The clouds are not really american, but they are subject to american laws. The money and ownership needn't be american, anybody all around the world can buy stock in america companies. And the work to build these clouds was not done exclusively by americans, as all these companies have offices in europe to hire european engineers (to say nothing of the foreigners they pay to come live in america). From the perspective of the market, the clouds being american is an irrelevant detail, since they can reap whatever benefits they like of the world outside the US, as well as whatever benefits they want within the US.

I think this is an important thing to note in all these discussions of "why can't europe innovate": europeans in europe can and do innovate, but the processes to commercialize that innovation have been set up in the US, and have no market incentive to relocate or diversify. They can always take advantage of innovation wherever it lies.

To make the market care about something it is otherwise indifferent to, you have to pay it. Whereas capital markets ordinarily don't care if a company serving europeans is domiciled in the US, if you pay them a couple billion suddenly they will. It may be expensive, but it's the only solution to the problem at hand.

> now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US. not even catching up. getting to where the US clouds are today.

What's your alternative? The US has behemoths with trillions of dollars in market cap, more than GDPs of most countries in EU. What kind of innovation in context of cloud do you think would allow anyone to compete with them? Who would risk their own money and pour billions into challenging them?

> now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US.

Depends on what you mean by this.

Quite often this is said in the direction of eroding labor protections and allowing corporations to fuck over consumers freely.

If that's whay you mean, then no, fuck that noise.

Better to take the China route of enforcing a bunch of stuff to be home grown and making it harder or impossible for US corporations to act here.

Isn't this essentially the Apple playbook typically? Don't innovate, let others find what works or not, then once you have something, catch up with the rest, try to out-compete? Apple is almost never "first" with something, but once they release something, it's a good iteration on that thing, I don't think Apple would be the only ones able to pull something like that off.