Rising tensions with the U.S. are spurring new plans in Europe to do something that has long seemed impossible: break with American technology in favor of homegrown alternatives.
President Trump this week dropped his threat to take control of Greenland by force if necessary. But even the possibility of armed conflict with allies has injected new urgency into long-simmering debates in Europe about how to reduce its reliance on U.S. tech infrastructure and tools that support swaths of the economy.
The worst-case scenario for European officials? A White House executive order that cuts off the region’s access to data centers or email software that businesses and governments need to function.
European reliance on US software: A digital sovereignty challenge • FRANCE 24 English
In living memory there were none of these systems and the governments functioned probably better. They didn’t get everyone else’s information stolen. The US government had to really work to steal all of their information, hackers, criminals, oligarchs, etc were mostly out of luck.
It is dumb to kowtow to the US on any of this, build out parallel systems, and set everything up to work the old way, with paper, as well. There is no reason society shouldn’t be able to function even without electricity, we know it can work because it did work.
Dutch public and private sectors dependent on US cloud services
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/01/dutch-public-and-private-sectors-dependent-on-us-cloud-services/
This would destroy the US tech industry. The oligarchs wouldn’t like that and it would be much harder to spy on Europe or influence them.
All the more important to gtfo.
Fucking do it, we need to understand how reliant we are on them and how dire the situation actually is. People like the FSF, the EFF and so on have warned us about this for decades at this point.
Maybe we should do a Chaos Monkey approach: Shut down a random US company in a random region for day. Repeat every few days. Just resilience testing.
us-east-1 has entered the chat
It is not a bug, it’s a service?
Well, DNS issues is something the US struggle with themselves.
What choices does the EU have for processors, RAM and most other tech components other than to source it from China? ARM is technically in the UK, but they only provide RTL, not masks or any or the other huge chunks of the backend needed to produce a viable CPU.
I’m all for getting independence here. We’re in a precarious position.
That’s another, even more complex, debate indeed.
But a sizable chunk of the internet and government infrastructure in Europe relies heavily on American technology.
All the AWS, Microsoft, Google services are a massive security threat, especially because we know that they’ll bend to the whims of the orange buffoon if required. They can literally paralyse Europe at the push of a button.
Hardware is a seperate issue, this is about US software. However you are right in that chip making is disturbingly US and Chinese.
Make important industry move to linux and store their files in EU. Create standards which require these things, start asking for this standard compliance from contractors.
Fund open source developers in EU, so they are there when you need them.
These remedies doesn’t sound expensive to me. But they do sound extremely useful.
On mastodon and linkedin, I read about more and more companies who are doing a “what if microsoft shuts down” test. With a few volunteers shutting themselves off from microsoft for a day or two. The conclusion is usually quite the wake up call.
Switch to Linux. Experience freedom.
Somewhat more freedom, yes. But we should still be wary of ways even that infrastructure could be shut down… https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/export/
Getting new live/installation images or updates from Fedora or RHEL and many other softwares might become difficult if the US seriously wants to hurt us.
Don’t use fedora or rhel, use suse or arch instead.
Are those not American then?
Nope and neither is Ubuntu
Which of the two is more beginner-friendly?
Probably Ubuntu but Linux mint which is based on that would be even better.
Mint is definitely the distro to recommend to beginners and people who want a no fuss system that just works with minimal upkeep. Ubuntu unfortunately went down the path to enshittification.
I meant of Suse and Arch, but yeah.
Suse, to my knowledge, is german.
We can also consider Debian, as it is widely spread and considered as a global distro.
Last time I (was forced to) use SUSE it was unfortunately vastly inferior to RedHat. Mainly in terms of reliable stability like how they claim to have the longest supported major versions but change so much in their “Service Packs” that you’ll have to be on your toes every 18 months anyway (and release notes for the SP wasn’t really created, only for major versions). and Arch doesn’t even try to deliver that kind of stability…
Ubuntu is probably a better bet since at least Canonical is based in the UK. Or simply Debian
Independent mirrors will solve the problem (partially). If they restrict access we’ll effectively “fork” it and take from there (at this point we can ignore ip laws or whatever).
Most mirrors in my country are based at univerties servers. One was even docked at a cable/communications company.
Isn’t this the norm?
It is, additionally, various service/CI/cd/cloud/etc. have their own mirrors to reduce inbound traffic and latency.
But if we increase the Linux share even 10 times (from 1% to 10%) - it’s going to put a huge strain on them.
So adding state/eu sponsored “sources of truth” (in addition to existing mirrors within the eu) would make some sense.
Simple countermeasure: Reject intellectual property of American companies. The mouse and the other lawyer thugs will knock at Trump’s door the Plancksecond this happens.
Heh. No way. The EU has much more onerous IP laws than the US. That’s one reason why the EU can’t compete in tech.
EG search engines like Google process copyrighted content to make it searchable. When they started in the 1990s that would have been plain criminal in Germany. Once the internet turned out to be a big thing, this was legalized.
We can now see the same thing with AI. It’s just not possible to be competitive for European companies. Companies like Huggingface (originally French) or Elevenlabs (Polish) fucked off to the US. Mistral stayed in Europe and is being left behind. The early models with which they made a splash were almost certainly trained illegally, but the AI Act made it clear that Europe would double down on past mistakes.
Despite the fact that European IP laws hurt our economy and culture, they have only been expanded in the last decades. Despite the fact that the major content owners are American.
Good point, you can never adapt laws to a changing world in the face of a new disparaging hostile relationship with the leader of the old world order. They came on high, law and order written on unmalleable stone tablets.
The deal was “sign this free trade agreement that includes our intellectual property laws and we will give you free access to the US market” but now the US has imposed tariffs on EU goods so there’s really no reason to continue honoring US IP laws.
