| I was there during the 2010s and here is what happened: - I have been at a lot of public debates/consultations in Brussels on the GDPR as early as 2012. I have seen first EU people there screaming at US/BigTech lobby groups trying to influence the debate in their favor. - When we started to understand what the regulation would look like everybody started to panic about what it would cost to comply in the public and private sector. Everybody started to appoint a Chief Data Office or Chief Data Protection Officer. Consultancy firms were hired everywhere. - At the same time "The Cloud" was starting to creep up in those organizations, first as what we were calling "shadow IT". But the decisions maker didn't wanted to hear about "The Cloud" or loosing control of their infrastructure. - After usually a year of study on the GDPR issue the decision makers were told that: 1/ Our infrastructure and software stack will need deep work to comply and it is gonna cost a fortune.
2/ The business is asking for agility and is already using the cloud.
3/ Look Google, AWS and Azure have a "GDPR compliant" certificate from EY (the same firm who is usually hired for compliance study and work).
- So I have seen dozens and dozens of organizations deciding their migration to the cloud between 2016 and 2019. Then of course COVID and homeworking came and it accelerated everything.So GDPR pushed everybody to hyperscalers ironically, because Big Tech is playing chess and know how decisions are made and how to work the system. Also I have never seen a big company centering or even using a Hertzner, OVH or Scaleway. What is probably going on is Big Tech went back to the Commission and explained the new legislation they have to pass. And my guess is it is not gonna help any EU based AI company stay competitive or get any significant market share. The EU will give them pennies to compete with OpenAI and Google and tell them that Europeans are smarter than Americans so David should be able to beat Goliath.
Also the EU AI models have to be trained on renewable energy or whatever. Washington is rotten but Brussels is about the same (or worst). |