Teathat french judge Nicolas Guillou He knows how deep Europe’s dependence on American technology is. Guillou and his Colleague The US is under sanctions at the International Criminal Court. They can no longer use e-commerce, book hotels online or rent a car. Their home smart devices ignore them. Credit cards from European banks no longer work, because in Europe still not developed It has its own EU-wide payment system, so most electronic purchases are via Visa and MasterCard. It is exceptionally difficult to convert euros into foreign currencies because everything goes through dollars. Living in Europe is no protection against Donald Trump disrupting your digital life.
This dependency is not limited to mod-cons. Last year, Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Danish Parliament said he was sorry On his role in Denmark’s decision to purchase US-made F-35 fighter aircraft: “I can easily imagine a situation where the US would demand Greenland from Denmark and threaten to disable our weapons and Russia would attack us if we refused. Buying US weapons is a security risk we cannot afford.” He is not alone. near spain abandoned There are plans to buy F-35s.
Perhaps the danger should have become apparent a decade earlier when it was revealed that American spies routinely recorded millions of Europeans’ phone calls and bugged the phones of European leaders. But throughout Europe, governments, armies, businesses, doctors, professors, and teenagers alike continued to rely on American technology. Sensitive state policies are created in Microsoft software. Health and tax records reside on Amazon’s servers. Important decisions are taken over video systems operated by Microsoft, Cisco or Zoom. Young Europeans see the world through a lens distorted by Snapchat filters and YouTube algorithms. News organizations in Europe rely on Google ad auctions.
Despite all this, Europe has a path to digital sovereignty. Loosening the American grip on word processing, video conferencing, and the “enterprise software” that companies rely on is not technically difficult. As veteran tech investor Roger McNamee told me, much of this technology was developed in the 1990s and 2000s and has since become “dumb” due to monopoly effects. investors selling software Stock because they fear that these products can be created too easily by new coding big language models. Now is a good time for Europe to build back better.
The Austrian army has already done this Thrown away Microsoft moved toward hosted open-source services in Europe and some German regional governments have done the same. Danish schools told abandon google laptop By the Danish Data Protection Authority in 2024. The new Dutch government says digital sovereignty Will be a national priority. France has relocated its 5.7 million public sector workers visioAn alternative to Zoom developed by the government, running on French infrastructure. and European Commission is being built A system based on Matrix, a European open-source technology that enables communication across different apps and servers, without handing over control of the conversation to any one company.
But Europe’s real technological challenges run deeper. First, each of the 27 countries in the European Union has its own way of doing business and its own special legal requirements. Even though the European market is huge (450 million users), startups never reach critical mass because it is very difficult for them to operate across Europe. IMF estimates Cross-border friction within the EU is equivalent to a 110% tariff. This, as a report The description, by Enrico Letta, a former Italian prime minister, goes over everything from consumer technology to cloud infrastructure.
Despite identifying the problem decades ago, EU countries are reluctant Abandoning national practices and frustrating domestic lobbies that benefit from the status quo. This may now finally change potentially significant compromise EU leaders were last week called on Europe to create “one market” and “buy European” in strategically important sectors such as defence, space, clean tech and AI.
The second challenge is that European startups cannot get the same kind of investment and initial public offerings as they do in the US because Europe’s capital markets are also a jumbled mess of national markets. With union-wide funding, this could soon change System In the works, to unlock €10tn Sitting in savings accounts for investment.
The final challenge is that Europe’s governments may not have the political willpower needed to defend the continent. When faced with the threat of seizing Greenland, did he ultimately take a tough stance with Trump at Davos in January? It is at least likely that his own Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, fearing damage to the dollar from a retaliatory trade war, convinced the US President to back off.
But voting Following the Greenland crisis it turns out that most Western Europeans (including Britons) do not want more American influence. They want more Europe. They also want more powers and decision-making ability at EU level.
Some leaders, like Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni want to achieve economic transformation by bite regulation and weakening EU standards across the board. But Instead of weakening its data laws, Europe should start enforcing them more strictly, to finally break the stranglehold Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have on the European market.
The US tech sector now looks like an asset, but it’s also a potential liability, because of its dominance over the US economy, and because Trump’s voters don’t share his love for it. Europe could attack that vulnerability, and doing so would shatter Trump’s support.
However, even now, Europe still outsources its democracy, commerce, and military machinery and plumbing to American tech firms. In effect, it has handed Trump a fatal switch that Europeans should fear.
Before the US President makes his next demand, before his agents further undermine Europe’s democracy, Europe’s leaders must make clear that they will not kneel. They will get up. And build.
