Europe's Glooming Tech Problem

The world is changing in front of our eyes. What many economists have been predicting the last 10 years is finally coming to fruition - deglobalization is in its full swing. New coalitions are being formed, new markets are being established, old markets are being changed. The goal behind this change is clear - large economies want to keep their economic dominance at all cost. In the days of the ever growing digital economy, where the digital sector is poised to play an increasingly central role in the global economy in the coming years Europe hasn't been paying any attention to its digital independence. The constant reliance on its Big Brother from across the pond left Europe without any significant Big Tech companies and made it completely dependent on the infrastructure Made in USA.

Although there are no exact figures of the cloud adoption in Europe a 2022 study revealed that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google collectively held approximately 72% of the European enterprise cloud storage market. In 2019, reports indicated that over 80% of Germany’s listed DAX companies utilized AWS services.

The situation is more or less similar in every other european country. European have been busy creating regulations for the US American companies but haven't created anything themselves. Soon Europe will be left with the best possible regulatory framework that has nothing to regulate. AWS, Microsoft and Google spent billions of dollars and years of software development to get to their digital dominance. The pan european decision to abandon the use of the cloud services provided by the Holy Cloud Trinity will send Europe into the digital stone age. The costs and time associated with an attempt to create something similar to AWS will exceed the expectations by a very high margin. The very rigid Europena regulation will slow if not completely kill the development of such a cloud provider. 

The issues of trust, independence and lobbyism won't let Europe to build the common cloud infrastructure for the whole Europe. France won't use the German cloud and Italy won't use the French one. We will see almost every european country creating its own AWS or GCP, what will make it extremely hard for the startups to easily deploy their product into a new jurisdiction. Knowing that Europe is solving most of the problems by the introduction of the new regulation, we are at the dawn of the new Open Cloud regulation that will try to introduce the European standard for the cloud infrastructure.

Big Tech companies that are currenlty providing the cloud services in Europe have grown in an market led environment. European market is led by regulation that limits or sometimes even kills the innovation. For Europe to create a pan-european cloud service that will be used everywhere in Europe, it will need to be centrally designed and executed and forced upon the companies - otherwise it is destined to fail.

The European future of Big Tech is gloomy. The defragmentation of the cloud and tech services is the most likely scenario that will lead to the Europeans companies left behind and the European market to become less interesting for investors and foreign companies.