Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors(ciphercue.com)
250 points by adulion 1 day ago | 178 comments
tl;dr: A study of 19,450 European company websites found that US-headquartered vendors serve the majority of primary sites in the UK (67.5%) and Netherlands (53.6%), and a plurality in Italy, Spain, and France, while Germany and Poland resist the trend due to strong domestic hosting industries. Cloudflare is the single largest internet-facing vendor in all seven markets studied. The analysis attributes vendors via AS operator lookups on DNS records, measuring who fronts the site rather than physical hosting location or origin infrastructure.
HN Discussion:
  • ~US vendors operate EU data centers under EU law and dependencies flow both ways
  • Methodology is flawed; analyzing APIs or better data shows different results
  • ~Europe lacks competitive alternatives to US products like Stripe, AWS, and Cloudflare
  • Aggregating Europe as one market ignores vast differences between countries and vendor lock-in nuances
  • Focusing on public web frontends is the wrong starting point for sovereignty discussions