technologically

The European commission just announced the European Technological Sovereignty Package. The objective is to reduce European dependence on foreign suppliers of both hardware and software solutions, and to achieve this the plan is simple: ensure that European companies can compete with North American companies. And precisely there lies the problem. For a European cloud. The entire focus of this initiative is on drastically reducing the exposure of the Old Continent to cloud services controlled by American companies. The concern generated by the CLOUD Act and the current geopolitical situation has caused the EU to try to migrate at least part of its critical services to local nodes so that this data always remain under European jurisdiction. The regulation trap. The great Achilles heel of this strategy is once again the way of trying to solve the problem. The European Union is a superpower regulatingbut it is a secondary actor in the field of creation and innovation. Both the US and China do not stop investing billions of dollars from the private sector to develop new AI chips or models. Meanwhile, Brussels responds with AI surveillance agencies and bureaucratic obstacles to the companies it precisely wants to try to promote. Hello Linux. In the document published by the EC, an open source strategy is repeatedly mentioned as an essential weapon to avoid dependence on foreign suppliers. Operating systems such as Linux and developments with this philosophy can undoubtedly provide a basic pillar to be able to develop competitive projects, and of course there are already movements that aim to replace proprietary solutions such as Microsoft Office with open source solutions such as LibreOffice. reality is harsh. The harsh economic and technological reality is that in many segments Europe does not have companies that can compete with the technological giants of the US. One of these segments is precisely that of cloud infrastructure: Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominate this market imperially, and although the intention is to change to “sovereign” clouds; The question is, which one? It is true that there are some companies such as OVH (France) or T-Systems (Germany) that have their own infrastructure, but they are still far from their American rivals. Worrying precedents. In 2020 Europe launched the GAIA-X projecta large cloud platform that was theoretically going to make it possible to face the three large hyperscalers in the US. Dozens of companies were going to get involved in an ambitious project that six years later is in a state that is difficult to define: the official website publishes news frequently and there is a specification and code which, for example, talk about GAIA-X 3.0 ‘Danube’, but it does not seem that at the moment this platform is being used in a practical way. The money comes, but from outside. And while the EU becomes entangled in regulation and ethical debates, the projects that should theoretically boost that digital sovereignty are weakening it. Investment in data centers in Europe is a good example: practically all those that want to be built They are simply delegations of large US technology companies. A wonderful utopia. Digital sovereignty is a logical objective as the world is currently moving, but in the EU they seem to confuse priorities once again. That sovereignty is not gained by prohibiting or regulating foreign technology. You win by making yours so competitive that the rest of the world has no choice but to use it. That requires a lot of work and a lot, a lot of capital investment. Not even the European Court of Auditors trusts for something like this to come to fruition. Image | Rafael Garcin In Xataka | The European Union knows that the US has stopped being a reliable partner: its new agreement with India aims to compensate for it