The French judge Nicolas Guillou knows exactly how deep Europe’s dependence on US tech is. Guillou and his colleagues at the international criminal court are under US sanctions. They can no longer use e-commerce, book hotels online or hire a car. Their home smart devices ignore them. Credit cards from European banks no longer function, because Europe has still not developed its own EU-wide payments system, so most electronic purchases go through Visa and Mastercard. Converting euros to foreign currencies is extraordinarily difficult because everything passes through dollars. Living in Europe is no protection against Donald Trump bricking your digital life.
This dependence is not limited to mod-cons. Last year, the chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee said that he regretted his part in Denmark’s decision to buy US-made F-35 fighter jets: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse. Buying American weapons is a security risk that we can not run.” He is not alone. Spain has abandoned plans to buy F-35s.
Perhaps the danger should have been clear a decade ago when it was revealed that US spies routinely record the phone calls of millions of Europeans and bug the phones of European leaders. But across Europe, governments, militaries, businesses, doctors, professors and teenagers alike continued to trust US technology. Sensitive state policies are drafted in Microsoft software. Health and tax records live on Amazon’s servers. Important decisions are made over video systems run by Microsoft, Cisco or Zoom. Young Europeans view the world through a lens distorted by Snapchat filters and YouTube algorithms. Europe’s news organisations rely on Google ad auctions.
Despite all this, Europe possesses a path to digital sovereignty. Loosening the US grip on the word processing, video conferencing and “enterprise software” that companies rely upon is not technically difficult. As veteran tech investor Roger McNamee told me, most of this tech was perfected in the 1990s and 2000s and has since become “enshittified” due to monopoly effects. Investors are selling software stocks because they fear these products can be too easily built by new coding large language models. Now is a good time for Europe to build better.
Austria’s military has already dumped Microsoft and moved to open-source services hosted in Europe, and some German regional governments have done the same. Danish schools were told to abandon Google laptops by the Danish data protection authority in 2024. The new Dutch government says digital sovereignty will be a national priority. France has moved its 5.7 million public sector workers to Visio, an alternative to Zoom developed by the government, running on French infrastructure. And the European Commission is building a system based on Matrix, a European open-source technology that enables…
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