Another European agency shifts off US Tech as digital sovereignty gains steam
137 comments
·October 31, 2025mentalgear
mrtksn
> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech?
Because it's pretty refined since it was funded with resources so great that it was intended to serve global level audience?
I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU. Unfortunately, refined high quality software requires considerable resources and no one will invest those considerable resources when the US companies can just offer better software at lower price thanks to their lead and deep pockets until the EU companies go out of business. Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.
embedding-shape
> I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU.
> Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.
Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?
It feels like whatever you're saying today could be said the other way in the past, so why does it really matter?
The fact on the ground is that people don't trust the US overall as much, even less the leadership of the US, so whatever dependency has been built up over the years, has to be fixed, no matter if the "local" technology is shittier at the moment.
I'm sure Americans felt the same about printing presses back in the day, where some things you just have to be able to do without needing the permission of others far away.
mrtksn
When you do something in a mature industry, you skip quite a lot of losing bets that those involved in maturing it couldn't.
That's why Google, Samsung and others were able to create smartphones comparable to iPhone without having a Steve Jobs and a Johny Ive right after Apple made one.
Once you know the way forward, the rest is an engineering task and it's matter of working towards it. Very low risk compared to the initial work done by the pioneers.
jaredklewis
> Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?
Running a software business in Europe is not against the laws of physics or anything, but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector. The US shooting itself in the foot might help a little, but there are still lots of internal barriers, like those outlined in the Draghi report.
jfengel
Governments can nudge. If they swear off American tech, they will be using something else, and have influence on how that goes. They can put money into getting what they want, and open sourcing it.
The more they invest, the more corporations will be able to switch.
kosinus
What is cutting off the ICC if not restricting. I think that was a pretty blatant move, and is a large part of the chain reaction we're seeing now.
kakacik
Who cares about fine details of quality if you are at permanent risk of on/off, and a very real one.
Not every company needs, wants or has room to become google scale. Stability long term is something we hold dearly in Europe, not everybody runs in 10 seconds attention span.
mrtksn
> Who cares about fine details of quality
People who actually work with that to achieve things that may be just as important care a lot.
nxor
bbb b b but Spotify is European :)
mrtksn
A lot of AAA+ games are European, Linux is European and a lot of other software and services are European, a lot of industrial software is European. The platforms are not European, that's what's lacking.
It's not matter of talent, its matter of investing a few tens billions into it and its not going to happen if US companies can just undercut and wait it out.
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graemep
They do though, and they are happy to.
A very small number of government agencies in a few countries have moved away from reliance on the US, but very few businesses have. We still have governments and businesses encouraging the use of US tech by, for example, encouraging use of mobile apps. AWS, Azure and Google dominate cloud services in most of the world. Microsoft dominates the desktop. Businesses and individuals are increasingly reliant on cloud apps that are mostly American.
Here in the UK my daughter's school (a large sixth for college) relies in MS cloud versions of Office and on Teams, you need (at least in my area) to use an mobile app, or a web app hosted on AWS to make an appointment with a GP (and if you are prescribed medication the pharmacy are informed via an API running in AWS). Most SMEs that do run anything of their own use AWS. One of the biggest banks (Lloyds) had issues during the recent AWS outage, and I know they are not the only one to use AWS.
A lot of European governments are pushing ID and age verification mobile apps.
In general a lot of governments are regulating in ways that favour the incumbents.
isodev
I think it’s important to focus on the momentum. It’s not easy to redesign and re-engineer systems that have taken years and decades to develop and span many layers of integrations. There is also the issue of retraining as everyone is happily used to whatever system they currently have. It’s unfortunate the US decided to go back in time rather than look to the future but eventually, very few (if any) services would rely on US corps.
lazide
Not to mention 95% of all mobile app installs are through App stores controlled by 2 US companies.
AlecSchueler
But to change these things within the past 7 or 8 months would have been impossible. I get what you guys are saying but there's so much of this stuff that is very entrenched and there's decades of inertia to push against, it can't just happen overnight. The story isn't that no one uses American services anymore, it's that fewer and fewer of us feel comfortable doing so and are open to or actively seeking alternatives in a way we never expected to be.
baxtr
Believe it or not, it’s partly because of regulation.
If you’re on Azure for example as a bank you know that most of the (eg DORA) requirements are met, because regulators have directly talked to Microsoft.
There are high compliance and migration cost for switching with no immediate gain for the business.
Permit
> capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country
Is there non-anecdotal evidence of this that you can share with us?
My understanding is that people make this claim but I haven't seen evidence of it beyond one-off articles about individual professors leaving the country.
lispisok
There is none. Despite the less stable environment if you are Talent by far the best place to be is the US. If you are an ambitious entrepreneur by far the best place to be is the US.
withinboredom
After I moved out of the US, I got emails all the time about moving to the EU; until I deleted my blog post about it.
