"Question. For many years, you’ve been trying to get U.S. technology companies to process the data of European citizens according to EU standards. Is that possible with Trump in the White House?
Answer. A legal system has to be stable precisely in situations where you have a crazy president. If everyone were nice and friendly, we wouldn’t need laws. A big issue is how much the whole data economy has become part of this trade war. One of the only things that Europe can retaliate [against] is going to be the digital industry. It’s one of the things where [Americans] make shitloads of money. It’s the financial industry, digital industry… and that’s about it.
The [EU] Commission just fined Meta and Apple… and the former responded with a very Trumpian press release, saying, “Oh, this is a tariff.” You broke the law and you knew you were doing it, so now you can’t just say it’s a tariff. It’s like someone driving their Porsche at 180 miles an hour and, when they get fined, they say, “Oh, you just hate rich people.”
Q. Is the European Commission right to fine two tech giants in the middle of a tariff war?
A. The EC is taking things slowly, because it doesn’t want to be the first to throw a stone. But at some point, you have to enforce your law. We must address the issue of technological dependence. In the U.S., there’s even been talk of American companies not offering their services in Greenland and Denmark. It’s crazy, because then no one would trust those companies again… but we also thought no one would ever start a trade war."
A. Yes. The enforcement issue with the GDPR is huge. We just did the statistics for data protection. If you look at all the complaints in Europe, we have on average 1.3% — I think it may be 1.4%, something in that ballpark — of complaints where you have a penalty, which sometimes is just a €500 fine ($575). The reality is that, even in cases where you do find that there’s a violation, there’s just no consequence.
Well… yeah
Yeah. We told them that at the time and were told to shut up.
We tell them that about AI and we were told to shut up.
We tell them everything. And we get told to shut up.
We’re the experts. Not management. And if management will not listen, management doesn’t need to be a thing.
No shit, exactly what I said in the late 90’s about SaaS and everyone ignored me as paranoid.
I’m not paranoid, this is how people operate.
But finance wankers drive management decisions, and they see it as offloading costs (or opposite of investment) as it reduces tax obligations, and arguably shifts risks to the cloud provider.
What those dipshit bean-counters didn’t understand is it actually increases engineering and maintenance costs rather than reducing engineering headcount, because each cloud provider uses it’s own convoluted management and cost system.
I can’t say it better than this blog: https://loudwhisper.me/blog/hating-clouds/
Funny enough, that website uses the illegal “consent or pay” dark pattern:
Accept cookies, including advertisement cookies, to read for free. Or become a paid subscriber and decline cookies.
They’re lucky GDPR is only enforced against large US companies - almost as if they’re specifically designed as a tarrif against them :D
[…] GDPR is only enforced against large US companies […]
That is very incorrect. Here you go: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
US companies have received the largest fines, but that is down to having the most users and the least compliance with European laws.
No shit. My last company was moving to become a cloud offering and actively worked to discourage the on prem as the cloud stood up yet at the same time was going nuts trying to not get locked in to the cloud vendors they were using.
The cloud is just somebody else’s computer.
But it is someone else’s computer, that unlike your computer, is shared by many users and used at nearly 100% capacity. You pay for your whole computer but maybe use 1% of its capacity (that’s generous). So the time to pay off the cost of the hardware should be at least 100x faster with the cloud, and cost of electricity is relatively minor compared to hardware.
The other advantage they have is economies of scale. If you paid $300 for the CPU in your computer, a cloud provider is probably getting similar performance for $100-200 due to buying thousands of units.
Those benefits existed long before in VPS-es.
What I understand that was new as the marketing terminology shifted to “cloud” is that the provider not solely provided you the virtualized hardware with a stock OS. They would also manage typical software like nodejs, database, elasticsearch, queue, … Along with the annoying stuff like updates and backups.
Basically reduce the amount of work invested in the ops part of devops.
I have a garage for my car. My car is dear to me. Why the hell would I pay money to park it in someone else’s garage? We are all easily manipulated because everyone bought into the idea of the “cloud” when all it is, is someone else’s disk space. Is this why most people in the world are wearing Blundstone boots? This is scary.
It’s precisely because you don’t have a car and buying one requires you to be a one man pit crew. That’s why you park your car in someone else’s garage. It comes with a pit crew.
It is more like renting a car when you need it and not having to pay for it for the rest of the time, with the added benefit that it is someone else’s job to maintain it for you.
Pretty much this. I’ve run into some hotshot truckers in the past that just rent a 1-ton Chevy or Ford or whatever for months at a time, instead of buying their own. The rental cost at the time was something like $2000/mo, but apparently the money they raked in was worth it over buying their own truck and having to pay the maintenance/repair costs for it, on top of a monthly loan payment…
Well, if you are just talking about disk space, then there are upsides to not administering a bunch of hard drives locally.
But I’m sure you must not mean just storage.
Convenience is capitalism’s greatest pull.
Wasn’t ti the fascism?
