"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."
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/