Europe's Break From US Big Tech
From Paris to Amsterdam, officials swap proprietary American products for open-source systems they control, though the deepest layers of the stack stay locked to Silicon Valley.
What actually changes when the European Parliament resets the default search engine on its staff computers from Google to a French competitor? At the level of the machine, almost nothing. The query leaves the laptop, travels much the same plumbing it always did, and comes back with results. A box was ticked. A setting was flipped. The institution that runs much of a continent’s lawmaking now reaches a different search index by default, and a European company collects the traffic an American one used to.
Then again, the gesture is the point, and the gesture is also the problem, because gestures are most of what is currently on the table.
The switch to a French engine is one entry in a long catalogue. Across Europe, dozens of governments, cities, NGOs, and universities have moved or drawn up plans to move away from American technology firms in favor of open source or local alternatives, and the people keeping count are careful to call it the tip of the iceberg. The moves are real and they are accelerating. The question worth asking is what the single word stretched across all of them is actually carrying.
The word is digital sovereignty, and it is doing an enormous amount of work.
Listen to how officials use it. The French government wants to break free of its dependence on American firms. Citizens, companies, and organizations, says Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament now at Stanford, are energized to take their digital future into their own hands, untangled from billionaire interests as well as Trump’s policies. The verbs are aspirational and the tense is future. Sovereignty reframes a story that is mostly about dependence as a story about agency, which is a flattering trade if a continent can actually make it.
Look at where the moves cluster, though, and a pattern shows up that the vocabulary would rather not name.
The Parliament changed a search default. France is rolling out its own office software so civil servants can stop opening American suites. More than a dozen European firms are readying an open-source documents product of their own. Cities in the Netherlands, France, and Germany are migrating off Microsoft Office and Google Docs. The Dutch government is moving its code from Microsoft-owned GitHub to a repository it controls. Finland declined to put its election data on Amazon’s cloud (a sentence that, read slowly, is its own small alarm); the organization behind Belgium’s .be domain says it will leave Amazon Web Services; an outfit called Eurosky has been stood up as a European alternative to Bluesky on the same underlying protocol.
Notice what these have in common. They sit at the visible, swappable top of the stack: search boxes, office documents, the tools an employee actually clicks on. They are the layers where switching is cheap, the change is announceable, and the press release more or less writes itself.
The layers underneath are the ones nobody is swapping this quarter. US-based firms continue to dominate almost every layer of Europe’s digital stack, one European Parliament report says, naming cloud computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and mobile operating systems among them. Those are the expensive, invisible foundations, and even the officials leading the charge concede that entirely unpicking the continent’s connection to American technology is probably impossible. A government can change its search engine over a long weekend. It cannot re-host its cloud over one.
What changed recently was not the dependence, which has been understood for years. Many of these sovereignty plans were drawn up well before the current American administration took office. What changed was the perceived cost of the arrangement.
The fallout from American sanctions against officials linked to the International Criminal Court turned an abstract risk into a demonstrated one. The court itself ended up moving away from Microsoft’s technology, which is the sort of decision an institution reaches only after the theoretical becomes uncomfortably concrete. The lesson European officials drew from it is not complicated: a dependence is comfortable right up until the day the vendor’s government decides it would like to use it. The legal scaffolding that turns the dependence into a lever, the CLOUD Act and FISA, has been on the books the entire time. It simply reads differently once an ally starts behaving less like one.
This is the part where the temptation is to reach for a villain, and the story politely declines to supply one. No one in Redmond or Mountain View set out to trap a continent. The dependence accreted the way dependence usually does, one sensible procurement decision at a time, because the American product was there, it worked, and switching was a hassle nobody had a standing reason to take on. The incentives built the cage; the sanctions merely rattled the bars and let everyone hear the sound.
Which is why, last week, the European Commission launched its official long-term plans to rely less on American technology, and why the whole moment carries the faintly frantic energy of a New Year’s resolution. The intention is real. The arithmetic is brutal. (The digital-sovereignty beat has heard versions of this resolve before, and could be forgiven for waiting to see the invoices.)
The cheap moves are the ones that get announced.
There is a tell in how the most quotable officials talk. We no longer have time to cheaply discuss the importance of digital sovereignty; given the geopolitical situation, we need to get from talking to doing, a minister in the German state of Bavaria said recently. It is a rousing line, and folded inside it is a confession: that talking has so far been the main activity, and that everyone in the room knows it. The same officials acknowledge that all of this risks irritating an administration in Washington that already dislikes Europe’s technology laws, which means the continent is picking a fight at the precise moment it is discovering how poorly equipped it is to have one.
So the vocabulary and the infrastructure are now openly out of step, and sovereignty is the word laid across the gap. It lets a continent bank the symbolism of the easy switches while deferring the cost of the hard ones, and present the whole bundle as a single coherent project with a single stirring name.
It comes back to that search default. A single administrator flipped it, and a single administrator can flip it back, which is exactly why it was there to be flipped at all. The cloud underneath does not answer to a setting; neither do the chips, the cybersecurity, or the operating systems on the phones in everyone’s pocket. Those are the layers that actually hold the continent in place, and so far no resolution has reached them, because they were never a checkbox to begin with.
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