A study says US vendors serve Europe's websites. A rival study found the opposite

Cloudflare leads every market, because it's the proxy, not the host

The study behind the headline, published by CipherCue, resolved the DNS A/AAAA records of 19,450 European company domains across seven countries and mapped each responding IP to the autonomous system announcing it. US-headquartered vendors serve the majority in six of the seven markets: 67.5% in the UK, 53.6% in the Netherlands, down to Germany at 31% and Poland at 18.8%, the two domestic-hosting holdouts. Cloudflare leads everywhere, Amazon sits second.

To its credit, the post states its own ceiling plainly. It measures the internet-facing layer only, "not origin hosting, data center location, or EU sub-processor arrangements," and argues that "sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack": before debating cloud regions, know which vendor already sits in front of your traffic.

The reader who ran the same question and got the opposite answer

That caveat is where the thread went to work. Resolving a domain's DNS mostly tells you who fronts the traffic, and Cloudflare wins every market because it is the proxy layer, not because it hosts the data behind it. Strip the CDN fronts out and the picture inverts.

"I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companies are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure" — an engineer who ran a parallel scan of 50,000 API subdomains

A reader working from a larger crawl put a number on the error bar:

"This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double … However … if you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality." — a commenter with access to a broader dataset

"Written by Claude," and measuring what's easy to see

The thread's other reflex was to distrust the prose itself. A longtime reader spotted the tell in the section headings:

"'What it means and what it does not': article is clearly written by claude … it actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content."

And even taking the finding at face value, several argued it captures the movable part of the stack and ignores the sticky part. Websites migrate in a weekend; Office 365 and Active Directory do not. One reader pushed the premise to its conclusion:

"If US vendors decide to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours … However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for the rest of the world." — an engineer in the thread

The loudest frustration came from the Europeans themselves, and it wasn't about dependency. It was inertia: the alternatives are already here and cheap.

"It's a damn shame because we have awesome hosting in the EU. OVH is great value, Scaleway can handle lots of traffic, hetzner is so cheap … So it's 'nobody gets fired to buy IBM' all over again." — a Python developer who writes at bitecode.dev