US Tech Giants Warn Europe That Data Sovereignty Requirements Could Cost $128 Billion (theregister.com) 89
A study commissioned by CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, estimates that the EU's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could impose 115 billion euros ($128 billion) in costs over a decade as governments and companies migrate workloads and rewrite software. The figure is more than six times the European Commission's upper estimate. However, roughly 80 billion euros ($89 billion) of it comes from a modeled scenario assuming sovereignty rules are extended to 25% of cloud workloads in essential private-sector industries.The Register reports: The report specifically targets Article 31 of the proposed legislation, which it says could allow the Commission to extend sovereignty requirements into essential private-sector services. CCIA argues that forcing businesses to move away from existing cloud infrastructure could trigger expensive software redevelopment projects, with code rewriting and re-architecting accounting for 69 percent of its estimated costs.
Luxembourg would apparently take the biggest hit, with the study putting the cost at 1,711 euros per worker over ten years. Denmark (905 euros), Austria (900 euros), and Finland (864 euros) also face hefty bills, as does Ireland (856 euros), which hosts the European headquarters of several US tech giants. CCIA is urging EU governments to overhaul the proposed legislation, limit sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads, and abandon requirements based on corporate origin or personnel nationality in favor of what it calls risk-based technical safeguards.
"Member States cannot rely on the Commission's incomplete estimates when deciding CADA's strict sovereignty requirements for cloud and AI providers," said Mitchell Rutledge, CCIA Europe's policy manager. "Taxpayers and businesses will foot the bill, yet the official assessment missed 70 percent of CADA's true impact." For AWS and Google, offering European customers greater control over their data also helps retain business that might otherwise migrate to European competitors. It's a rather convenient arrangement: sell customers sovereignty on one hand, while an industry association representing your interests warns governments against imposing too much of it on the other.
Luxembourg would apparently take the biggest hit, with the study putting the cost at 1,711 euros per worker over ten years. Denmark (905 euros), Austria (900 euros), and Finland (864 euros) also face hefty bills, as does Ireland (856 euros), which hosts the European headquarters of several US tech giants. CCIA is urging EU governments to overhaul the proposed legislation, limit sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads, and abandon requirements based on corporate origin or personnel nationality in favor of what it calls risk-based technical safeguards.
"Member States cannot rely on the Commission's incomplete estimates when deciding CADA's strict sovereignty requirements for cloud and AI providers," said Mitchell Rutledge, CCIA Europe's policy manager. "Taxpayers and businesses will foot the bill, yet the official assessment missed 70 percent of CADA's true impact." For AWS and Google, offering European customers greater control over their data also helps retain business that might otherwise migrate to European competitors. It's a rather convenient arrangement: sell customers sovereignty on one hand, while an industry association representing your interests warns governments against imposing too much of it on the other.
Yeah they know that (Score:5, Insightful)
Next time you want to do business outside of the United States don't allow a known pedophile and rapist with clear signs of dementia to become president of the United States just so you can get some tax breaks and a little extra corruption. Long-term the trade-offs probably aren't worth it.
Re:Yeah they know that (Score:5, Insightful)
With the recent interference with Starlink in Ukraine, it's pretty clear that there are many powerful people in America who are Russian assets.
Not Russian assets (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yeah they know that (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. And as to the "cost", that is nice, but they seem to have omitted all the gains. And that the gains are not over 10 years, but permanent.
Re: Yeah they know that (Score:1)
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I wish there were a "-1 Incoherent" mod for drivel like this. What are you trying to say?
Half the analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting. And how much does it cost them to not fix the problem?
Re: Half the analysis (Score:5, Informative)
Also, all that money will be going into European pockets. For the longest time all those funds were spent on foreign companies with hardly any footprint in Europe.
I'm personally seeing the effect in Belgium, with companies in my field popping up like mushrooms in autumn. It used to be difficult finding a decent job over here, because my specialty was only in demand by US companies that weren't hiring in Europe. All that is changing,and so I think the money is well spent.
Re: Half the analysis (Score:5, Informative)
Also, all that money will be going into European pockets. For the longest time all those funds were spent on foreign companies with hardly any footprint in Europe.
I'm personally seeing the effect in Belgium, with companies in my field popping up like mushrooms in autumn. It used to be difficult finding a decent job over here, because my specialty was only in demand by US companies that weren't hiring in Europe. All that is changing,and so I think the money is well spent.
Kind of ironic that Trump's whole spiel is that he thinks he is going to bring more jobs back to America, but he himself is a huge red flag to the world about the abject hazard of doing business with Americans.
Re: Half the analysis (Score:2)
The Trump era has now put the US on a blacklist for many new investments.
It's a slow move that takes time, but it's there. It will take decades for the US to regain trust.
US bonds are also seen as less reliable today so lenders outside the US are slowly leaving them, which means that more bond buyers have to be found in the US. This in turn lead to the US$ to be less trusted and trade values like US$/barrel for oil may end and be replaced by other measurements.
The US inflation is already rising, which is an
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There's another effect that I think will become important to the rest of the world outside of the U.S. The AI infrastructure investing has just taken a hit on Wall Street and the Asian markets, I expect the Euro markets will follow suit. The feeling is that AI won't turn out to be money spinner. In part this is because of open models from the Chinese (and others) stealing the big boys' lunch. It is also due to the herd tendency of Americans to hop onto the latest whizzy thingy so they can get rich quick. Th
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Wait for the AI mastermind's move: Outlaw usage of open models (or make it hard by requiring throughout safety checks that are hard to pass) so the US companies like Anthropic don't need to fear competition. Meanwhile Europe and the rest of the world start embracing non-US models leaving only the USA at mercy of OpenAI and Anthropic.
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Really? I don't see pics or stories of Aryan, er, White Real Americans moving to the country to do stoop labor, which is one of the two major reasons for the price of food (the other being diesel).
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the number of people working is the same.
LOL yes you repatriated all the menial jobs. The world is laughing at you.
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Why shouldn't poor white Americans have the opportunity to get jobs?
Indeed. You'll need them as the rest of the world migrates away from your white collar ones with increasing urgency.
Is there some other reason I'm not seeing?
I suspect there is much you do not see.
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Whjy do you believe tje Faux News version of what we want? I might as well believe China Daily on what you want.
And *we* want people from other contries to take our jobs? Perfect answer: about 20 years ago, a guy sued Oracle. He had found evidence that they brought him in as an H1-B, *explicitly* because they could pay him 10% LESS than Americans. ROI, y'know...
Why aren't you mad at corporate execs, who don't want to give *YOU* good paying jobs?
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Oh, well then! (Score:5, Insightful)
A study commissioned by an organization whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta could not possibly be even the teeny-tiniest bit self-serving.
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Maybe so, but at least we can count on honesty from any group that includes Meta!
Re:Oh, well then! (Score:5, Interesting)
yes there's a cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes there's a cost to continue doing business with companies that are increasingly greedy based in a country that is increasingly hostile and an existential threat. I have never on my life seen such brash and naked lust coming from a country that was previously a beacon, a country that built alliances that benefitted more than just themselves. Sad that this has all been destroyed. Hard times ahead for everyone. Sad also because it's so senseless.
Re:yes there's a cost (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly right. And what's even sadder is that the USA is hurtling towards financial doom ($40T debt and going up by $2T/year; spending more to service the debt than on the military) so that we'll all get to "enjoy" living under the last remaining superpower of China. Really tough times ahead.
Re: yes there's a cost (Score:4, Insightful)
The period where this was true only started after the second World War.
Before then the US was just as egotistical and self-absorbed as it is today. That is the reason why it joined so late in both World Wars.
So you could say the US is simply returning to its default stance on world affairs.
Re: yes there's a cost (Score:4, Interesting)
An interesting 46min video on just this: an inward looking America has never best served its own interests [youtu.be], also the history of "America First".
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Yes there's a cost to continue doing business with companies that are increasingly greedy [and whom i dont like]
there is also a cost to not doing business--for example, europe has only 1 company in the worldwide top 25, whereas the US has 20.
and one of the biggest hurdles to starting a business in europe, per europeans, is regulations.
i applaud the spirit in which the EU strives to safeguard its citizens; however the practical effects are another matter.
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i applaud the spirit in which the EU strives to safeguard its citizens; however the practical effects are another matter.
It depends on what you regard as most important: a company making a lot of money that is distributed to a small number of people (share holders) even if it means, for instance, polluting the local environment or acting to the benefit of the general population. Ie is it the rich getting richer and the poor poorer or is wealth to be distributed more evenly.
bro (Score:1)
The Cloud Act was in 2018. That meant that no data held by a US company anywhere in the world was safe. That law was passed specifically because the US was trying to access this data and until then companies were saying no. It was not a hypothetical threat. Only a fool would have kept using US tech infrastructure past that point.
