(The date of the meeting referred to in paragraph 4 is correct: 15 April and not 15 March)
By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Airbus and 15 other EU companies have criticized a proposal that would allow Amazon (NASDAQ:), Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:) Google and Microsoft (NASDAQ:) to bid for the EU’s highly sensitive cloud IT contracts.
The draft plan from Belgium, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, concerns a certification scheme (EUCS) to guarantee the cybersecurity of cloud services and help governments and companies in the bloc choose a secure and reliable provider. reliable for your business.
The proposal removes so-called sovereignty requirements from an earlier draft that forced US tech giants to create a joint venture or cooperate with an EU-based company to store and process customer data in the bloc in order to qualify for the tier higher than EU Cybersecurity Label.
The Belgian plan will be discussed by cybersecurity experts from the 27 EU countries on April 15, which could pave the way for the European Commission to adopt the Northern Hemisphere cybersecurity program in the autumn.
EU countries should reject this latest proposal without sovereignty requirements, Deutsche Telekom (OTC:), Orange, Airbus and the other 15 companies said in a joint letter to their countries’ authorities and senior Commission officials.
“The inclusion of European control and EU headquarters requirements in the main scheme is necessary to mitigate the risk of illegal access to data based on foreign laws,” they said in the letter seen by Reuters.
Without such requirements, European data could be accessible to foreign governments based on their laws such as the US Cloud Act or China’s National Intelligence Law, they warned.
Big Tech looks to the lucrative government cloud market to spur growth, while the EU on the other hand fears illegal state surveillance and the dominance of US cloud providers.
EU companies said the EU cybersecurity label should follow the example of the European cloud computing platform Gaia-X created to reduce the EU’s dependence on Silicon Valley giants and which has sovereignty requirements .
They said the lack of sovereignty clauses could also hinder nascent EU cloud providers compared to their larger US rivals.
“Removing these requirements from the system would seriously undermine the viability of sovereign cloud solutions in Europe, many of which are in development or already available on the market,” the companies said.
Signatories of the joint letter include the French energy group EDF (EPA), the French cloud services provider OVHcloud and the Italian company Aruba, Dassault Systemes, the German Ionos, Telecom Italia (BIT:), Austrian Exoscale, French technology company Capgemini and Eutelsat.