Financial Times, 2 January 2026
Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned.
Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure.
“We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”
The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.
This dependence was not an “enormous security problem” for the EU, said De Bruycker, who has led the CCB since it was founded a decade ago. But Europe was missing out on crucial new technologies, which are being spearheaded in the US and elsewhere, he said. These include cloud computing and artificial intelligence — both vital for defending European countries against cyber attacks.
Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.
He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.
It could be similar to when European countries jointly set up the planemaker Airbus, he said: “Everybody was supporting the Airbus initiatives decades ago. We need the same initiative on [an] EU level in the cyber domain.”
Companies such as OVHcloud in France and Germany’s Schwarz Digital already provide crucial digital infrastructure, according to IT experts.
EU countries have been fretting about their dependency on US tech companies such as Amazon, with calls growing to increase Europe’s “technological sovereignty”.
De Bruycker said those discussions were often “religious” and lacked focus, however. “I think on an EU level we should clearly identify what sovereignty means to us in the digital domain,” he said. “Instead of putting that focus on how can we stop the US ‘hyperscalers’, maybe we put our energy in . . . building up something by ourselves.”
Belgium, as a host of the EU institutions and Nato, has been in the crosshairs of increased hybrid attacks allegedly staged by Russia, with increased cyber assaults and drone incursions into its airspace since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Last year Belgium suffered five waves of DDoS attacks lasting days, in which compromised devices overwhelm websites of businesses and government agencies to temporarily take them down. De Bruycker said the attacks typically targeted up to 20 different organisations per day, with “Russian hacktivists” generally behind them.
Although it was unclear whether the Kremlin was directly sponsoring them, the attacks generally followed as a response to anti-Russian statements by politicians.
“Sometimes . . . it’s not even a Belgian official, it’s an EU official who has said something in Brussels, and they start to attack,” he said.
Although such attacks have increased, De Bruycker does not see them as particularly harmful and says they are mostly aimed at disruption. “It’s temporary, it’s not stealing any information. It’s really disturbing the normal functioning of the website or the portal.”
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US hyperscalers were crucial in helping salvage data from Russian attacks, he said.
He also expressed confidence in continued co-operation with American companies to crack down on bad actors, despite US tech companies having aligned themselves closely with the Trump administration, which has repeatedly signalled it would step away from supporting Europe’s security.
Europe is the center of open source. The experts are here, the problem is the legislation preventing them from taking the internet back. Allow nerds to reverse engineer the shit out of US products and you will be rid of their shitty lock-in services in just a few years.
Lemmy doesn’t take over the Reddit space. The lock-in comes from network effects that cannot be overcome easily. Legislation is just an additional hurdle, as is funding. There is not a bunch of magical nerds waiting for the law to change so that they can bring liberty to Europe for free.
The lock-in comes from network effects that cannot be overcome easily.
That is mainly a legal problem.
EG you could have a combined Reddit/Lemmy client that fetches messages from both. You create a Lemmy community that complements a Reddit community. The client fetches posts/comments from both and combines them in your interface.
That’s illegal even in the US (case law). In the EU it’s hyper-illegal because you go up against copyright, database rights, and GDPR.
The EU has actually picked up on the importance of interoperability and mandates it in the DSA, but I have no idea how that is supposed to work, given all the other regulations.
Cory Doctorow has been screaming about this anti circumvention law stuff for years now but the powers that be dont seem to want a solution.
I was about to mention Cory Doctorow. He has been a force for years. For everyone new to him: His talk at 39c3 some days ago was awesome!
Yes. The problem is that those are very American solutions. In Europe these ideas are just unacceptable. European values, fundamental values, and all that.
What?
The client can’t just fetch them from both but has to publish them on both.
Reddit offers a paid API so it should already be possible.
The price is an issue but I doubt that a competitor can be established like that. It would essentially be another Reddit client.
You don’t need an API. The law says that you need permission.
Another technological possibility is to scrape a subreddit to migrate the discussions to EG Lemmy. That might actually be legal in the US but certainly not in Europe.
Scraping doesn’t solve the network effect issue. Having a ghost town where all the ghosts are mimicking a real town doesn’t give you a real town. You actually need people to come over and join the community.
True. It only makes migration easier, but that’s still something.
Does it make migration easier? I don’t think it does. I think it makes migration harder.
If I switch to Lemmy and join my favourite migrated community (all posts and comments scraped and reposted from my favourite subreddit) and then I try to reply to those messages on Lemmy, nobody is there to reply to me! It’s a ghost town where I’m the only one who’s not a ghost! That sucks, so I leave.
There are other Reddit clients so the permission exists.
Maybe take a look at that link I posted above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventures,_Inc.
I did. They copied Facebook without permissions. The alternative Reddit clients have them so it is not the same.
Yes, but I would like to see a visual editor. Now a bold is shown as a double asterisk. A link is a mixture of square and round brackets. You can click on Preview, but to edit it, you have to leave it again.
