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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.
These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.
The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe’s own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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We are so far away from competing with aws, gcp and azure though
Hopefully investments are there
They have to. Trump will use any form of leverage against them.
It’s about time …
I wish Canada was doing the same
The Five Eyes surveillance sharing system makes it unlikely that the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand will have the same national security drive to opt out. They can just ask the US to share info on their own citizens in a way that isn’t open to mainland Europe.
Canada can’t afford that right now, not in this economy, not while a president that is so easily purchasable. But I wish the same.
Just dangle a set of keys in front of Trumpie. Works for babies, will work for him.
Sounds great on paper but my bet is it’ll take a decade or more and cost tens of billions to hire and retool everything. It’s not just install Linux on all the machines of every beurocrat and call it a day. So much SharePoint, Netsuite, Salesforce, and more need alternatives built out. Thousands of hours or more spent retraining decades of learned computer skills. A deep lack of technical talent due to brain drain over the last two decades thanks to huge US tech salaries.
Not saying they shouldn’t. I’m just expecting a big push and then a bunch of failed projects to move that leave systems spread across two platforms.
Naturally, we all want this effort to succeed. However, even if many projects fail, directing this funding toward local providers is already a major improvement. Keeping capital investment within the local economy is far preferable to exporting it abroad where it ultimately strengthens the American tech ecosystem instead of our own.
Beyond the immediate economic impact, investment in training and retraining local talent is especially valuable. It helps develop skills not only for building new tools, but also for enabling local companies and institutions to understand emerging technologies and create their own training capabilities. This builds long term capacity rather than short term dependency.
As a result, it becomes far less unrealistic for local companies to invest in new technologies. They gain practical experience in adapting systems and training people to use new software services. This lowers both the perceived risk and the real cost of innovation.
Over the long term, this shift will also affect the salary dominance of Big Tech. Their exceptional margins are largely sustained by monopolistic control over key software services. If Europe, one of their largest markets, begins importing less while actively fostering local competition, that balance will change. A gradual but meaningful shift in power and pricing will follow. I am cautiously optimistic their arrogance will be their downfall. Let’s see.
I think you’re overestimating the brain drain. Most people who emigrate from EU countries do so to another EU country.
We’re not India.
And if you go to the right type of tech company in the right member state, you can easily get a salary over 130k USD with just a few years of experience. With much better job security and work life balance.
The best time to start is now, so 10 years down the road you get it happening.
What the fuck does Salesforce do?
Again, we don’t need our very own local Torment Nexus.
Sounds good, but with the big tech lobbying in Europe and many politicians having their ears bent for the right price there will be a pushback that will delay it until it’s too late.
Too many saying our privacy is not a priority. Identify those and get rid of them (don’t elect them) and block it at every possible point.
Sweden is not. Our tax office decided only this year to migrate everything to the Office 365 cloud despite Microsoft admitting that they’d turn over any data to the US government should they be asked to. I think the EU should step in on this.
Finland moved election vote count system to Amazon’s cloud service. Votes are still given on paper, but the results are counted on AWS’ servers, which theoretically gives Amazon the possibility to affect our election results from here on out.
That is fucking insane.
In Ireland in 2002 they tried to bring in electronic voting. It cause uproar, they had already paid for the machines so for almost a decade the machines stayed in storage in ‘accomplices’ - storage facilities among other friends locations.
The machines cost €55m (to buy and store)
Storing the machines cost as much as €700,000 one year
Dropping slightly a few years later
Election Officials to get €400,000 from state for storing them
The €51m machines were eventually sold for scrap for €70,000
Ireland could still be paying some costs until 2029 regardless that the machines have been scrapped
That’s crazy, I hope electronic voting is never allowed in Portuguese elections.
The Dutch tax agency did the same, mostly because there are supposedly no sufficiently capable European alternatives.
(Worth specifying that it’s specifically about the Office 365 suite, and not the software for handling tax returns)And don’t forget that the Dutch digital ID was outsourced to a Dutch company that was now bought by a US company. The Dutch way for the government to digitally identify Dutch citizens is about to be in US hands.
Afaik Solvinity, the company that takes care of he infrastructure behind DigiD and MijnOverheid, is on the verge of being bought by the US company Kyndryl. But it hasn’t been sold yet.
Hypothetically the government could still stop it on the grounds of national interest. Though you can see how well that went with Nexperia…
With the government being “demissionair” however, idk if they will.It would certainly draw the attention of America is we did.
Ah, I wasn’t aware that it wasn’t 100% done yet. Shame that I have 0 trust that they’ll do anything about this.
Can you just stop filing taxes because you don’t wanna violate EU data protection laws? /s
Filing taxes in sweden means going to the tax agencys website, identifying with your phone, and they already have everything pre-calculated so you just sign it digitally, takes 5 minutes. If you ignore it I think it’s the same as accepting it after a certain date.
To elaborate a bit more: the only reason to not just signing directly is if you want to declare things like “I have commuted this distance this year and want a tax cut on my commute” or other special case things you might apply for. Or if you have a small business or something. So for like 75 %, simply just signing the pre-filled tax is enough.
Spain has the same - but getting the signature to work on Linux isn’t too easy.
Fixing things like that - demanding that government services are accessible by open and free software - is a major step.
I wish Canada had that system.
I don’t know much about Sweden, but the government released a report including options for digital collaboration platform technologies for the public sector in 2021 (available in English and Swedish, both a s pdf).
At least the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning has chosen Nextcloud in 2022.
No Swedish governement agency can freely choose a technical solution. Almost all such choises fall under a public procurement, which are heavily regulated. They can demand that the service supports certain things to exclude actors, but if too strict I think the procurement can be overturned. In some cases a US actor can just offer a low enough price and the agency more or less have to pick them.
I feel like ”adhering to GDPR and not sharing personal information of citizens with actors outside the EU” would be a reasonable requirement. But I’m not lobbied by big tech so what do I know.
Well, France just renewed its contract with Palantir to manage it domestic intelligence. I guess they didn’t get that memo. I’m sure they’re working really hard in the background to some day replace it.
I never understood how companies like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc. can commit crimes such as espionage for the NSA over years, and everyone will still give them their personal property without any concern whatsoever. The problem is public infrastructure uses these products with the pre-bundled viruses, meaning even if you are practicing perfect infosec, it still doesn’t matter. Because the U.S. can still get it through just asking Microsoft or Apple to fork it over.
It’s so insane how whatsapp has become so heavily used by businesses in some countries. World is filled with stupid people.
This. I literally only started to use WhatsApp and FaceBook when i moved to Spain, because otherwise it’s impossible to find, evaluate and contact any business here. Need a craftsman? Reserve a table in a restaurant? -> whatsapp
Here, people have not the slightest conscientiousness about data protection policies
Just like the US cut out of TicToc, we need to cut out of Facebook, X, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Yes, and we need also cut out of Tiktok :-)
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They can legislate it into happening unfortunately. Even with US services.
But this is unrelated.
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