Pan-European Cloud

Remember way back in February — before even COVID — when I wrote about this weird ideathe EU had about a “single data market”? Well, of all the possible ways they could have pursued this, it looks like they picked the dumbest of the dumb. Here are some tidbits. The Internal Market Commissioner for the EU, Thierry Breton, said, “Contrary to the prejudices, we are not late [on cloud development].” German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said, “In order to achieve digital sovereignty, we need to start approaching data processing the way major American and Chinese companies — the hyper-scalers — approach it”. But … um … “The Commission’s plan is to invest up to €10 billion [over the next 7 years] to develop Europe’s cloud and data infrastructures.”  Guess what? That’s less than 1/2 of what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each spent in 2019 … after almost 20 years of investing no less than $2 billion per year in CapEx. No, the EU isn’t late at all, and that €10 billion will make a huge difference [I’m looking around for a sarcasm emoji]. Never mind, how does the EU government think it can successfully implement anything nearly as efficient or cost effective as these companies? The EU is pretty good at regulation. But, this is isn’t regulation, and it’s a dumb idea.

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