Looming over the internet lasers and firestarting phones companies were touting at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month, was a more nebulous but much larger announcement: a pan-European cloud called EURO-3C. EURO-3C’s backers – Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica, dozens of other European companies, and the European Commission (EC) – aim to fill a gap. U.S.-based cloud giants dominate in the EU, and European policymakers want their growing portfolio of digital government services on a “sovereign cloud” under full EU control. But the EU lacks a real equivalent to the likes of AWS or Microsoft Azure. Indeed, any effort to build one will inevitably run up against the same U.S. cloud giants. Just four U.S.-based hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud – together account for some 70 percent of EU cloud services. This is despite the fact that the 2018 U.S. CLOUD Act allows U.S.…