Europe’s push for “digital sovereignty” is moving from policy rhetoric to procurement decisions.
The European Commission has launched a long-term plan to reduce dependence on US technology, while European public institutions and governments are beginning to replace American products with European or open-source alternatives.
The shift is occurring across several layers of the technology stack.
- Search: European Parliament devices are switching their default from Google to France’s Qwant.
- Office/productivity: France is deploying the open-source LaSuite; Euro-Office is another emerging European offering; municipalities in the Netherlands, France, and Germany are moving away from Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
- Software development: The Dutch government is moving code away from Microsoft’s GitHub to its own repository.
- Cloud infrastructure: Finland reportedly decided against putting election data on Amazon cloud infrastructure, while DNS Belgium is leaving AWS.
- Social networking: Eurosky is being developed as a European alternative operating on the same AT Protocol used by Bluesky.
The underlying concern isn’t simply dislike of American companies. It’s dependency.
The article identifies several risks: European governments and businesses lacking control over their own data, concentration of critical technology in a small number of companies, changing geopolitical relationships, possible US government access under the CLOUD Act and FISA, and increasingly close relationships between major technology companies and the Trump administration.
The Trump administration appears to be an accelerator rather than the original cause.
According to the passage, many digital-sovereignty initiatives predate Trump’s second term. But US sanctions affecting people linked to the International Criminal Court gave the issue greater urgency. The ICC itself subsequently moved away from Microsoft technology.
There’s an important open-source dimension.
Europe isn’t necessarily attempting to reproduce Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other US companies as vertically integrated European corporations. Instead, several examples involve government-controlled infrastructure, interoperable systems, and open-source software.
No individual switch is necessarily transformative. Put together, however, the cases collected by the WIRED article suggest something broader: European institutions are increasingly treating dependence on US technology as a strategic and geopolitical risk, not merely an IT purchasing question.
The economically interesting part
I think the passage’s most consequential distinction is European technology versus European control.
Those aren’t identical.
A government could achieve substantially greater technological sovereignty without creating a European Microsoft or Amazon. Open-source software, self-hosting, interoperable protocols, domestic repositories and diversified suppliers can reduce dependency even if Europe never achieves US-scale technology firms.
In other words, the emerging European model described here looks less like:
“Replace every American technology champion with a European champion”
and more like:
“Reduce the number of critical functions for which Europe has no credible exit option.”
That’s a considerably more achievable objective.
And from an economics perspective, it turns this into an interesting option-value / switching-cost problem. A European alternative doesn’t necessarily have to outperform Microsoft 365 or AWS. It may only have to be sufficiently capable that retaining an independent exit option is worth its additional cost or inconvenience.
That makes the Qwant, LaSuite, government Git repository and AWS examples more significant collectively than they might appear individually. They are experiments in lowering the switching costs and institutional lock-in that have historically made technological dependence self-reinforcing.
