- European consortium pledges money for ‘Trump-Proof’ cloud.
- Open-source and collaborative approach to insulate against US policy fluctuations.
- Sovereign compute, storage, networks needed for continuity and predictability.
The announcement at the end of last week by the CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Providers in Europe) that it was committing a token €1 million to open-source development could not have been more timely.
The European cloud and infrastructure consortium seeks to establish more open-source development to help create cloud computing infrastructure that is ‘Trump-Proof’, in a collective effort named the Fulcrum Project. A ‘Trump-Proof’ cloud will comprise of data centres and services that aren’t US-based nor run by US companies, in order to avoid the unpredictability of pricing and availability caused by the US mercurial leader’s decisions.
Yesterday, the Trump administration’s tariff list set the US levy on European imports at 20%, with the UK’s figure set at 10%. Trump’s decision to wreak havoc on his domestic economy and those of other countries may play well at home in the short term, but business leaders around the world (and traders on the US stock exchange) seem united in the opinion that the economic effects of the swingeing tariffs will be negative.
What those involved in any form of foreign trade, either directly or via supply chain elements, most favour from economic circumstances is stability and predictability. The appearance of the president’s list of trading partners seemed show he and his team had divided the countries of the world into facile notions of ‘goodies and baddies’ as represented by the extent of the levy to be imposed on each country or bloc, rather than any deeper assessment of economic necessity.
According to the press release on the CISPE’s website (also available in French, Spanish, and German [PDFs]), “cloud customers, including European public administrations, are concerned that foreign governments have too much power to demand data, impose tariffs and restrict services on the cloud infrastructures they use. Customers need options to select ‘Trump-Proof’ cloud services that rely on 100% European cloud infrastructure and services and are immune from disruption […].”
The quiet war of words between the tech industry-influenced US government and the EU has come to something of a head recently with fines beginning to be imposed under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, as well as under various pieces of legislation regarding user privacy, consumer choice, and data use policies as they apply to EU subjects. President Trump once called the then-EU competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, the “tax lady” after he identified her as a key figure promoting European interests over those of the US operators behind unconstrained data collection and sale.
What European businesses need is predictability and continuity (as much as possible), rather than being subject to the whims of a country’s leader who seems willing to tank the home economy on the bases of perceived slight, misinformation, stupidity, and xenophobia. The establishment of European hubs for enterprise-level compute, storage, and networking would be one way in which European businesses can become the bosses of their own destiny.
The secretary general of the CISPE, Francisco Mingorance said, “Past attempts to create ‘Airbus-style’ cloud champions have repeatedly failed because centralised, top-down approaches ignore market dynamics and innovation. Europe’s strength lies in its diversity and bottom-up approaches – we are home to more cloud infrastructure providers than any other continent. Collectively, these providers can pool their resources to deliver greater diversity, reach, and scale than any single company could achieve alone.”
The wider European area contains several of the world’s largest open-source organisations who need to step up at this critical moment in history, to help to build a continent-wide provision that will be as immune as possible to external economic vagary. The Fulcrum Project reflects the collective, collaborative, and transformative spirit that led to the creation of the EU post-WWII.
With words and phrases that do not resonate through the corridors of power across the Atlantic, such as “federated”, “free to use”, “pool resources”, and “collaboration engine”, the Fulcrum Project represents learnings born of a sense of history, lived experience of the horrors of conflict, and a considered way forward for the European technology industry. If its sentiment is the only aspect of the Project (and other similar moves happening across the continent) to continue, Europe will have little choice but to appease those driving politics to such extremes in the US.
Europeans know that countries tried to practise appeasement less than 100 years ago, and evidence of the failure of that course can be seen in cemeteries and preserved camps right across the continent.
