Time to Cut the Digital Cord: Why Europe Must Ditch Silicon Valley and Build Its Own Tech Future

The Uncomfortable Truth: Europe Is Digitally Colonised

Let's not sugarcoat this. Europe, for all its economic power and regulatory ambition, is essentially a digital colony of the United States. The numbers are staggering. US cloud providers control roughly 85% of the European cloud market. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google alone account for over 70% of it. The largest European cloud companies, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, hold about 2% each. Two percent. In their own backyard.

It goes way beyond cloud computing. Think about your average European business. The operating systems on the computers? Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS. The office suite? Microsoft 365. The email marketing? Mailchimp. The cloud infrastructure? AWS or Azure. The team communication? Slack or Microsoft Teams. The video calls? Zoom or Teams again. The messaging app on everyone's phones? WhatsApp, owned by Meta. Even the payment systems we use are dominated by Visa and Mastercard, both American.

Every single layer of Europe's digital infrastructure runs through American companies, which means it runs through American jurisdiction. And that's where the CLOUD Act comes in. This US law gives American authorities the legal right to demand access to data stored by US companies, regardless of where in the world that data physically sits. Your data could be sitting in a data centre in Frankfurt, but if it's managed by Amazon or Microsoft, the US government can legally request access to it.

For years, this was a theoretical concern. A "what if" scenario that privacy advocates worried about while everyone else shrugged and got on with their day. But Trump's second term has turned those theoretical concerns into very real threats. When the US administration starts sanctioning ICC prosecutors, threatens to take Greenland by force, imposes tariffs on allies, and sends its Vice President to Munich to lecture Europeans about "censorship" because they dare to regulate tech companies, the "what if" becomes "what now."

Governments Are Already Moving. Are You?

The good news is that some European governments have stopped waiting around and started doing something about this. And the momentum is building fast.

In Austria, and this one's close to home for me, the Bundesheer (that's the Austrian Armed Forces) completed a massive migration in 2025. They removed Microsoft Office from all 16,000 military workstations and replaced it with LibreOffice, an open source alternative. The motivation wasn't about saving money, though they did save roughly €6.5 million a year in licensing fees. It was about sovereignty. The military saw Microsoft pushing its Office products towards mandatory cloud services and said "absolutely not." They weren't about to have sensitive military data processed on external cloud servers that could be accessed by foreign entities. And here's the really brilliant part: they didn't just adopt LibreOffice, they actually contributed back to it. More than five person years of development work went into adding features the military needed, and those improvements are now available to everyone using LibreOffice.

Then in January 2026, France announced it was ditching Zoom and Microsoft Teams across its entire government. All civil servants will switch to Visio, a domestically developed video conferencing platform, by 2027. Visio is hosted on French sovereign cloud infrastructure certified under the SecNumCloud framework, and it even includes AI meeting transcription built by French startups. The savings? Around €1 million per year for every 100,000 users. But again, this isn't about cost. French Civil Service Minister David Amiel put it bluntly when he said they cannot risk having scientific exchanges, sensitive data, and strategic innovations exposed to non European actors.

Germany's state of Schleswig Holstein has migrated 44,000 employee inboxes away from Microsoft to open source alternatives. Denmark announced a pilot programme to replace Microsoft Office for government employees. The German state of Schleswig Holstein is rolling out Linux desktops. The French city of Lyon is deploying LibreOffice. And at the European level, all 27 EU member states signed a declaration in November 2025 affirming their shared ambition to strengthen digital sovereignty.

The pattern is unmistakable. Big Tech is no longer welcome in sensitive European government installations.

I've Already Started Switching. Here's What I Use.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. "That's all well and good for governments with massive IT budgets, but what about the rest of us?" Fair point. So let me share what I've been doing personally and in my own businesses, because I've been gradually replacing US tech with European alternatives, and honestly, most of it has been smoother than I expected.

Operating Systems

Instead of paying for Windows or macOS licenses across my organisation, I switched to Linux. Specifically, Ubuntu for desktops and Debian for servers. Yes, there's a learning curve, especially if your team has only ever used Windows. But modern Linux distributions are genuinely user friendly these days, and the cost savings alone make it worthwhile. More importantly, it's open source, meaning no single company or government can pull the rug from under you. The Austrian military is already running Linux based servers, and Schleswig Holstein is rolling it out across their entire state government. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for your business.