Have you checked the various frontends? If none has it you could start something like a kickstarter campaign to finance it.
The lack of visual editor arises with the web version on lemmy.world and with the Mlem app. I have not checked anything else. (And I don’t see it as my role to start a kickstarter campaign).
The nerds prefer markup. If you want it and you can’t code, why not use the skills that you have to get it?
I hope that is sarcastic remark. 🙄
Are you a lemmy developer?
We’ve lost the whole cloud
There’s your problem, Europe. You’re looking in the wrong place. The Internet isn’t in the clouds, it’s down here on earth.
Like it or not (I certainly don’t), we’ve gone full circle to the old server-client relationship instead of the peer-to-peer model we had for a while. Almost everything is in the browser now, which means we need EU infrastructure. That takes time, money and effort to set up, even before you start dealing with user inertia.
Rising costs for “cloud” infrastructure were beginning to tip the balance back towards favouring owning your own web servers I think — AWS is stupidly expensive now. But once the bubble bursts I guess all the new excess datacentre capacity that’s already being rapidly built will put a stop to that. Governments adding to that problem seems unnecessary.
Buy dedicated servers from Hetzner… and that’s it?
Who the fuck needs Torment Nexus Made By EU?
Drop any Office shit, move to self-hosted Nextcloud, pay 10% of your old licences towards support - everybody wins.
It’s not that hard, it’s not that easy, but by goodness we can do it.
told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure. […] “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”
I… don’t see it?
I suspect he’s in a serviced tech bubble like MS Office 365 and makes a wrong extrapolation from that?
He also expressed confidence in continued co-operation with American companies to crack down on bad actors, despite US tech companies having aligned themselves closely with the Trump administration, which has repeatedly signalled it would step away from supporting Europe’s security.
Why’s he swinging the complete other direction here? He remains hopeful? Good luck, I guess.
Here are a few (recommended) reactions on the site of the FT itself (I could add all of them but there is no way to add a pdf here):
LOL, this poor guy…the only sane person in an insane asylum. How bad is it? Only about 4% of global cloud infrastructure capacity is European‑owned, with most European governments, firms, and citizens relying on US hyperscalers.
More background:
Average investment in telecom and digital infrastructure per operator in Europe is less than half that in the US, with a total connectivity investment gap to 2030 estimated at at least €174bn and likely over €200bn to hit EU “Digital Decade” gigabit and 5G targets.
EU telecom policy has historically favored many national and sub‑national operators, leaving Europe with over 100 mobile operators and only about 5m subscribers per operator on average, versus roughly 107m in the US and 467m in China, which undermines scale and returns on capital for big 5G and fiber
Fragmented capital markets (27 different regimes) and shallower venture and growth equity pools make it harder to scale home‑grown cloud, AI, and semiconductor players compared with US deep capital markets and Chinese state‑directed finance. roll‑outs
The EU is a regulatory superpower (GDPR, Digital Markets Act, AI Act), but multiple analyses argue that “over‑regulation” is overstated; business surveys show lack of skilled staff, energy costs, and uncertainty rank higher as barriers to investment than regulation, which tends to come fourth and often from national, not EU, rules.
The more specific critique is that Europe leaned heavily on competition and privacy law without pairing them with an ambitious infrastructure and industrial build‑out, leaving it as a regulator of US platforms rather than an owner of its own stack.
The cost of nationalism. The nostalgia for their little nation statelets is costing Europeans their sovereignty. Which is ironic as the little nationalists are all about sovereignty but in reality help outside powers to colonialise Europe.
It’s time for an emotionally painful but necessary goodbye to the European nation state. Europe needs a single capital and service market where startups and Tech companies can scale up as rapidly as in the US and China and pool capital from across the continent following a single set of rules rather than being bogged down with 27 mini markets.
If this can’t be done at an EU level then a coalition of the willing should go ahead. According to a study the remaining internal barriers in the EU are equivalent to a 44% tariff on intra EU trade. Worse than anything Donald Trump has imposed. The first countries to achieve this will create immense additional prosperity.
European nationalism is Europe’s biggest threat to its prosperity and sovereignty, worse than Russia, China and the US combined.
There is no lack of money, brains, IP or will. This is nearly entirely a legislative and administrative issue. Make it more compelling to invest in startups - and in particular to work at one - and make it easier to grow a small business across Europe. Taxation especially closely followed by an administrative patchwork of regulations for small businesses is creating this issue. The incredible European entrepreneurs I know feel forced to grow their business in the U.S. because it is just too slow and cumbersome to do in the EU. This is not at all the priority in Europe it should be. There are some individual member state smallish initiatives- nearly every state has one - but by and large those are mostly marketing. Admirable to try and ask for attention but they do not address the underlying issues. And those issues are 100% within the control of EU and member state governments. There are entrepreneurs in Europe - good ones even - they just need to be empowered. There is plenty of money too. It just needs to be more attractive to invest in startups.
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