The expat facebook groups have exploded if you’re looking for 'evidence'.
szundi
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poisonborz
I wish, but for a corporation morale grounds are not enough, and the facts speak for the contrary. Even with all the insanity, the US would not touch something as insanely profitable as this, and the government is very protective of the top tech firms. Also on the technical level, EU companies are simply not in the same ballpark.
danaris
> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech?
First and foremost, because it takes time to switch.
Secondly, because there are a lot of things that just don't have realistic alternatives.
For a large agency, especially one that has statutory or regulatory requirements on how they decide on and deploy hardware and software, even if they can legally choose to switch to open-source options, if they made that decision the day after the election last year, it might have been too late to get major proposals in for the 2025 fiscal year, so they'd have to wait until 2026 to do more than start planning. (This is, fairly obviously, a near-worst-case scenario; other agencies will have much more freedom to change as they please.)
Even if they're less encumbered, the more users you have within an organization, the longer it takes to execute a migration like this, and it can be really really hard to operate for any length of time with a partial migration completed, especially for the support team. I could easily believe that some such migrations are already in the planning stage, but will take months to actually happen.
And finally, because This Is How We've Always Done It is a very, very powerful force. For some organizations, unfortunately, it will take some kind of catastrophic event to realize that they really shouldn't be relying on a foreign and possibly hostile power for all their major enterprise IT vendors.
graemep
I have also met the attitude that using hyperscalers is the right way to do it, and running anything of your own that you could outsource to them is weird and unprofessional.
mentalgear
Time well invested. If you are a publicly-traded company, the executive level is financially irresponsible to the stakeholders if they leave the company's data at perpetual risk of just vanishing.
jimbob45
It’s Europe. They couldn’t even drop Russian oil imports despite them being an existential threat. They’re doing this because anti-US moves are trendy right now and that’s it.
cassepipe
Some of us in Europe are ready to drop Russian oil imports whatever the cost. It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever and governments have to tread lightly all the time in order not to let power go to all those far right parties who would just buy the cheapest oil coming from anywhere as long as it allows them to remain in power.
bad_haircut72
when the momentum really gets going expect similar agitators rallying against reductions of US influence
jack_tripper
>Some of us in Europe are ready to drop Russian oil imports whatever the cost.
Translation: "Some of us in Europe are ready to drop drop bread in favor of eating cake, whatever the cost."
Easy for you to write cheques that others have to cash. Be careful with such suicidal empathy, as that has second order effects that back-fire in spectacular fashion. That's why you're supposed to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.
>It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever..
TIL that if you aren't gonna sacrifice yourself for Ukraine and prioritize your family's survival, wanting to have a job, a roof over your head and food on the table, somehow makes you a "Russian populist" now. Interesting logic.
You'd think much differently if you or your family would face unemployment, homelessness or malnourishment due to the economic damages caused by a surge in energy costs across the board. Half my immediate friend circle have lost their jobs in the last ~2 years due to the economic situation, my grandma can't afford her bills from her pension without financial support from us, while access public services like healthcare and childcare has only gotten worse, despite us paying more for everything. Not exactly the environment people feel like gutting themselves even further for a foreign country, whichever that may be.
nutjob2
Surprisingly, when you depend on Russia oil and gas for your refineries and industry for decades, you can't always turn it off instantly, it sometimes takes many years due to infrastructure and for come countries, pro-Putin politics.
Being anti US isn't 'trendy', it is a response to the US being anti-EU at the moment, and justifiably being seen as unreliable, mercurial and even dangerous.
drstewart
EU is the entity with fascist Hungary and Slovakia having veto powers, isn't it? The one where "free" countries like Denmark push for encryption backdoors?
I think I'll avoid them - for good reason
kergonath
> The one where "free" countries like Denmark push for encryption backdoors?
In a free political system, anybody is able to push any agenda. What matters is what gets adopted. I agree that the EU is not perfect, but you cannot just take a government’s pet project and claim that it is a failure of the political system.
lm28469
Lmao, westoids having hard takes on Slovakia after reading headlines on reddit is the funniest thing ever, if only you knew how wrong you are
Quick example, people who stop at headlines keep talking about Fico yapping about stopping aids to Ukraine, yet they give more as a percentage of their gdp than Germany, France, the UK, &c. Fico's a piece of shit but don't stop at what he says, half of his bs doesn't make it further than headlines in western medias
patrickmcnamara
How can Hungary or Slovakia do the same? Literally, how could they? What mechanism exists?
mentalgear
While there are fascist leaders in those countries (especially Trump modelled is remodelling of the country after Orban's autocratic and corrupt Hungary), those are just 2 of 27 - so far far from the majority.
