- A meeting on March 27 at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate addressed Europe's heavy dependence on US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google).
- The meeting was prompted by SIDN (.NL registry) concluding no European provider could meet its needs, planning to use an Amazon-backed consortium.
- US hyperscalers dominate European markets, but their dominance raises risks: US government access to data (even on EU servers), loss of local skills, and cultural control over content.
- European cloud providers are fragmented and far smaller, lacking the full service range of hyperscalers, leading to a 'megascaler' idea—a set of basic services that European providers could offer.
- The Dutch government is inadvertently deepening dependence by migrating its own email and data to US clouds, instead of acting as a lead customer for European alternatives.
- Cloud migration does not always reduce costs; organizations often see IT spending rise, and security is not automatically guaranteed.
- Resistance to datacenter construction in the Netherlands further hampers European cloud infrastructure.
- The author urges building a European cloud industry (like Airbus) by defining essential services, fostering government procurement, and maintaining digital self-sufficiency.