is exactly all the data stored currently? even assuming that most orgs do proper, working backups, restoring them and setting up their systems for the new providers would still tame a lot of time

[–] kungen@feddit.nu 7 points 16 hours ago

where is exactly all the data stored currently?

Hopefully in the EU, as the EU-US DPF is garbage and should be repealed just like the previous "Privacy Shield" attempts.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 19 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure all three of those companies host server farms in Europe. I doubt they would give them up just to fluff Trump.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 9 hours ago

MS pulled access to the azure environment of a (Russian owned) bank in NL and despite NL court orders asking for the data to be made accessible, it took diplomacy and a US court order to get access. This was not during trump admin.

We’ve been saying “this would never happen” and trump admin has slowly been shifting the Overton window.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 59 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Ya ok but this isn't a doomsday thing, we used to build our own servers before and lots of people know how to do it still.

All AWS and the like do is remove the hardware for the consumer and add some APIs.

Doesn't sound as scary to me as the article paints. The only hard part would be the migration 😅

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 24 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah. That's literally the whole point of "the cloud" it can be anywhere.

The EU has lots of places with available renewable energy.

Hook up a couple servers to some dams. With "free" electricity it'll be almost impossible to not end up being cheaper than Amazon in the long run.

Like, I'm struggling to see how this would be a bad thing long term. Relying on American corporations just isn't a rational choice anymore

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 10 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Hook up a couple servers to some dams.

As someone who works in IT, I love the optimism of making it sound this simple. Things that I expect to take 10 minutes can end up taking weeks, because there's always a surprising answer to "How complicated could it be?"

[–] Bravo@eviltoast.org 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

True, but sometimes the only way something worthwhile ever gets done in the first place is because somebody started on it without realizing how hard it would be. Columbus only discovered the New World because he'd underestimated how far away from Asia he was. Sometimes you NEED an optimistic idiot to actually get something done. Nobody else wanted to sail west because they (correctly) assessed that the Earth was bigger than Columbus thought, and it was only blind luck that Columbus encountered an unknown continent before running out of supplies. So an idiot was necessary.

And (as a separate point) yes, when an idiot embarks on an overly-optimistic project it's a pain in the ass for everyone else who has to clean up the mess, but often the achievement lasts a lot longer and outweighs the trouble by orders of magnitude. For example the Moon landing ended up costing ten times what was originally budgeted, but I'd still say it was worth it.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

sometimes the only way something worthwhile ever gets done in the first place is because somebody started on it without realizing how hard it would be.

Yes, that's a good point. We both benefit and suffer from humanity's overly optimistic moments.

often the achievement lasts a lot longer and outweighs the trouble by orders of magnitude.

True too, but Columbus might not be the clearest example of that.

[–] Bravo@eviltoast.org 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Ah yes, I hadn't intended that part to be considered a continuation of the Columbus point. "Sometimes idiots like Columbus get things done that nobody else was gonna do because everybody else understands just how monumental the task actually is and are deterred from doing it" is a separate point from "often even when a project was more trouble, time and effort than bargained for, it's still worth it". My apologies for the confusion. I've edited my other comment to make it clearer on that score.

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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

If the USA switches off cloud services for the EU, that's a short-term problem. Really bad short term, but after a month or so everything is back up and running.

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[–] Bwaz@lemmy.world 15 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Time for EU to start a new web, WWWUS. World-Wide-Without-....

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 9 points 16 hours ago

WWWEU.. Pronounced as "Wii U". 💅

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 31 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

All that would do is get Jeff Bezos to hire a hitman to take out Trump.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 45 points 21 hours ago

I’m not hearing a problem here

[–] dinren@discuss.online 6 points 20 hours ago

I know an Italian guy who might be down

[–] nialv7@lemmy.world 21 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I hope this means people finally start to see the danger of centralization.

[–] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 7 hours ago

I can't convince a single person to get off Facebook and stop using Gmail.

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 11 points 20 hours ago

Our own internet without Americans? Where do I sign up?

[–] T00l_shed@lemmy.world 11 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, there are servers in European countries, couldn't they just nationalize the servers and continue as usual?

[–] lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 9 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The servers would stop working the moment the US “pulls the plug.” Nationalization would not secure service, that would only secure non-functional hardware

[–] Branny@sh.itjust.works 12 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

The hardware is here. The entire hecking infrastructure is here. Making it work might not be as easy as flipping a switch, but it is definitely not impossible lol

[–] lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago

The hardware isn’t the hard part, but I get your point

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 7 points 20 hours ago

For one, servers running Amazon's ECS/EKS can switch to self-managed Kubernetes.

Even if Trump is bluffing as usual, European governments and local councils should get the hint that the tech hegemony Google Amazon Apple and Microsoft is going to be used as an arm of the US government.

Time to switch! Wololo

Richard stallman, Saint IGNUtias of the Church of Emacs

[–] ideonek@piefed.social 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google...

Do it! What are you waiting for? Do it!

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 5 points 20 hours ago

If we get tot get point Trump is cutting off the world's internet, I'd be more concerned about the nukes about to fly.

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