Do these EU hosting companies also have servers available in other continents like North America? Could you operate a sufficiently global website from these hosting companies?
Do they have S3-style or Pub/Sub-style features or do you have to build those in-house or maintain something off-the-shelf?
If you're a small website maybe you can get by but if you get large you'll probably find you don't have many other options.
and others. The european cloud providers clearly don’t have as many features or market share as the GAFAM (they also tend to be more specialized), but contrary to what a lot of people here seem to believe, they have enough for most uses
Let's compare some costs then. As a random example, but not an unreasonable one, we have 100 1GB files stored for one year, and we want to deliver each of them 10000 times.
With Cloudflare R2, this will cost roughly $16.
With upcloud, this will cost roughly $10,000.
You see how this can easily be the difference between a business being viable and... not?
You're taking a specific case (low amount of data, high egress) and comparing an offer specialized for that use case (r2) with a general-purpose offer. Amazon S3, for example, would not perform better than upcloud here (I calculated $50,000), and that comparison may be more adapted.
Though I agree that neither ovh nor upcloud have an offer tailored to that use (I think in that case using a CDN instead may be the more adapted). That offer may or may not exist on the EU market but I'm too lazy to search for it
On a sidenote, I didn't know about r2, thanks for the tip
I don't think any offer exists that competes with R2 currently, if you want to deliver large amounts of data. That's why I consider access to this service critical for business.
The closest you can get is renting servers with unmetered 1-10gbit connections and serving it yourself, but because you don't have the economy of scale that Cloudflare does, it will still be much more expensive than R2. You can't balance out your costs against those of hundreds of other customers that don't serve as much data, or against customers serving data at different times where your unmetered bandwidth would be wasted.
Starting up a service with pricing like R2 is only really possible at Cloudflare scale too, so it's not like it's possible for someone like us to see this gap in the market and... fix it?
CNIL and other GDPR enforcement agencies do not ban products directly; they fine companies infringing GDPR. The article above is about orders to companies using Google Analytics.
Regarding browsers and operating systems, the companies selling them will be fined until they either comply with the law (ie. either by removing any "phone american home" task, or by using any of the alternatives provided by article 6 paragraph 1) or stop doing business in the EU.
Why would those cloud services be required to run a business?
We're doing just fine without them, hosting fonts locally, using Matomo, saving data on servers from EU companies.
Its's possible, although Google etc. will of course tell you otherwise.