I do appreciate all the work the EU has done with regulatory work around data sovereignty and the DMA. But they would still be gigafucked if the US ordered Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to cut them off. They may not even have the encryption keys accessible entirely in the EU. The fact that their data physically resides in Europe don't mean shit if a US corp can kill their whole infrastructure with a single command to lock their accounts.
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@JessTheUnstill If the #EU gets on as accelerated a course to shifting to tech alternatives as they did to renewable energy when Russia started using gas export cutoffs to oppose arms assistance to Ukraine, so they can issue a credible threat of losing Europe’s business, they could sell Microsoft, Amazon, and Google on a relatively easy solution:
Reorganize and split the companies, such that Microsoft Europe, Amazon Europe, and Google Europe become separate non-subsidiary legal entities, headquartered in European democracies and tied to their American counterparts not by ownership or common leaders, but only by contracts, irrevocable IP licenses, and bidirectional API keys.
They could legally permit the European counterparts to fail to compete with the American counterparts, and even to work at the American companies’ direction except as necessary to comply with laws of the European headquarters country or compatible laws of jurisdictions of customers of the European entity, or with legal agreements under those laws with customers subject to those jurisdictions.
As a condition of retaining Europe’s business, they only must prohibit any part of the European company being owned or led by the American company, nor by any entity which owns or administers any part of that company, and to prohibit any person answerable to the American company or its government having administrative access to the European company.
Once the American companies have no technical, legal, or organizational ability to fire staff, delete data, or shut down infrastructure of the European companies, the European companies can continue as the American companies’ proxies, and can even remit the vast majority of their profit to the American companies so long as the Americans uphold their side of the contract.
#Canada and a few other large jurisdictions (such as #SouthKorea) could implement similar solutions, and then the rest of the world could choose between the American entity or its non-subsidiary foreign proxy. Each of the mutually independent yet mostly cooperating international doppelgänger companies would then have exactly one axis of competition: which best respects the sovereignty of the customer government or the private customer’s country.
@deFractal @JessTheUnstill Yeah, that *could* work—but the US government absolutely will not let it happen: ratfucking will commence in 3 … 2 … 1 …
@cstross @JessTheUnstill What if they did it indirectly, through tax policy? Pretend they’re trying to close international corporate tax loopholes, but “accidentally” leave spitting companies by jurisdiction as a way to evade those tax measures.
@JessTheUnstill +1000 for "gigafucked". Yes, we would be 😖