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 communication across different apps and servers, without surrendering control of conversations to a single company.
But Europe’s real tech challenges lie deeper. First, each of the 27 countries in the EU has its own ways of doing business and its own particular legal requirements. Even though the European market is huge (450 million consumers), startups never reach critical mass because it is too difficult for them to operate across Europe. The IMF estimates that cross-border friction inside the EU is equivalent to a 110% tariff. This, as a report by the former Italian prime minister, Enrico Letta, details, kills everything from consumer tech to cloud infrastructure in the cradle.
Despite identifying this problem decades ago, EU countries have been unwilling to sacrifice national practices and disappoint domestic lobbies that benefit from the status quo. That may now finally change after the potentially momentous agreement by EU leaders last week to make Europe “one market”, and to “buy European” in strategically important sectors such as defence, space, clean tech and AI.
A second challenge is that European startups cannot get the kind of investment and initial public offerings enjoyed in the US because Europe’s capital market is also an untidy mess of national markets. This may change soon, too, with a union-wide financing 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 necessary political resolve to defend the continent. When faced with the threat to seize Greenland, did they finally take a tough line with Trump at Davos in January? It is at least as likely that it was his own treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, fearing the damage to the dollar from a retaliatory trade war, who convinced the US president to back down.
But polling after the Greenland crisis shows that most western Europeans (including people in the UK) don’t want more US influence. They want more Europe. They want more powers and decision-making at EU level, too.
Some leaders, such as Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni want to achieve economic transformation by cutting regulation and watering down EU standards across the board. But rather than dilute its data laws, Europe should start to enforce them rigorously, to finally break the chokehold that Google, Microsoft and Amazon have over the European market.
The US tech sector looks like an asset now, but it is also a potential liability, because of its sheer dominance of the US economy, and because Trump’s voters do not share his love for it. Europe can attack that vulnerability, and in doing so shatter Trump’s support.
For now, though, Europe still outsources the machinery and plumbing of its democracy, commerce and military to US tech firms. This has, in effect, handed Trump a kill switch that Europeans should fear.
Before the US president makes his next demand, before his agents further undermine Europe’s democracy, the leaders of Europe should make clear that they will not fall on their knees. They will rise. And build.
Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties
