Anyone already being affected? What are your plans for the future?
last time the rules changed, some companies hired people from their own countries instead. if this happens again, it may be harder to find jobs in the U.S.
to be safe, i try to work with people from many places, not just one.
I'm not sure they will directly affect remote workers. Or at least the mechanism seems unclear.
Tariffs are currently collected at a port of entry by Customs (CBP staff.)
Since remote work does not flow through a port, its not clear who would collect this tax (presumably your US employer) or how they would submit it for payment.
In other words I'm not aware if remote work is classed as an "import" , or how it would be collected and submitted.
I am keen to hear of any actual legal opinions in this space.
If you are a European startup and were considered "only an alternative" to a bigger competitor...now's the time to push it out and be seen for it. There's a huge demand right now, and it won't easily go away for the next (remaining) 4 years. The civil war that in my opinion is unavoidable won't make it better for US stability.
And you slightly mis-parsed my words. A migration of cloud services from US providers isn't the same as to a "European Cloud". Canada, Australia, India, Vietnam, South Africa... there's a whole world of nominally friendly and economically viable suppliers out there. What matters is moving from Microsoft, AWS, Google and other services that cannot be considered "safe" any longer.
I notice from your profile you're an AWS disciple. You must know AWS want to build a "Euro Sovereign" division? Not that I think it will be successful, but look at which way the wind is blowing.
Where generally EU-based businesses aren't allowed to move their cloud infrastructure either.
With the US and Privacy Shield there at least used to be an agreement in place. While that agreement was frivolously nullified by EU courts, at least so far authorities haven't been overly eager to enforce that, probably because they know that'd put pretty much every EU-based company out of business.
Have fun trying to convince zealous bureaucrats and lawyers that hosting your customer data in Vietnam is fine for an EU-based business, though.
Oh come on, can we stop with that? Not having regulations results in quasi-monopolies and oligarchs. Preaching against regulation is only worth it if you are Google, Amazon & Co. Regulations don't prevent fairly big companies from existing.
Maybe the lack of regulations in the US pushes EU companies to move there. But right now maybe non-Americans will start looking for non-US alternatives, and that's good.
With the US and Privacy Shield there at least was an attempt to come to some sort of reasonable real-life solution (which of course was shot down by EU courts, so as of 2020 pretty much every EU-based business is in a legal limbo).
You're talking specifically about AWS competitors, right? I don't think it's related to GDPR. It's really that everybody uses AWS. Would you say that Canada doesn't have a competitor to AWS because of their regulations, too?
Regulations like the GDPR precisely try to give incentives for competitors. Which is hard to do because people/companies fight to use the US solutions and don't care about privacy, just convenience.
The Whisky is getting expensive. /s