This week tells you everything about Europe’s digital sovereignty transition

The European Commission announced an ambitious legislative package this week to boost the EU's digital sovereignty, aiming to compete with the US and China on chips, data centers, and AI while mobilizing hundreds of billions of euros for local industry. The next day, the European Parliament replaced Google with French privacy-focused search engine Qwant as its default browser, highlighting the gap between bold policy ambitions and small-scale implementation. The moves underscore Europe's struggle to reduce its crippling dependence on US tech, which controls over 80% of the bloc's key digital products and 85% of its cloud market.

Two decisions from the EU this week illustrate the state of digital sovereignty in Europe. Facing existential threats from the US /blog/nordic-alternative-us-tech-survey and a crippling reliance on foreign tech providers /business/europe-tech-watch , the European Commission announced an ambitious legislative package on tech sovereignty new window https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-tech-sovereignty . The commission wants the EU to compete alongside the US and China on chips, data centers, and AI, building local resilience and infusing the latest IT revolution with European values like data protection. The plan is expected to mobilize hundreds of billions of euros new window https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2026/785742/EPRS BRI 2026 785742 EN.pdf for local industry. The next day, European Parliament took its own step. They updated the default search engine new window https://www.politico.eu/article/european-parliament-ditches-google-for-french-search-engine/ on their browsers, from Google to Qwant new window https://www.qwant.com/?l=en , a privacy-first provider in France. The gap between the European government’s bold ambitions, through a serious legislative intervention, and its own baby-step implementation within one of its branches shows how difficult this kind of transition can be. They will have to migrate massive amounts of data and retool thousands of employees and departments. And they will need to encourage European businesses to do the same. European tech companies often simplify migration, with tools like Proton’s Easy Switch /easyswitch . By switching to Qwant, the EU is leading by example. Small adjustments can have a large impact — in this case, lawmakers will no longer feed all their search queries into Google’s surveillance machine. But they will need to go much, much further. Europe’s dependence on US tech is bigger than search The EU’s reliance on Big Tech could become an existential threat. Proton research shows businesses in Europe have a crippling dependence on US-based tech /business/europe-tech-watch , including cloud infrastructure, communications, productivity software, and AI. EU-US relations are under more strain than they’ve been in decades. New tariffs new window https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20250210STO26801/eu-us-tariffs-tensions-trade-deal-and-what-could-change , NATO escalations new window https://time.com/article/2026/04/01/trump-considering-pulling-us-out-of-nato-iran-war-legal-options/ , and open threats of retaliation from Washington new window https://fortune.com/2025/12/17/trump-administration-threatens-eu-tech-regulations-retaliation-dma-dsa-digital-markets-services-act/ have been pulling apart once-close allies. Digital infrastructure sits squarely in the middle of that tension. More than two-thirds of businesses /business/europe-tech-watch in Spain, France, and the UK run on US tech. The top three cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — are all American and together command an estimated 85% of the European cloud market new window https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/four-charts-europes-reliance-us-digital-infrastructure.html . The Commission’s own tech sovereignty package puts a number on it: Over 80% of the EU’s key digital products, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property comes from outside the bloc new window https://cerre.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Digital-Industrial-Policy-for-Europe.pdf . US leadership knows how to leverage new window https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/27/europe-technology-digital-sovereignty-eu-decoupling-us/ that structural vulnerability. European leaders are taking note. Belgium’s director of the Centre for Cybersecurity, Miguel De Bruycker new window https://www.ft.com/content/854fcad0-0d39-438b-975b-adf9d8b89827 , has stated that “Europe has lost the internet” — the continent’s digital infrastructure is so deeply embedded with American platforms that keeping data fully within European borders is, right now, effectively impossible. Finnish MEP Aura Salla new window https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/04/mep-the-eu-runs-on-microsoft-uncle-sam-cou%20ld-turn-it-off/4192943 put it more starkly: “The US could turn us off in an hour.” France has already announced it will roll out LaSuite new window