Martin Kleppmann's QCon London 2026 keynote addressed Europe's heavy dependence on US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud hold ~70% of the European market) and proposed three engineering strategies to mitigate this risk. First, multi-cloud commoditization via de facto standards like S3, Kubernetes, Kafka, and Postgres wire protocol to make provider switching trivial. Second, the AT Protocol underlying Bluesky, designed around 'credible exit' so users retain their data and social graph when switching providers, now with 43 million users and heading to IETF for standardization. Third, local-first software built on CRDTs (via Automerge), where the user's local data copy is primary and cloud services are reduced to sync and backup. The unifying theme: commoditization and decentralization shift power away from single providers and back to users.