It has nothing to do with who the US president is. He is not the one seeking this data. It's the "security state" same as it always was.
Duh (Score:2)
What would you expect the CCIA to say? Vibe code the replacement?
hmmmm (Score:2)
Europeans: hey US companies, you gotta keep all the data inside EU borders and only Europeans can control it".
US companies: "sure, we can build a bunch of data centers in the EU to serve you exclusively, and populate them with expensive EU employess, but we're gonna pass those costs on to the customer. Prepare for the heart attack when you see the bill in 3, 2, 1..."
The actual cost? Who knows. I'm not sure that I would
Re: hmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Having the datacenters in Europe is just one of the requirements. More important is the legal aspects of who has control.
American and Chinese companies have to abide by the laws of their home countries first, so they will screw over Europeans every time no matter where the datacenter is located.
Re:hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Europeans: hey US companies, you gotta keep all the data inside EU borders and only Europeans can control it".
That was the old way, since then EU noticed that US companies will still send the data to the US government if they ask so the new way is not involve any US company at all regardless of where they have their datacenters.
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I would expect that this pays off within 20 years or so and then produces a plus, long-term.
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Yes a lot of infrastructure has a long payoff period after the initial cost. Datacenters might be different than sewers and electrical lines.
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It is mostly not a question of infrastructure.
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US companies: "sure, we can build a bunch of data centers in the EU to serve you exclusively, and populate them with expensive EU employess, but we're gonna pass those costs on to the customer. Prepare for the heart attack when you see the bill in 3, 2, 1..."
Every US tech company already has EU datacentres. Every US tech company is currently executing projects to build more EU datacentres (except Facebook, but that's because they literally just failed to build one in the Netherlands due to local opposition to the location they chose). There is no difference in bill. It doesn't cost much to build and run datacentres in Europe, and while the USA currently has 46% of the world's datacentres, the EU already has over 30%.
The cost being discussed has nothing to do wi
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Expensive european workers that pay expensive taxes in Europe... the bill is not really as high as you'd imagine.
Re: hmmmm (Score:2)
Soverignty Ain't Cheap (Score:2)
Freedom ain't free, sovereignty ain't cheap.
Hopefully they are increasing their military budgets too, shoring up the physical side of security.
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trump isn't "holding Western civilization strong".
trump is a corrupt piece of shit that is selling out the core of the Western civilization to the worst enemies of the Western civilization for personal enrichment and some verbal praise from those very enemies of the Western civilization.
You're a moron maggot, but even you understand that you're posting stupid lies, that's why you're always trolling as anonymous, a pseudonym would have been modded to oblivion and forgotten here long ago.
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Hey, tavarishch, your own foreign minister Kalantarian-Lavrov is a "brown migrant" by your standards. Your own president orchestrated the largest Muslim influx in a country on the European continent since the ottoman empire. All while killing "white Christians" in his stupid short victorious 5 year war he's lost in Ukraine. GTFO with your dumb talking points.
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LOL, really, all you can do is a feeble tu quoque?
Ta ty strelochnik, blyad, huzhe pidorasa.
I'm making it about your talking points, only pointing them back at you, tavarishch.
You claim that Europe's "countries get overrun by 3rd worlders".
But the Muslim overflow of Moscow and other large cities, is an often discussed problem in the ruzzkie pederation, many of your compatriots claim it is engineered by your zeroed president and virtually all who have traveled to Europe agree that it is a lot worse in Moscow
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You should, tavarishsch.
You live there.
Holy Shit! Really???? (Score:2)
This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.
Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.
Exactly WHO will it cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a condemnation, it's an admission by the Megalomaniacal Seven that they have zero interest in building out EU versions of the very infrastructure their "services" require; an admission that the money is only supposed to flow in one direction, and it ain't East.
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No not at all. Facebook *HAS* it's own EU datacentres. Three in fact, and they tried to build a fourth in the Netherlands only for it to be cancelled due to local opposition. Heck all major technology companies have massive data presence in the EU and geofenced data at that. EU laws have already required this for a long time. Microsoft currently has 200!!! datacentres in the EU, 71 dedicated to EU based Azure cloud infrastructure. They have major data hubs in France, Germany and the Netherlands and are cur
Money well spent (Score:2)
And money that will get saved after the process is concluded. And then saved some more, forever.
I can beat that! (Score:3)
I predict it could cost as much as $150 Billion!
Do I hear $200B? We're making shit up - go large!
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640 G$ ought to be enough for anybody !
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The trillionaire class is laughing at you.
