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.
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.
Yes, that’s a good point. We both benefit and suffer from humanity’s overly optimistic moments.
True too, but Columbus might not be the clearest example of that.
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.