Office Software

I use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. It handles word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations perfectly well for day to day business needs. Is it identical to Microsoft Office? No. Does it do 95% of what most people need? Absolutely. And it supports the OpenDocument Format, which is an ISO standard, so you're not locked into any proprietary file format. The Austrian military proved that even complex migrations with years of accumulated templates and macros can be managed successfully.

Cloud Hosting

This was the big one for me. Instead of AWS or DigitalOcean, I moved my infrastructure to Hetzner, a German cloud provider based in Gunzenhausen. The pricing is significantly cheaper than AWS, the performance is excellent, and my data sits in European data centres under European jurisdiction. No CLOUD Act. No wondering whether some American intelligence agency can demand access to my servers. Other solid European alternatives include OVHcloud from France, Scaleway (also French, and carbon neutral), Exoscale from Switzerland (owned by Austrian telecom company A1), and IONOS from Germany. For more enterprise grade needs, Open Telekom Cloud by Deutsche Telekom runs on OpenStack, which reduces vendor lock in even further.

Email Marketing

Instead of Mailchimp (American, now owned by Intuit) or Postmark (also US based), I use Mailjet. It's a French company, founded in Paris in 2010, and it handles both marketing emails and transactional emails brilliantly. The collaborative editing features are genuinely useful if you work in a team. Another excellent European option is Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), also based in Paris, which offers email, SMS, and CRM features in one platform and stores all data on EU servers. There's also CleverReach from Germany, rapidmail (German as well), and GetResponse from Poland. All of them store data within the EU, which makes GDPR compliance straightforward rather than a legal headache.

Messaging

Instead of WhatsApp (owned by Meta, subject to US jurisdiction, metadata collected for advertising), I use Threema for anything sensitive. It's Swiss, it's end to end encrypted, it doesn't require a phone number to register, and it doesn't store messages on servers after delivery. The Swiss Data Protection Act is one of the strictest in the world. For business team communication, Wire is another excellent European option, based in Germany and Ireland, with full end to end encryption and on premises deployment options. Element, built on the open Matrix protocol, is being used by the French government for digital sovereignty projects. And there's Olvid from France, which encrypts even the metadata that most other apps leave exposed.

Video Conferencing

Instead of Zoom or Teams, there's Jitsi Meet, which is open source and can be self hosted. France's new Visio platform is built on similar principles. For businesses that want a managed solution, there are European providers offering hosted Jitsi instances with enterprise features.

Search Engines

Instead of Google, I've been using Ecosia (German, plants trees with ad revenue) and Qwant (French, privacy focused). Neither tracks you the way Google does, and both process data within Europe.

Email Hosting

Instead of Gmail, there's Proton Mail from Switzerland (end to end encrypted) or Tutanota from Germany (now rebranded as Tuta). Both are designed from the ground up with privacy and European data protection in mind.

But Can We Actually Pull This Off?

Right, let's be honest about the challenges. Because switching to European alternatives isn't just a matter of downloading different software and calling it a day.

For individuals and small businesses, the switch is surprisingly doable. Most of the alternatives I mentioned above are mature, well supported products that can replace their American counterparts without major disruption. You might lose some niche features, and there will be an adjustment period, but the core functionality is there.

For larger organisations, it gets more complicated. If you've been running your entire operation on AWS for years, with dozens of proprietary services tightly integrated, migrating to a European cloud provider is a major undertaking. It's not impossible, but it requires careful planning, significant investment in migration, and probably 12 to 24 months of parallel running before you can fully switch over.

For enterprises deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, with Active Directory, SharePoint, Teams, Azure, and thousands of custom integrations, a complete switch might take three to five years. And some specialist tools may not have European equivalents yet, particularly in areas like advanced AI services or highly specialised enterprise software.

