Europeans are dangerously reliant on US tech. Now is a good time to build our own | Johnny Ryan

The French judge Nicolas Guillou knows exactly how deep Europe’s dependence on US tech is. Guillou and his colleagues at the international criminal court are under US sanctions. They can no longer use e-commerce, book hotels online or hire a car. Their home smart devices ignore them. Credit cards from European banks no longer function, because Europe has still not developed its own EU-wide payments system, so most electronic purchases go through Visa and Mastercard. Converting euros to foreign currencies is extraordinarily difficult because everything passes through dollars. Living in Europe is no protection against Donald Trump bricking your digital life.

This dependence is not limited to mod-cons. Last year, the chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee said that he regretted his part in Denmark’s decision to buy US-made F-35 fighter jets: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse. Buying American weapons is a security risk that we can not run.” He is not alone. Spain has abandoned plans to buy F-35s.

Perhaps the danger should have been clear a decade ago when it was revealed that US spies routinely record the phone calls of millions of Europeans and bug the phones of European leaders. But across Europe, governments, militaries, businesses, doctors, professors and teenagers alike continued to trust US technology. Sensitive state policies are drafted in Microsoft software. Health and tax records live on Amazon’s servers. Important decisions are made over video systems run by Microsoft, Cisco or Zoom. Young Europeans view the world through a lens distorted by Snapchat filters and YouTube algorithms. Europe’s news organisations rely on Google ad auctions.

Despite all this, Europe possesses a path to digital sovereignty. Loosening the US grip on the word processing, video conferencing and “enterprise software” that companies rely upon is not technically difficult. As veteran tech investor Roger McNamee told me, most of this tech was perfected in the 1990s and 2000s and has since become “enshittified” due to monopoly effects. Investors are selling software stocks because they fear these products can be too easily built by new coding large language models. Now is a good time for Europe to build better.

Austria’s military has already dumped Microsoft and moved to open-source services hosted in Europe, and some German regional governments have done the same. Danish schools were told to abandon Google laptops by the Danish data protection authority in 2024. The new Dutch government says digital sovereignty will be a national priority. France has moved its 5.7 million public sector workers to Visio, an alternative to Zoom developed by the government, running on French infrastructure. And the European Commission is building a system based on Matrix, a European open-source technology that enables communication across different apps and servers, without surrendering control of conversations to a single company.

But Europe’s real tech challenges lie deeper. First, each of the 27 countries in the EU has its own ways of doing business and its own particular legal requirements. Even though the European market is huge (450 million consumers), startups never reach critical mass because it is too difficult for them to operate across Europe. The IMF estimates that cross-border friction inside the EU is equivalent to a 110% tariff. This, as a report by the former Italian prime minister, Enrico Letta, details, kills everything from consumer tech to cloud infrastructure in the cradle.

Despite identifying this problem decades ago, EU countries have been unwilling to sacrifice national practices and disappoint domestic lobbies that benefit from the status quo. That may now finally change after the potentially momentous agreement by EU leaders last week to make Europe “one market”, and to “buy European” in strategically important sectors such as defence, space, clean tech and AI.

A second challenge is that European startups cannot get the kind of investment and initial public offerings enjoyed in the US because Europe’s capital market is also an untidy mess of national markets. This may change soon, too, with a union-wide financing system in the works, to unlock €10tn sitting in savings accounts for investment.

The final challenge is that Europe’s governments may not have the necessary political resolve to defend the continent. When faced with the threat to seize Greenland, did they finally take a tough line with Trump at Davos in January? It is at least as likely that it was his own treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, fearing the damage to the dollar from a retaliatory trade war, who convinced the US president to back down.

Wake me up when EU investors start putting their money in EU tech.

Good time was 10 years ago 😒

Could argue the same thing the other way around. Who make the equipment that’s used to make those chips that the Americans and the Taiwanese make? The Europeans.

Amazon, Google, Apple etc. weren’t created by government officials saying we need to make tech companies lol

These companies naturally developed and took decades to mature mature.

There are two possible futures for Europe here.

One where we embrace open source and open standards that allow actual competition and innovation around technology and privacy thanks to code transparency.

Or one where we just switch to a European  proprietary opaque solution that is owned by private corporations that will use it to grow into our version of a big tech monopoly.

I don’t have high hopes it will be the first one.

There is milion restrictions that works both for big tech and startups, HOW you want develop apps like apple google amazon when at the beginning you need to focus on law instead of development

These companies would not be created in EU, we have no startups, why? read above! Sad but true

You want FREE apps not big not centralised who will make it for FREE to make it as good as big US tech, and blonde on the top for which agenda is GREEN more RESTRICTION for years, now just reminded that she needs industry and tech

Same with countries like france germany and other rich, they open markets but restrict them to export a lot and import with restrictions (WEE law is good example, more papers…)

Act not talk

At first the EU should be able to protect themselves without the USA military.

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