Projecting Cyber Power via Beneficience

So many articles come out decrying Europe's inability to create another Google or AWS or Azure or even a DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, Alibaba, or Tencent. Look, when you list it out loud, it's even more obvious how far behind Europe is in this space compared to where it should be.

And of course, projecting power via regulatory action only gets you so far. Governments like to negotiate with other governments, and you see this in cyber policy a lot, but it's worth mentioning that the European populace has a vastly different opinion on the value of Privacy than everyone else. We talk a lot at RSAC about Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability, but in Europe personal Privacy is in the Triad, so to speak.

I think this is a unique strength. But I also think: Why try to beat the rest of the world at creating giant warehouses full of k8s clusters, when you can just pick almost any vendor now and get roughly the same thing. Moving the bits around and storing them redundantly is the BORING part. 

But there are things Silicon Valley categorically, for reasons built into the bones of the system, cannot do. Some of those things hold great power.

Education is the obvious market vertical for Europe. There's massive power projection in being able to provide useful services, as Hezbollah does, as the local city council does. Look at the disaster that is the underfunded US education system, and think about the opportunity there. And in smaller countries, it's even more useful as strength projection. You just need to invest in translation and customer service. The key is NOT to exploit it for the obvious opportunities it would present to an aggressive intelligence service. Trust is as important an element of cyber power as deterrence is in nuclear policy. 

I don't mean to understate the difficulty in doing good customer support across time zones and translation into the specific cultural dialects worldwide, but there's real technical innovation to be done in education as well. And innovation in software scales and has network effects and can provide the basis for a 21st century economy a lot easier than something built purely on advertising and surveillance.