It may not feel this way, but for millions of people, the online world is a purely American experience. Your iPhone, for example, was of course designed in California. When you tap the browser, you probably use Apple’s Safari to get online, and when you type a search term you use the default search engine, which is Google.
All of that may be fairly obvious to the casual internet user. But when you go to the news website of your daily newspaper, although it may be published thousands of miles from the US, its website is still hosted on a US platform like Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud. An ad catches your eye for something local, but that ad is hosted on Amazon Web Services. You decide to make a purchase using a saved Visa credit card. The email confirmation lands in your Gmail inbox. All American. There’s no escaping the fact that almost every business you interact with online relies on the services of a US tech giant.
America’s technological reach doesn’t end with the consumer. From your child’s school, to your place of work, to council-run local services and even to the inner workings of the national government, the systems on which they rely are powered by just three companies: Amazon (30% global share of all money spent on cloud services), Microsoft (21%) and Google (12%). You may think you know these companies – but they have changed into cloud-computing “hyperscalers”. They have built massive infrastructure businesses, offering on-demand computing power and the ready-to-use software tools that underpin our digital economies, and our lives.
To say we’re in bed with these tech giants is an understatement: over 80% of spending on cloud services and software by large European enterprises goes to US providers. But does it matter? If the tech is slick, quick and convenient, where’s the catch? The answer to that question is currently sitting in the Oval Office.
“Since the election of Donald Trump, who is supported by tech CEOs and has killed the transatlantic relationship, this is now a matter of urgent national security concern,” says Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician and former MEP. “People see the clear risk of US tech being weaponised.” The solution, she says, is to make “the EU digitally sovereign.” How might that work?
“We’ve been infantilised by decades of American support,” says the economist Cristina Caffarra, who is co-author of EuroStack, a plan to shrink Europe’s dependence on foreign technology by supporting homegrown alternatives. “In the space of 20 years, all of the underlying supply chain that supports all of the services and apps that we use every day has become mostly American.”
“Digital sovereignty is not about ripping off every bit of American kit from every bit of the land – that is not realistic and feasible,” Caffarra says. “But we need Europe to regain some ability to have some autonomy, to have some resilience, some fallback.” Those are necessary, she says, “in case of catastrophic incidents” or “disputes”.
“Microsoft is absolutely owning the entire infrastructure in Denmark,” she says. “Suppose Trump wants to walk into Greenland and he wants Microsoft to assist in this operation. Microsoft could be told to disable certain services and could be put under an executive order to do so.”
Political kill switches for mainstream services may sound dramatic – but then Trump recently ordered the US firm Maxar Technologies to cut off commercial satellite data to Ukraine, to pressure it in negotiations with Russia. US technology provision is already being weaponised – why should Trump limit his leverage to Ukraine?
Caffarra is not the only one raising the alarm over Europe’s predicament. More than 200 industry interests put their name to an open letter urging the EU to support a sovereign digital infrastructure plan. The European Commission responded that it has plans including a review of public procurement rules, but supporters of the EuroStack plan say none of this goes far enough.
In the meantime, any European governments putting their email into the US cloud should be in “no doubt” that their messages are being read, warns Bert Hubert, a Dutch entrepreneur and digital infrastructure expert who has written extensively about Europe’s digital sovereignty problem.
Regardless of whether or not Trump actively threatens Europe with disconnection, what troubles Hubert is “the mere thought that you have to be careful… that ‘I should not antagonise the US.’” The problem, he says, is that a government’s functions are not entirely under its own control. In other words, Europe is a digital colony of the US, and is now waking up to the consequences of that fact.
The digital sovereignty issue also raised its head during the Covid crisis, when governments wanted to use contact-tracing apps as a public health measure. It then became clear that they could only do so with the consent of Apple and Google.
One possible piece of the solution is presented by Element, a European developer that provides encrypted communication systems that are self-hosted, meaning that no large tech firm is underpinning your system and gathering up your data. Element is now supplying parts of Germany’s armed forces and the French government.
“Traditional centralised technology firms can no longer be trusted to provide services to their customers,” says its COO, Amandine Le Pape. The gravest danger was demonstrated, she says, by Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk and used by, among others, the Ukrainian military. At one point earlier this year Musk raised the possibility of shutting Ukrainian forces out of Starlink. That service has become “subject to political whim,” Le Pape says.
And so here we are, Hubert says, in a “quite absurd situation” in which policymakers lack the technical nous to actually understand the predicament they are in. “The people that make these decisions are not just bad with technology,” he says. “They are technically illiterate.”
Which means that for most governments, the question of digital infrastructure sits in the “too difficult to resolve” pile. But how much longer can this go on? Perhaps recognising the shifts in opinion, in April, Microsoft announced a set of crisis PR-sounding “new European digital commitments” – including a pledge to “uphold Europe’s digital resilience even when there is geopolitical volatility”.
“The shorthand is, total market enforcement failure of competition rules and data protection rules allowed a bunch of [technology] oligarchs to exist – and then the country where those oligarchs are based elected a king,” says Johnny Ryan, a director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties that’s focused on Big Tech.
While there’s certainly a cost involved in rewiring Europe’s digital foundations, Ryan contends that this is “almost zero” when set alongside the risks of doing nothing, and remaining strategically compromised by Trump.
Caffarra also downplays the cost of the proposals set out in the EuroStack plan, suggesting a lot could be done with mandates encouraging governments and businesses to “buy European”. However, one upper estimate of the cost of achieving digital sovereignty for Europe is around €300bn over a decade.
Hubert is under no illusions about how difficult switching away from the hyper-convenient US cloud will be, even as he supports the goal. “The main issue with any European plan is who is going to do it?” he says. Existing European cloud players are not well suited to becoming 24/7 software service behemoths, which means this switch certainly can’t happen overnight. And it will be “very hard work”.
“The question for the EuroStack is really how deep it can go,” says Michael Veale, an associate professor of Digital Rights and Regulation at UCL, sounding sceptical about whether Europe is really up to taking control of its digital fortunes against such “entrenched and resilient” competition. “The introduction of credible and properly funded alternatives alone creates a possibility for change, but the incumbents have a lot of tricks up their sleeves, and deep infrastructures under their control, which will pose barriers to real change.”
But perhaps the biggest problem of all when confronting the American hyperscalers is that none of these tech giants is actually in control. Ultimately, digital sovereignty isn’t a technology lever – it’s a political hinge. You only have to think back to the line-up of Silicon Valley CEOs at Trump’s inauguration for a snapshot of where the real power lies. And no amount of European legislation can do anything about that.
Natasha Lomas is a writer on technology who is based in Barcelona
