Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives.

And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola.

Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany.

IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.

I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure

https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...

This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far.

It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.

Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?

Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.

Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products?

Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?

I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.

I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.

Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?

I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?

"What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.

Interesting read. Canada would be even more US-skewed.

Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).

My anecdotal evidence from France and Germany is that there is very much a trend to look for non-U.S. alternatives which is somewhat recent. It is related to the current government, not really politically motivated but more of a "no guarantees/cannot rely on this partner anymore" thinking coupled with a bit of "WTF annex Denmark, really". Many companies have task forces or projects to investigate moving tech stacks and in the past this was not even an agenda topic (despite strategic advantages and potential cost savings).

EU companies own like 20% of EU compute, and a huge portion of that was from a russian asset being spun out.

There needs to be more free DDOS offerings and inbuilt DDOS from vm providers.

There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default.

Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.

> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate.

This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.

I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.

> For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.

Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...

This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double.

However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality.

Source: I have access to better data.

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts.

On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.

It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.

Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.

Good article because it clearly exposes the methodology and the shortcomings of the measurements (mostly the front CDN of a ~20k number of old continent entities of apex/www domain).

Looking at serving is very skin deep. The cloud is easy. What about the stack? MySQL hailed from Sweden, now owned by Oracle. The Linux Foundations is in the states. Nginx - F5 (US). There are many Europeans working on site or remotely for US tech.

Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I am an American, and I don't like what I am seeing the last few years, but further balkanization doesn't seem to be a sound strategy.

Curious what the percentage would be when you include Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Shopify...

So only in 2 smaller countries the "majority" is US served? That's what I read in that graphic

Wait to see what they are using for emails and for most of their internal docs (containing any kind of secrets)!

I know companies that will tell you "I'm not gonna put any of my data in cloud, especially not American ones" but they are perfectly fine using any major cloud based office suite (mail, docs, chat/video apps, ecc ecc) where they voluntarily and deliberately load any kind of data.

Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes.

However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.

It's a distraction. Websites are relatively easy to migrate, Office and AD not so much. Isn't it really a case of measuring what you can see vs what really matters?

Europe right now is the ultimate US vasall. Germany is the leader here; France and Netherlands are much more self-conscious but also way too dependent on US corporations. The worst part is that in Germany with Merz in charge, this will not change. He is a good puppy for the USA.

As ever, there's a relevant xkcd

https://xkcd.com/932/

Mail (SMTP) is even worse.

Europe has reduced itself to a backwater. Surrounded by hostiles

There was a post here on hn that showcased EU tech map which you can use to check for alternatives, ie for Gmail https://europeantechmap.eu/alternative-to/gmail?pricing=free...

There aren't many completely european solutions, but there are more than zero.

Interesante

Woow

AI slop be AI sloppin'.

whatsapp has entered the chat

AI slop

Right on the front page...

“American website hosting companies are disproportionately exposed to market shock from their European customers”

Let me repost another comment of mine.

TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco...

There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc.

I find it laughable.

Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform.

Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that?

Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what?

Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise.

But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is.

People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again.

And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?

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