https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ , a sovereign digital ecosystem, to replace Zoom and Microsoft Teams across all government departments by 2027. Consumers feel the reality of this dependence too. More than 8 out of 10 people /blog/european-alternative-us-tech-survey in the UK, Germany, and France believe their countries have become too reliant on US tech companies, according to a survey of 3,000 people across the three countries. Following Trump’s threats to annex Greenland new window https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/21/davos-2026-trump-greenland-rules-out-force-part-north-america , signups for privacy-first services from Proton alone surged nearly 80% /blog/european-alternative-us-tech-survey across Nordic countries — with Denmark alone exceeding 100% growth. The appetite for alternatives is real, and it’s accelerating. What’s at stake for European businesses When the US imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, the chief prosecutor lost access to his Microsoft inbox overnight new window https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-email-block-a-wake-up-call-for-digital%20-sovereignty-10387383.html and had to migrate to alternative services just to keep working. Other ICC officials similarly lost access new window https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/156847-living-with-us-sanctions-means-living-in-constant-uncertainty.html to PayPal and Apple services and had US-based assets frozen without warning. US tech companies apparently felt compelled to comply immediately with executive orders against perceived adversaries in Europe. The question is: Will it stop there? If you’re a business leader, geopolitical instability is now an operational risk that leaves your email, your files, your communications, and your cloud infrastructure exposed. If they’re running on US platforms, they’re subject to US law, US political decisions, and US corporate obligations to the US government. Beyond geopolitics, the structural risks are compounding. Because so much of the world’s infrastructure runs on a handful of US platforms, those platforms have become single points of failure. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together serve the vast majority of Europe’s cloud market — which means a single outage or configuration error doesn’t just affect one company. It takes down entire ecosystems of businesses at once. This has happened repeatedly: A major AWS outage in late 2025 new window https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-reports-outage-several-websites-down-2025-10-20/ crashed apps across industries; nine days later, an Azure outage new window https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/29/microsoft-hit-with-azure-365-outage-ahead-of-quarterly-earnings.html knocked out Outlook, Teams, and dozens of enterprise services for eight hours straight. Then there’s the problem of your data being exposed. The US demands more data from Big Tech than any other country in the world — more than Germany, France, and the UK. The number of accounts shared by Google, Apple, and Meta with US authorities has increased by over 500% since 2014 /blog/big-tech-data-requests-surge . Under the CLOUD Act, US authorities can demand your business data even if you’re based in Europe, potentially putting you in direct conflict with GDPR. In April 2026, the EU fined Google, Meta, and other US tech companies a combined €6 billion for a range of violations new window https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billion-euros-eu-fine.html . The US government’s response was not to encourage compliance — it was to threaten retaliation. For European businesses that can’t absorb GDPR fines or afford service disruptions, dependence on US tech is a live compliance risk, a geopolitical exposure, and a structural vulnerability all at once. How to start de-coupling from Big Tech To varying degrees, the European Commission’s tech sovereignty package and parliament’s move to Qwant are signs that Europe’s institutions are waking up and trying to act. For businesses, there’s no reason to wait — you can take action to get ahead of the risks right now. Steps you can take are simple and practical. And most US services have a market-ready European alternative /learn/european-alternatives . Here’s where to start: Audit your stack. List every third-party tool your business uses and flag which are US-headquartered. Identify your critical dependencies. Which tools, if suddenly unavailable, would stop your business from operating? This should already be part of business continuity /business/business-continuity planning. Check your data exposure. Understand where your business data is stored, who can access it, and under what legal jurisdiction /blog/switzerland . Research European alternatives . For each critical tool, find out whether a privacy-first, non-US equivalent exists and start testing it. Start migrating where it matters most. You don’t need to replace everything at once — prioritize the tools that carry the highest risk and move. Europe hasn’t lost the internet. But it might if the only thing that changes are search defaults.