As well as political announcements, domestic European technological developments and millions in additional funding, the WIRED analysis has documented dozens of public examples of companies, governments, NGOs and education establishments moving away from US technology companies in favor of open source or local alternatives. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
“The Trump administration’s aggressive policies, attacking international law as well as the EU and democratic principles, have provided a wake-up call to many,” says Marietje Schaake, non-resident fellow at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and former member of the European Parliament.
The moves are widespread—and growing. Last week, the European Commission launched its official long-term plans to rely less on American technology. The European Parliament has changed the default search engine on its devices from Google to the French alternative Quant. Thousands of employees in the French government are using their own open-source office software – called LaSuite – as officials aim to “break free” from reliance on US tech firms. An open-source document offered by more than a dozen European tech companies, called Euro-Office, is set to launch soon. Cities in the Netherlands, France and Germany are all moving away from Microsoft Office and Google Docs
It’s not just productivity software either. The Dutch government is moving its code away from Microsoft-owned Github to its own repository. In a series of decisions, Finland has reportedly decided not to move its election data to Amazon’s cloud services, while the organization behind Belgium’s .be top-level domain has said it will move away from AWS. Meanwhile, EuroSky has been developed as an interoperable alternative to BlueSky over the AT protocol that underlies both social networks.
WIRED collected publicly known examples of European entities abandoning US-based Big Tech. (Click the arrows to scroll through the timeline of examples below, or view them in this Google Sheet or Proton Sheet).
Although several “digital sovereignty” plans were in place before the start of Trump’s second term, the changes are often cited as having been urgently driven as a result of US sanctions against officials associated with the International Criminal Court. (The court itself moved away from Microsoft’s technology).
Europe’s long list of other concerns includes governments and companies not having control over their data; changing international relations; Dependence on technology from a small number of companies; Potential access to data under the US Cloud Act and FISA; And closer ties than ever between Big Tech firms and the Trump administration. “Citizens, companies and organizations are proactive in taking their digital future into their own hands,” says Schaake. “Untouched by billionaire interests as well as Trump’s policies.”
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