The honest answer is that a full, continent wide shift away from American technology won't happen overnight. The Forrester research firm predicted that no European enterprise will shift entirely from US hyperscalers in 2026. And they're probably right. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

But that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and accept the status quo. The approach should be pragmatic and incremental. Start with the low hanging fruit: email, messaging, office software, and basic cloud hosting. Move the most sensitive workloads first. Use the EU Data Act's new switching rights, which came into effect in 2025, to mandate that cloud providers facilitate workload portability. Build on open standards and containerised architectures that make future migrations easier.

What About Existing Data? Can It Move?

This is the question that keeps IT directors up at night. You've got petabytes of data sitting in AWS or Azure. Years of accumulated documents in Microsoft 365. Entire business processes built around Google's ecosystem. Can that data actually move?

Voluntarily? Yes, technically it can. The new EU Data Act requires cloud providers to facilitate data portability and prohibits unfair switching charges. Container based architectures like Kubernetes make workload migration between providers more feasible than ever. European cloud providers like Scaleway and OVHcloud are specifically designed around open standards like OpenStack to minimise vendor lock in.

But "technically possible" and "practically straightforward" are two very different things. Data migration costs money, takes time, and carries risk. The larger your dataset and the more tightly integrated your systems, the more painful the migration will be.

Now, what happens if organisations are forced to move? That's the scenario that should be keeping every European CTO awake at night. Imagine Trump signs an executive order restricting European access to US cloud services. Imagine Microsoft decides to comply with a US government request to hand over European data. Imagine AWS raises prices by 300% for European customers as a trade war escalation. These scenarios aren't as far fetched as they sound. The European Council on Foreign Relations actually published a hypothetical scenario in which Trump declares a "digital security emergency" and limits US digital services to foreign users.

If that happens, and organisations haven't prepared, the disruption would be catastrophic. We're talking about businesses losing access to their own data, their own systems, their own communications. Virtually overnight. That's not a risk you can manage by hoping it won't happen. It's a risk you manage by having a plan, starting the migration now, and building resilience into every layer of your digital infrastructure.

The Bigger Picture: A Stronger European Identity

Let me zoom out for a moment, because this isn't just about technology. It's about identity. It's about what kind of continent we want to be.

For decades, Europe has been content to be a consumer of American technology. We used their platforms, adopted their standards, and in return, we got convenience and familiarity. But that arrangement came with strings attached, strings that are now being pulled very aggressively by a US administration that views Europe not as an ally but as a rival to be exploited.

Trump's tariffs, his hostility towards EU regulation, his threats over Greenland, his administration's cosy relationship with Silicon Valley billionaires who openly lobby against European digital protection laws: all of this should be a wake up call. Europe doesn't need to be hostile towards the United States. But it absolutely needs to stop being dependent on it.

And here's the thing: this isn't just defensive. It's a massive opportunity. The European cloud market alone is projected to be worth over €70 billion this year, and it's growing at 24% annually. If even a fraction of that spending shifts to European providers, it creates enormous economic opportunities. Jobs, innovation, investment, all flowing into European companies rather than American ones.

Spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure in European countries is predicted to more than triple to $23 billion by 2027. The EU's public procurement accounts for roughly 15% of GDP, which is around €2.5 trillion. A deliberate "buy European" strategy for digital infrastructure would redirect massive resources into homegrown tech companies, creating a virtuous cycle of investment, innovation, and competitiveness.

Every euro spent on Hetzner instead of AWS is a euro invested in the European tech ecosystem. Every organisation that chooses Brevo over Mailchimp is strengthening a Parisian company instead of an American one. Every government that switches to LibreOffice is funding open source development that benefits everyone.

This is about building a European digital identity that's as strong as our cultural identity. We already have world class engineering, some of the best universities on the planet, and a regulatory framework in GDPR that the rest of the world looks to as a model. What we've lacked is the political will and the collective determination to turn those advantages into digital independence.

Trump's belligerence has, ironically, given Europe exactly the kick up the backside it needed. Let his reign of tariffs and threats backfire spectacularly. Let it be the catalyst that finally forces Europe to invest in its own technology, reduce its dependence on Silicon Valley, and emerge stronger, more united, and more sovereign than ever before.

The tools exist. The alternatives are mature enough. The political momentum is building. The only question is whether we have the courage to actually make the switch.

I already have. And I'd encourage you to do the same.