The utter chaos in the United States and the country’s antagonistic, erratic, and often downright hostile approach to what used to be its allies has not gone unnoticed, and it seems it’s finally creating some urgency in an area in which people have been fruitlessly advocating for urgency for years: digital independence from US tech giants.
Efforts to make Europe more technologically “sovereign” have gone mainstream. The European Commission now has its first-ever “technology sovereignty” chief, Henna Virkkunen. Germany’s incoming ruling party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union, called for “sovereign” tech in its program for the February election.
“Mounting friction across the Atlantic makes it clearer than ever that Europe must control its own technological destiny,” said Francesca Bria, an innovation professor at University College London and former president of Italy’s National Innovation Fund.
↫ Pieter Haeck at Politico
This should’ve been a primary concern for decades, as many have been trying to make it. Those calls usually fell on deaf ears, as relying on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other US tech giants was simply the cheapest option for EU governments and corporations alike. However, now that the US is suffering under a deeply dysfunctional, anti-EU regime, the chickens are coming home to roost, and it’s dawning on European politicians and business leaders alike that relying on US corporations that openly and brazenly cheer on the Trump/Elon regime might’ve been a bad idea.
To the surprise of nobody with more than two brain cells.
It’s going to take a long, long time for this situation to get any better. Europe simply doesn’t have any equivalents to the services offered by companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and even if does, certainly not at their scale. Building up the resources these US companies offers is going to take a long time, and it won’t be cheap, making it hard to sell such moves to voters and shareholders alike, both of which are not exactly known for their long-term views on such complex matters.
Still, it seems consumers in the EU might be more receptive to messages of digital independence from the US than ever before. Just look at how hard Tesla is tanking all over Europe, part of which can definitely be attributed to Europeans not wanting to buy any products from a man openly insulting and lying about European elected officials. If this groundswell of sentiment spreads, I can definitely see European politicians tapping into it to sell massive investments in digital independence.
Personally, banning Twitter and Facebook from operating in the EU should be step one, as its owners have made it very clear that illegal election interference and nazi propaganda is something they have no issues with, followed by massive investments in alternatives to the services offered by the US big tech companies. China has been doing this for a long time now, and Europe should follow in its footsteps. There are enough bases to work from – from open source non-Google Android smartphones to EU-based Linux distributions for everything from desktops to server farms, and countless other open source services – so it’s not like we have to start from nothing.
If we can spend €800 billion to finally get EU defense up to snuff, we should be able to spare something for digital independence, too.
I get my company to buy me laptops exclusively from NovaCustom in the Netherlands. Those guys are awesome and they make beautiful laptops with Dasharo Coreboot. Lot of really exciting tech businesses in Europe. I ran SuSE/openSUSE as my business OS for about 18 years, it was so solid and stable during a time when most OS’s were totally chaotic (et tu, Ubuntu?) And people in Europe have such incredible phone choices – I would love to get a Fairphone in my hands and working on one of our local cell networks, something that is no problem in Europe.
andyprough,
They buy you personal laptops? And plural no less. Wow, I haven’t seen a company offer that. They provide corporate laptops sure, but it’s not my laptop it’s theirs. Here I am annoyed that some employers have imposed their own say on my personal phone.
I’d give them a shot but I wish they supported the US market. Importing foreign phones that don’t support the domestic carrier frequencies isn’t ideal. Some frequencies overlap, the coverage isn’t as good.
>”They buy you personal laptops? And plural no less.”
No, they ask me what I need for work, and I tell them to get me a laptop from NovaCustom. It’s a work laptop. And yes, it’s plural, I’ve had them buy a couple of them to work with. Very nice – they have built-in ethernet and HDMI, unlike the direction it seems most modern laptops have gone. But also have modern CPU’s. The versions on sale right now have Intel Meteor Lake CPU’s, which is probably the newest CPU supported by the Dasharo Coreboot system.
How about Raspberry Pi and its chips? Can it be considered at least mostly non-american?
Pretty sure Raspberry Pi is firmly british. As is, of course, ARM, the processor architecture behind it.
The problem isn’t so much hardware, as there are plenty of european hardware designers (and even a good few fabs and packaging plants). The real issue is software, services, and device manufacturers. Despite the fact you can buy a phone packed to the brim with european silicon, it’s likely built by an asian firm, and running American software.
Yes! Let’s make sure everything is checked for facts and correctness of opinion before publishing by our governments. Those pesky Americans with their incorrect opinions must be stopped.
Nazis must be stopped. I don’t think storming the beaches of Normandy with dialogue and tolerance for the intolerant would’ve worked, but maybe I’m wrong.
Has this not been called for since the SGS-Tompson vs Cyrix/Intel deal? It is not going to happen, most western europeans are “rule followers” and this innovation is stifled. Perhaps eastern europe has a better shot, but like with skype it will be bought up by the americans and ran into the ground in favour of their own sollutions.
Having European cultivars of cancerous private US Tech companies is a huge missed opportunity for Europe. Nokia wasn’t exactly a boon to humanity.
Europe created publicly owned AirBus to compete with the US’s publicly subsidized but privately owned Boeing. The AirBus model can be applied for US tech more broadly.
However, if Europe ALSO made an organized and concerted effort to fund more Open Source software such as municipal, regional governmental and non-profit software in the public interest it would benefit both themselves and the entire world.
Similarly, encouraging open hardware and other open tech should be a distinguishing feature of European tech policy.
The US Tech industry is dominated by DMCA restrictions and monopolies. Don’t repeat the US mistakes in a different geography.
Looking forward to European social networks. The bot-to-human ratio on X/Twitter is ridiculous, especially on topics that are being astroturfed using bot farms operated by foreign powers.
I don’t think cloning Facebook business model will even be possible in the EU due to regulatory environment, so the only realistic outcome will be a Great firewall of Europe and looking what could later come out of it.
Building an european digital ecosystem would be a quantum leap in our lives as europeans. And not only our _digital_ lives, actually.
Unfortunately, we are also in the same boat here. All those wanna-be-Trump in pratically all EC countries, all those populisms and far-right movements increasing consensus. I cannot imagine the reaction of the typical regular joe voting for AfD or Fratelli d’Italia or RN to use european alternarives for Google, Netflix, Facebook or whatever. I can imagine Matteo Salvini’s rants, aready…
So are we in the same progressist bubble of the american democrats? Yeah, probably we are…
Said that I cannot believe that all companies in the US should be blamed by definition. Yes, many of them have (somewhat surprisingly….yes, Disney, I’m talking to you) the Trump agenda. But many of them have not. I think we’ve two distinct pages here: the need to build this benefical european ecosystem in the long term and an immediate stand-up against those (and only those) american subjects and companies which don’t meet the european scale of valours.
This could give a good idea on where to start IMHO: https://www.axios.com/2025/01/16/dei-rollback-companies-amazon-meta-mcdonalds