And many decisions in the EU do not allow for their veto votes anyhow - Orban's Hungary has been withhold now for years Billions of EU investments because of how the countries institutions were hollowed out by him.
drstewart
What do you call a table of 27 with 2 Nazis at it? 27 Nazis.
anon291
27 out of 27 agree that end to end encryption and free speech are dangerous... So spare us all the pearl clutching
ArcHound
These are great news. I was quite pessimistic about this transformation, but seems there are plenty institutions willing to make the leap.
Are you aware of any tracking web that would display all these efforts? Wiki seems a bit outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_free_and_open-sour...
EDIT: this seems to be a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
Havoc
Even if you can’t move all of it now the basic building blocks like VMs and databases aren’t exactly cutting edge tech so should be doable.
toomuchtodo
People overestimate the technology required to build the utility stack, from physical servers to the first bit from an http server. Is it easy? It's straightforward. Can there be downtime? Tell me what us-east-1, Azure Front Door, Github, etc have looked like lately. Everyone uses cloud as an excuse for more uptime, but they're still down frequently, so this argument doesn't hold water. Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource. Can't build it yourself? That's fine, people like Oxide can build it for you, and you own all of it.
The profits you don't pay to hyperscalers is investment in your sovereignty. Easy case to prioritize stakeholders over Google, Microsoft, and AWS shareholders, and the US government's ability to rug pull your access and data at any time. The argument isn't bare metal vs virtualized; the argument is "Do you own it?" You are spending a certain amount no matter what to get the technology capabilities needed.
37signals Leaves the Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 - October 2022
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else...
(have built cloud infra for startups, fortune 100s, financial services firms, and on prem infra for high energy physics, non profits, public goods, etc; thoughts and opinions always my own)
graemep
> Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource.
If its outsourced the downtime is someone else's fault.
People prefer opex to capex.
You are right at a technical level, but short termism and personal incentives trump those.
toomuchtodo
> You are right at a technical level, but short termism and personal incentives trump those.
Agreed. Never let a crisis go to waste. This is that crisis. Like bankruptcy, change happens gradually, then suddenly.
zoeysmithe
Both those things are like the root account to one's data. If there is a hypervisor backdoor (or if your vendor is told by the government to stop giving you updates or sell you product, or even pull your keys) then its game over. DB's too because they're so mission critical and not trivial to move off.
As far as cloud goes, how many shops are now looking at bringing stuff back in because eventually cloud maximizes its profit margins and captured clients can't say no to ever increasing prices. I imagine leaving the US-owned cloud also means an opportunity to reconfigure what is on the cloud and if it needs to be there.
Here's hope desktop linux comes back into play.
As for Munich moving back to windows, who knows how much of that was 'checkbook diplomacy' of the USA demanding they go back to US products or the US will pull unrelated support or whatever. Now that the USA has become isolationist, if not a threat to the EU, those favors/checks aren't being cashed anymore. So much of this is not a meritocracy but instead the crony capitalism that defines the modern world. Maybe there's potential for actual merit now that the USA is losing global prominence in so many ways.
The EU liberated from US influence can lead to great things and this is a good start. For all the doom and gloom of politics today, the US's century of influence ending can only be a universally good thing, imho.
sipofwater
* "The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires." by John B. Sparks: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200375~3001080:The-Histomap--Four-Thousand-Years-O), https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.... (4194 x 19108 pixels, web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg) via https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net... (web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg); https://archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915c... (4194 x 19108 pixels, archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915cbd50a.jpg) via https://archive.ph/1wEk8
* "(Covers to) The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires.": https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200374~3000299:-Covers-to--The-Histomap--Four-Thou)
sipofwater
"The world without hegemony" "As Pax Americana ends, a multipolar order is emerging. The history of Southeast Asia holds lessons for what’s to come": https://aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us... (aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us-about-a-multipolar-order) via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771497 ; https://archive.ph/wBrLt
Herring
I’m the last person you can call a fan of US foreign policy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...
But for global stability it’s best if there was some kind of entity with a legitimate monopoly on force. It’s like I don’t want to live in a town where everyone has guns, I’d like a police force with accountability.
kergonath
Personally, I like a forum for sorting things out peacefully without relying on the goodwill of the bully du jour.
Your argument is not new and is exactly why enlightened absolute monarchs were fashionable at some point. It sounds good, but the problem is that this works as long as the monarch is good. When they aren’t, or aren’t any more, or their heir aren’t, then it’s horrible.
Democracy is an exercise in optimising for the middle ground: sure, it’s not going to be as efficient as a competent autocracy, but it limits the worst case scenarios.
