> And what does European mean?

In this context "European Union" and the company is registered primarily in the EU and where the vast lionshare of profits are declared. The companies mentioned do appear tastefully (or limited in your words) curated are definitely EU based and lends some credence to the overall claim and purpose of page. I'm not seeing controversial 'European' companies that are actually American like Stripe. (Sometimes people claim Stripe to be Irish) -- Adyen is definitely Dutch for example and Mullvad is Swedish.

I'm not seeing anything with a Union Jack on the page and the UK would normally have some entries here. Switzerland and Norway are part of the EU institutions like Schengen and the EEA -- just not full members. So the author of the page does appear to have very good working definition of 'European' but it's not clear what exactly that is -- it's not in the terms page for instance.

To complicate matters there are "European" companies like Booking that are totally Dutch but owned by a hands off US holding company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings

> Mullvad is Swedish.

Indeed, it's the Swedish word for "mole". Chosen, I assume, because like a VPN, the animal digs tunnels.

I think the idea is companies that do not have a conflict of interest with the US. Although Microsoft claims their data in European data centers can not be given to the US government the US government doesn't see it that way and there are court cases being fought over this.

Microsoft can claim whatever they want, they must respect the USA law.

It's that why they don't operate the one of the Azure datacenters in Germany? It's managed by Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft doesn't have access.

Edit: They may have changed that, it's a Deutsche Telekom company that managed the physical access, that seems a little pointless, if everything is available via the internet.

I don't know, but it could be one of these older deals in which local companies could operate some kind of Azure datacenters. We had one like this in Norway with Evry before it stopped and got replaced by two Azure datacenters operated by Microsoft.

The same Deutsche Telekom whose own data centers are powered by Huawei?

Good questions ... e.g. look where the founders of Elastic come from (Israel & Netherlands & Germany) and they initially incorporated in the Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_NV

Yes it probably means european as in the legal sense (where it's registered).

As for the last question, that doesn't mean you're an european alternative, you just do what you mentioned: either don't violate or are compliant with the EU policies.The website is probably meant for people who want to use services from inside the EU.

However, this needs to be reminded: if the EU wants to keep this dream of promoting tech development, it needs to look itself in the mirror when it comes to supporting/not supressing entrepreneurs with shitty legislation. They won't do it obviously, but the discussion needs to keep happening. Right now you still have the vast majority of old "boomers" that don't understand the way in which the whole pipeline works, the second biggest group is right out activists who frankly exaggerate when talking about technology(and it mostly has nothing to do with tech regulation/support but forcing tech into their own ideology) and the third group is probably the least popular one, with sensible people who understand you cannot regulate because that suppresses development, but at the same time recognize values and rights needs to be adapted to this medium, while being individual-focused.