CLOUD Act

And it is, why would I use a European cloud over cloud, right? And I think it's a really good question to ask because you've hit into it.

Like coders or developers are definitely pumping all their company's IP and secrets into cloud and into their engines, passing it over clients through APIs, through load balancers, and finally into caches stored in insecure places in cloud, right? this is the problem, right? Like if we have models that we can self-host or access in Europe that we can have better trust with, like take, for example, in the US, right? They have both the Cloud Act and they have the Foreign Intelligence Act, right? And that pretty much allows that even if, for example, Cloud says, oh, we're setting up an EU data center and it's going to be run by EU people, the mother company is still US, which means they still have to provide all the intelligence information, including your company's intellectual property and secrets to the us government without you even knowing and as long as that defecto is there i'm not sold on that as an acceptable kind of flaw especially in today's world where like like obviously we have geopoliticals which are there as a factor and that does impact us like i think one great one that came out again as a reassurance of why we should look towards eu cloud and even self-hosting if your business is really serious about this is that a if you have uploaded your company's IP to cloud, that's considered public domain.

And that's absolutely nuts to say, because it means that you don't have trade secrets anymore.

If, if a competitor comes in and copies your product, you can say that's trade secrets because it's public domain.

And what this means is that most of the money is actually going to end up outside of Canada.

And further to that, There is this very uncomfortable fact that everyone in this conversation should know about and understand, which is the fact of the U.S. Government CLOUD Act.

CLOUD, it's an acronym, capital C-L-O-U-D, passed in the first Trump term in 2018.

If I'm going to boil it down without getting into a weedsy legal analysis, what I can say is that I've brought up the Cloud Act dozens of times, dozens of people, including counselors, counselors who like to talk about digital sovereignty.

And after I bring it up, I just pause and I go, do you know what that is? And no one seems to know what it is.

It's bananas to me because it is so important to this conversation around digital sovereignty.

The Cloud Act says that data, personal data, user data, any kind of data, anywhere in the world, regardless of where the server is, so the server could be in a data center in Canada, the data is seizable by the US federal government.

if the data touches software that has any operations, any corporate operations in the United States.

So you were asking, you know, if we have the data residency, if we're storing information here, is that enough? No, to the legislation that Cheyenne mentioned earlier.

the Cloud Act and FISA, if that even, you know, Canadian company with a made in Canada data center is storing data here, if they have a quote unquote significant presence in the US, and I'm willing to bet that significant presence can mean something pretty modest, they are then also captured by that legislation.

So again, it's quite expansive.

Right.

But certainly don't ever volunteer to use it.

Bear in mind as well that Google Drive and OneDrive are U.S. companies, and the so-called Cloud Act applies to everything stored on them.

And, of course, they're also vulnerable to AI.

Don't forget that as well.

Yeah, so it's hosted in the European Union, which means no politics from across the pond that affect you.

No Cloud Act.

I'm not sure how many people know about the Cloud Act, but that is... law in the US, which means that the government can request data from all the hosting providers, AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, you name it, even for customers in other countries.

The only requirement here is that the hosting company is U.S. or has a U.S. subsidiary even sometimes.

Sure, Amazon is a U.S.-based company, so even if you run your server on AWS in Frankfurt or Amsterdam, Still, the US government can go and say, hey, please give me all that data.

Well, they're not going to say please, they're just going to say, give me all the data of the customer that you have here in Frankfurt, which might be a German customer with a German company.

So I think the Cloud Act is one of the major reasons that European companies are looking for European hosting solutions for everything.

And there isn't really a good European hosting solution for Git hosting.

That is not a conspiracy theory.

It is what the Cloud Act says.

The honest reading is that the compute plan is a good national research facility strategy that has been asked to carry a national security argument.

It cannot carry.