15155
> It’s like I don’t want to live in a town where everyone has guns, I’d like a police force with accountability
Accountability doesn't equal magic: when seconds count, the police are minutes (realistically: hours, in many places) away.
zoeysmithe
The war on terror has killed millions of civilians, mostly women and children. Brown University lists excess deaths from the WoT at 4 or 5m. The USA has destabilized many countries and performed coups. It invades and goes to war for its own geopolitical gains and regularly lies why. What you're praising is a horror.
Being defenseless hoping an angry 800lbs gorilla will be kind to you must be the worst system imaginable. A balance of power both economic and arms is going to be the best way forward because now that gorilla knows it can't just do what it wants anymore.
tjpnz
>Now that the USA has become isolationist, if not a threat to the EU, those favors/checks aren't being cashed anymore.
Trump could threaten tariffs.
zoeysmithe
Trumpism is all about maximizing tariff gain/benefit. Economically and politically he may not have room to do more without crippling the USA. The EU is already dealing with tough tariffs from the USA.
Most of the "500% tariffs" is bluster and he backs down to the min/max level the capital owning class he is part of and he ultimately serves don't want to go past.
sipofwater
"Replacing Office365, how to keep OS secure": https://help.nextcloud.com/t/replacing-office365-how-to-keep... (help.nextcloud.com/t/replacing-office365-how-to-keep-os-secure/223289)
sipofwater
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sipofwater
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agile-gift0262
it's been years since the last time I go to zdnet. My experience when opening the link: I've been greeted by a dialog asking me to enable notifications, then the classic cookie dialog, and 5 seconds into reading the article, an auto-playing video with sound shows up pinned to the bottom of my screen. No thank you. Tab closed.
jjtheblunt
rage-bait retitling? title says Big Tech, not US Tech.
9dev
What other big tech is there really, apart from Chinese tech (which is already avoided across Europe)?
jjtheblunt
open source is pretty global, i'd say. it's also a theme in the linked article.
ArtTimeInvestor
Are there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own?
I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs.
I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs.
Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.
jschoe
Europe does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences.
Pretty hard economy to survive in.
ArtTimeInvestor
US companies seem to sell into Europe just fine?
Amazon, Google, Microsoft - they all make tens of billions of revenue in Europe.
Why wouldn't a company based in Europe be able to do the same?
somanyphotons
US companies get big first, only then try Europe once they have big revenue/headcount to handle the risk/complexity.
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kergonath
One thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.
consumer451
EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.
The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.
Here is a subreddit on the topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeanFederalists/
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eikenberry
The US started this way... Europe must be careful about how much power is given the EU or it will end up the same way.
rzerowan
They would probably need a anchor client that would allow for predictable growth at scale - AWS always had Amazon.com GCP had its gmail and other workspace apps. Ideally the varoius goverments in the EU would commit to only hosting their work on them , however from one article read recently even the rules they come up with to test sovereignity claims are gamed to benefit the US providers.
wiether
Like https://www.stackit.de/en/ which is the cloud offering of Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl?
rzerowan
Yep,hopefully their API offerings are industry compatible and requisition of resources for clients is smooth. Would also help if they can onboard similar sized operations that are currently doing their own hosting or using one of the non-EU clouds.
TacticalCoder
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tartoran
US big tech is not just no longer reliable but toxic, predatory, prying, patronizing, etc..
I have to rely on office 365 at work for some minimal functions. I generally try to avoid it and only use it when necessary. The other day when I logged in to look for some document everything was hidden and Copilot AI was front and center. Copilot is the dumbest LLM possible, terrible integration, terrible responses, everything has become a headache for a simple task I had to do. How long would have until Microsoft corpo customers grind to a halt?
A_D_E_P_T
Am I way off base, or is there a HUGE potential market for a new spreadsheet program compatible with xls/xlsx?
It can't be that hard to make one, can it? (Famous last words, I know...)
ironman1478
LibreOffice Calc can do this already.
The main issue is the collaboration aspect of LibreOffice. I imagine though with funding LibreOffice can be upgraded to do this. If countries are already trying to migrate away from US tech, they could invest in this.
rubenvanwyk
I know actually that LibreOffice specifically has lamented xlsx, apparently it’s a hard file format to design for.
cassepipe
I personally think the future is a database like postgres or sqlite that is know to be very robust with a nice calc frontend. I believe Mathesar is on it. Watching them closely.
Why ? Because falling back to SQL for big data would ne just great. Excel and Google Sheets seems to struggle.
notepad0x90
the spreadsheet part is done already. the real power of excel these days is M365 cloud integration.
Gsuite and Zoho try to compete but they don't come close.
dmje
Does zdnet really auto autoplay audio when you open the page…?
ChrisArchitect
[dupe] Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud
Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president?
If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.