By setting it up with a European governance structure, Amazon can tell the US government "hey we told them give us the data, but they refused because that would send them to jail under EU law, and they're a legally separate entity so there's nothing we can do."

This is very intentionally not just a regular foreign subsidiary owned by the parent company.

Organize your business and your tech correctly and you can have an owned foreign subsidiary that can comply with local laws. But things would have to be quite separate.

AWS maintains a similar stance, too [0]?

  The CLOUD Act clarified that if a service provider is compelled to produce data under one of the limited exceptions, such as a search warrant for content data, the data to be produced can include data stored in the U.S. or outside the U.S.

Hm. As for AWS, they say that if the customer sets up proper security boundaries [0], they'll ensure will keep their end of the bargain [2][3]:

  As part of the technical design, access to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud physical infrastructure and logical system is managed by Qualified AWS European Sovereign Cloud Staff and can only be granted to Qualified AWS European Sovereign Cloud Staff located in the EU. AWS European Sovereign Cloud-restricted data will not be accessible, including to AWS employees, from outside the EU.

  All computing on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will run on the Nitro System, which eliminates any mechanisms for AWS employees to access customer data on EC2. An independent third party (the UK-based NCC Group) completed a design review confirming the security controls of the Nitro System (“As a matter of design, NCC Group found no gaps in the Nitro System that would compromise these security claims”), and AWS updated its service terms to assure customers “there are no technical means or APIs available to AWS personnel to read, copy, extract, modify, or otherwise access” customer content on the EC2 Nitro System.

  Customers also have additional mechanisms to prevent access to their data using cryptography. AWS provides advanced encryption, key management services, and hardware security modules that customers can use to protect their content further. Customers have a range of options to encrypt data in transit and at rest, including options to bring their own keys and use external key stores. Encrypted content is rendered useless without the applicable decryption keys.

  The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will also benefit from AWS transparency protections over data movement. We commit in the AWS Service Terms that access to the EC2 Nitro System APIs is "always logged, and always requires authentication and authorization." The AWS European Sovereign Cloud also offers immutable, validated logs that make it impossible to modify, delete, or forge AWS CloudTrail log files without detection.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-mode...

[2] https://d1.awsstatic.com/onedam/marketing-channels/website/a...

[3] https://aws.eu/esca/

Exactly, this seem pointless for people serious about staying away from US owned data stores. I know first hand of EU based businesses that left AWS (and all other US owned services) before 2020 due to customer (B2B) demand which in turn was due to the Cloud Act[1], and for whom it today would be completely untenable to return.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

The US can of course command the US owners to instruct their EU based employees to do something illegal in the EU, but if your boss tells you do do something illegal, you are still breaking the law if you do it…

>To fix an issue there we have to play telephone with an engineer in ESC where they give us a all the data we need or get fired.

?

Not as much as you might think. The most important component -- Nitro -- basically runs out of Germany.

Id argue that very few software components are written (let alone maintained) by US staff. This is basically another major player (there are other sovereign clouds) reading the writing on the wall and doing what is necessary to avoid losing business or being irradiated from the market.

CloudFlare CEO, take notice. Look how the big boys do business and maybe learn a thing or two.

People talking about EU sovereignty and US hegemony then crying Italy isn’t allowed to dictate terms globally are showing they’re not people with principles — they’re just losers who would be every bit as hegemonic as the US, they just lack the power to be and are publicly crying about it.

There will be gnashing of the teeth, doomsaying galore, a few actual minor catastrophes... but we will be okay.

Not just okay, but we will be better off for it. The Internet will be better off for it, because the inescapable side effect will be at least a bit of re-decentralization.

Any European equivalent replacing what is lost will be better. Not because we have better coders or are even better people, mind you - far from it. It will be better because we will have the gift of hindsight; any replacement for web-based productivity services, search engines or social media springing up will be the product of a society and legislative system which has caught up at least in some sense to technological progress and which has been there, done that. The actual web two point oh.

So let's pull out as many plugs as we can. It'll hurt for a bit, but not only is it without alternative - it'll be fresh, it'll be fun and it'll be good in the end.

Let's get to work.

Same with Apple iCloud - one day Europeans will wake up and see that all their pictures have been deleted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_Stat...

That's the entire point of setting it up like this.

Think of it like fast-food franchises. They have to sell the same food and use the same branding and charge the same prices. But if McDonald's tells you to start selling cocaine on the side, you tell them nope, that's not in the contract and I don't feel like going to prison.

In other words: making a cloud provider isn’t that difficult, making a cloud provider that people will use INSTEAD OF AWS is an exponentially harder problem.

[1] https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/guerre-economique-c...