// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Big Tech Funded a €115 Billion Warning Against Europe’s Digital Independence
The European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, or CADA, looks to lay out four tiers of requirements for cloud services where public bodies would pick a tier for each service they buy, based on the risk involved.
The upper tiers demand tighter control over who owns a provider and who controls its software. ECIPE, a Brussels-based think tank, put a 10-year cost estimate on those rules via a research report this week.
It argues the Commission's impact assessment misses an important part of the costs, mainly one-off software rewriting.
CCIA, or the Computer & Communications Industry Association, funded the study. The association is a tech trade group with members like Amazon, Google, Intel, Cloudflare, Apple, and Meta.
ECIPE modeled three scenarios for the period between 2027 and 2036. The narrow one comes to €35.6 billion, the middle one to €115 billion, and the broad one to €233 billion.
Though none of them are being presented as a forecast. The difference is how many workloads end up in the two strictest tiers and how far the rules reach into private companies.
The middle case puts 20% of affected workloads in those tiers, and it also applies the rules to a quarter of cloud use in essential private sectors like energy and banking.
About €33.3 billion lands on public budgets. That works out to roughly €159 for each person part of the working-age workforce.
Around €80 billion, which is about 70% of the total, would fall on private companies. That only happens if the Commission uses Article 31 of the CADA to extend the rules to them.
About 69% of the total is paid for moving to new providers and rewriting software. Higher ongoing cloud prices account for roughly 30%. Postponed digital projects make up the last 2%.