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> If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down.

You don't think they'd rather maybe find alternatives rather than shutting down? Sure, it'd be sucky probably for a long-time, but it's not like we don't have IT professionals who can stand up physical servers, email servers and what not, plenty of local municipalities do so already, so somewhere there is expertise already.

People generally don't just give up and throw their hands in the air in the face of difficulties, even less so when the governance of their country depends on it.

[jandrewrogers]

I think you are underestimating the supply chain problem. You can't stand up extra servers you don't already have in extra data center capacity you don't already have. The whole point of the cloud is that you don't have these assets.

While you can acquire these assets the lead times would be several months at a minimum, and probably years if everyone is trying to do it at the same time. It isn't an issue of knowhow, the required physical infrastructure doesn't exist.

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Say Microsoft/Google/whatever my local municipality is using right now, gets blocked tonight, and tomorrow everything US-related is offline. It won't (and can't) take months for them to get one server up and running for them to continue with their administration. As mentioned, other municipalities in the country already are 100% independent, running everything themselves, either they're willing to help out the rest of us, or at least provide expertise enough so we can. Then the country is filled with FOSS nerds like myself, who wouldn't shy away from stepping in to help either.

Probably the larger cities would take longer to solve, but I don't think "We cannot get server hardware from the US" will be the biggest problem, it'll be around national organization until the biggest fires been put out. Putting one server in each ajuntament would basically be enough to get 80% of the local municipalities up and running again.

[mike_hearn]

It wouldn't only affect local governments, it'd also trash all the businesses, banks, national governments, etc. Google on its own getting blocked breaks the entire internet because so many websites rely on the free services they host. Remember there are no European search engines of any quality and only Mistral as a European AI provider, so even just findings things would be difficult.

[embedding-shape]

You underestimate how resilient and effective people can be when needed. Yes, as mentioned earlier, it'd suck for a while, but we'd come up with solutions pretty quickly, as the entire country would rely on that.

Pretty much exactly a year ago, I was about leave home to go buy something, when the power was cut, garage door didn't open. Fine, jump into a taxi, and both of us notice that seemingly the entire town is without power. Once we arrive at the store in another town, same thing.

Turns out, the entire country had lost power, and would be without power for pretty much the rest of the day, and same thing in neigboring Portugal. We were literally without power, internet and cell-phone service for pretty much the entire day.

Did the entire of society pretty much was put on hold for a day? Yeah, but still we managed to go on with our day. I owed the taxi driver until the next time I saw him, the store accepted the same thing so we could buy some stuff, they noted down everything on paper, and so on.

We did survive, and thanks to humans being humans, we all could pretty much survive even that day.

Loosing Microsoft/Google/AWS would indeed be pretty much on a smaller scale, mostly impacting IT and everything related to IT, which is large swaths, but just like every other problem, it'll be worked around both temporarily and permanently, it's just in human nature to do.

Again, I'm not saying it wouldn't suck, nor that it wouldn't be difficult, but also, it wouldn't take a year before emails are being sent between companies again either.

[graemep]

It was just one day. I have experienced multi-day power cuts and it was bad enough in a developing country that was largely a cash economy. it would be a lot worse in Europe now.

I think Europe now is far more dependent on IT systems than you think. They are almost as essential as electricity. You found a taxi driver you would see again - how would one get an Uber and when would you meet an Uber driver again? How long can shops keep extending credit?

Its not just losing Azure/Google/AWS. It means losing security updates to smartphones, not being able to use Windows logins for your laptop, not being able to make card or phone payments, possibly not being able to withdraw cash. Without security updates American OSes will become insecure. How long will it take to replace the OS on every smartphone and desktop? What about defence? Will those F35s keep working without IT support? What about medical and hospital systems?

The IT impact is on top of everything else, not the only impact.

Its one thing for things to come to a standstill for one day, but the economic impact of things coming to a standstill for weeks is very different. At best it is an instant deep recession. It will mean running out of essentials, even food as logistics is heavily compromised. Even over 30 years ago the CEO of a logistics company told me that IT was critical to their business - that will only be more true today. You can do stuff on paper but at greatly lowered efficiency.

it might not mean a total collapse of society, but it will mean a huge amount of economic damage, and far more than any combination of European countries (e.g. EEA plus UK) could do to the US.

[DiogenesKynikos]

And it would mean the permanent end of American dominance over the international software and cloud compute market.

You can only ever play a card like that once. Afterwards, no one will trust you or use your services again.

[graemep]

Maybe. People forget lessons very quickly.

The US has had long standing bans on exports of things like encryption. The US banned the export of software with greater than 40 bit key sizes for many years and most people just accepted the security risk (and the implication that the US and others could easily spy on them) including European governments.

There are still controls and notification requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

[mike_hearn]

People said that about spying before the Snowden leaks. Nothing happened.

The difficulty of building an entirely home grown IT ecosystem from scratch is insurmountably huge. Especially as a lot of the people you'd need to do it currently work for US companies and are happy there - in any fight it's not at all clear that the people with the right skills would side with Brussels, which has a long history of treating the tech industry as a cash cow at best and outright antagonistically at worst.