Everything leading up to the Cloud Act (Score:5, Informative)
federal prosecutors used a domestic warrant to demand a suspect's emails from microsoft. microsoft said nahh, make me, because the data was physically stored in their in ireland data centers and that american warrants do not work on foreign soil. to get evidence abroad prosecutors were supposed to use og diplomatic treaties (agreements between countries to help each other look for clues). but that system was a bureaucratic nightmare that routinely took 10 to 24 months. frustrated by a system too slow for the internet age, the doj took microsoft all the way to the supreme court.
instead of modernizing international treaties to fix how global investigations work, the us congress took a shitty shortcut by making a new law.
in 2018, they passed the cloud act (a law that ignores physical borders entirely and fks w/ sovereignty). the new law said that if a tech company is based in the usa, it must hand over data under its control no matter where in the world the servers are located. this meant american tech companies had to comply. they either had to comply with a US warrant and face massive digital privacy fines in EU for illegal data transfers, or refuse the warrant and face contempt of court back home.
because the int'l community never built a functional system for digital evidence, EU is now playing D. realizing that US providers control roughly 70% of their cloud tech (and that the USA claims legal power over all of it) the EU is pushing for data sovereignty (keeping data strictly under their own control and laws). rather than fixing international police cooperation, regulators are choosing to financially decouple. this means a multi-billion-dollar effort to strip out US big tech dependencies and wall off EU data from foreign reach.
so basically to go back to the way things were before but for $129 billion more.
tbh, they could just force tech companies to decouple from US interests instead like the US forced Tiktok to move ownership from singapore to the usa.
They are always "warning" Europe. (Score:2)
It will cost them! (Score:2)
Yes, but... (Score:1)
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What is the possible cost of not having Data Sovereignty?
Someone like Trump or Musk could turn off your data and let an invading country have its way with you to improve their chances in the mid-terms.
Boo fucking hoo. (Score:2)
The EU doesn't give two shits if not privacy-raping them costs you money. That's the cost of doing business in the EU.
Do it, or don't do business there. Whining about it isn't going to change anything. There are zero EU politicians that are going to say "oh, we didn't think that trillion dollar companies would have to spend 1% of their revenue per year to comply with not privacy raping us, so we better just bend over and take it forever!"
What the hell were they trying to get here? Sympathy?
Laughable.
Math time (Score:5, Informative)
$128 billion over a decade is $12.8billion per year. Divide over 27 countries, and... under $500m/year? That sounds cheaper than a single Oracle project.
Worth every cent (Score:3)
Nice sovereignty you have here (Score:2)
It would be a shame if something happened to it.
We have to (Score:1)
It is not just about money, it is about freedom from USA.
For many years there were a lot of things we didn't build or run ourselves because we didn't have to, we could buy it from our friends in the US.
Now they don't want to be friends anymore so we have to set ourselves free from them.
It is ok, I just wish we had started sooner.
That Cheap? (Score:1)
Nextcloud (Score:2)
reminder: you can dump MS/AWS/Google and adopt Nextcloud instead.
Nextcloud has been touting itself as a way to gain digital soverignty for a while now. Many facets of EU public sector have adopted Nextcloud for this reason.
It's not popular yet with US small businesses, but I haven't found a good reason for that. I've had one customer do a NC trial. They didn't really identify any issues with it, other than it was not what they were used to seeing (gmail, MS office).
I think it's a good fit _now_ for a sma
Not Being Held Hostage by US Tech Giants:Priceless (Score:2)
On the flip side... (Score:2)
Worth every Euro too (Score:2)
The price of freedom
Seems quite reasonable... (Score:2)
Of course they will complain about any new costs that they have to absorb. But, they are complaining to the wrong people. Given the current US administration's level of isolation and uncertainly, the EU has to enforce this as a matter of practicality. Just handle it and send a polite invoice to the White House for the additional costs.
Because they're impartial and honest? (Score:2)
... whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, estimates that the EU's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could impose 115 billion euros ($128 billion) in costs over a decade.
Why would anyone listen to these lying liars who are supporting the utterly corrupt Fascist US administration? I'm pretty sure they're purposely inflating that cost by quite a bit, and I certainly hope European leaders aren't falling for their bullshit.
Even if Silly Valley's estimates are accurate, you have to ask what the cost would be of NOT establishing autonomy from US tech giants. Lack of digital autonomy could ultimately result in greater loss of economic sovereignty, and maybe even loss of actual ph
high cost? nope (Score:1)