Another European agency shifts off US Tech as digital sovereignty gains steam

If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.

First and foremost, because it takes time to switch.

Secondly, because there are a lot of things that just don't have realistic alternatives.

For a large agency, especially one that has statutory or regulatory requirements on how they decide on and deploy hardware and software, even if they can legally choose to switch to open-source options, if they made that decision the day after the election last year, it might have been too late to get major proposals in for the 2025 fiscal year, so they'd have to wait until 2026 to do more than start planning. (This is, fairly obviously, a near-worst-case scenario; other agencies will have much more freedom to change as they please.)

Even if they're less encumbered, the more users you have within an organization, the longer it takes to execute a migration like this, and it can be really really hard to operate for any length of time with a partial migration completed, especially for the support team. I could easily believe that some such migrations are already in the planning stage, but will take months to actually happen.

And finally, because This Is How We've Always Done It is a very, very powerful force. For some organizations, unfortunately, it will take some kind of catastrophic event to realize that they really shouldn't be relying on a foreign and possibly hostile power for all their major enterprise IT vendors.

A very small number of government agencies in a few countries have moved away from reliance on the US, but very few businesses have. We still have governments and businesses encouraging the use of US tech by, for example, encouraging use of mobile apps. AWS, Azure and Google dominate cloud services in most of the world. Microsoft dominates the desktop. Businesses and individuals are increasingly reliant on cloud apps that are mostly American.

Here in the UK my daughter's school (a large sixth for college) relies in MS cloud versions of Office and on Teams, you need (at least in my area) to use an mobile app, or a web app hosted on AWS to make an appointment with a GP (and if you are prescribed medication the pharmacy are informed via an API running in AWS). Most SMEs that do run anything of their own use AWS. One of the biggest banks (Lloyds) had issues during the recent AWS outage, and I know they are not the only one to use AWS.

A lot of European governments are pushing ID and age verification mobile apps.

In general a lot of governments are regulating in ways that favour the incumbents.

I think I'll avoid them - for good reason

And many decisions in the EU do not allow for their veto votes anyhow - Orban's Hungary has been withhold now for years Billions of EU investments because of how the countries institutions were hollowed out by him.

If you’re on Azure for example as a bank you know that most of the (eg DORA) requirements are met, because regulators have directly talked to Microsoft.

There are high compliance and migration cost for switching with no immediate gain for the business.

The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude. Europe is basically hopeless at this point

Is there non-anecdotal evidence of this that you can share with us?

My understanding is that people make this claim but I haven't seen evidence of it beyond one-off articles about individual professors leaving the country.

How do you call a Parliament with two communist representatives, a communist regime ?

But then again it's increasingly being made by Indian migrants, right?

How far away the critical state is, who knows. Could it be in this presidential term? Would it happen within ten years of the coming imperial takeover of the presidency? Perhaps.

But when the valley loses its dominance it will likely happen pretty quickly: huge numbers of the people who make it happen will go home, go back to their home states, or just go to live somewhere cheaper. The US is not educating people fast enough or deeply enough to replace them, and there's no sign that AI really can replace the ones that matter.

Just because nobody can see exactly when this will happen doesn't mean you don't start planning for it to happen. Because it will happen, and when it happens it will happen fast.

The US tech industry is still built on the idea that the USA is a comfortable, friendly, open liberal democracy. And that is over. I mean, on a basic level any individual H1B placement in the future exists at the whim of the executive. Who do you have to donate to, to keep it? And any skilled migrant who might come over, work the hell out of a job that is beneath their level of education in the quick-e-mart and then start something of their own is not going to come.

Europe has its own problems with pasty-faced, bad-haired weaselly proto-fascists, but it's still fighting.

Kicking them out isn't easy unless there is unanimity. Unfortunately EU requires this kind of quorum for the big decisions, which is kind of a safeguard to precisely avoid going full fascist for the whole EU due to a minority of countries.

And let’s not count out Europe. I’m actually typing this in a BMW dealership’s waiting room in the Bay Area as I get my brake pads updated. BMW definitely qualifies as technology, even if it’s not a software company.

Because it's pretty refined since it was funded with resources so great that it was intended to serve global level audience?

I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU. Unfortunately, refined high quality software requires considerable resources and no one will invest those considerable resources when the US companies can just offer better software at lower price thanks to their lead and deep pockets until the EU companies go out of business. Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.

The more they invest, the more corporations will be able to switch.

Being anti US isn't 'trendy', it is a response to the US being anti-EU at the moment, and justifiably being seen as unreliable, mercurial and even dangerous.

Not every company needs, wants or has room to become google scale. Stability long term is something we hold dearly in Europe, not everybody runs in 10 seconds attention span.

People who actually work with that to achieve things that may be just as important care a lot.

We have fools in many places, but not that much and that bad. Look at defense - every single country in Europe is ramping defense budget big time, most of those money goes to European companies. Doesn't matter much how good US tech currently is, if it has electronics that can be tweaked or switched off remotely its a massive risk. F16 case was really enough for whole world to wake up and reevaluate.

Why should any other industry including what we discuss react differently? Private companies can risk as much as they want, its up to governments to sweeten the deal for local stuff or let it be, sure there market forces can play as hard as wanted.

The great thing about Linux is we don't need to care where Linus lives. We obviously have — in principle — the tech, the workforce and the money to build an alternative tech stack. Most of it is open source at this point.

It's just political will. If we had the commitment and sense of urgency to unwind from America we could. Just like in military affairs we don't do it because we have a mental blockade to break with the existing global order.

In a free political system, anybody is able to push any agenda. What matters is what gets adopted. I agree that the EU is not perfect, but you cannot just take a government’s pet project and claim that it is a failure of the political system.

> Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.

Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?

It feels like whatever you're saying today could be said the other way in the past, so why does it really matter?

The fact on the ground is that people don't trust the US overall as much, even less the leadership of the US, so whatever dependency has been built up over the years, has to be fixed, no matter if the "local" technology is shittier at the moment.

I'm sure Americans felt the same about printing presses back in the day, where some things you just have to be able to do without needing the permission of others far away.

And now someone will link "but there was just a fire that resulted in many online gov services being down for weeks!!!". Yes. And having that happen once in a decade, after which measures will be taken so that from now on it happens once in 3 decades, is absolutely 100x preferable to depending on US hyperscalers like EU governments do. As we just saw, it's not like AWS and Azure don't go down.

Sure, they don't have their own OS. But even much of China still runs on Windows. China might manage to get entirely rid of it at some point but not yet.

Doesn't Intel depend on ASML when their chip machines break? I don't think there exists a single country in the world that can currently produce a significant amount of full-stack, modern compute. If there is one, it's definitely China rather than the US.

That's why Google, Samsung and others were able to create smartphones comparable to iPhone without having a Steve Jobs and a Johny Ive right after Apple made one.

Once you know the way forward, the rest is an engineering task and it's matter of working towards it. Very low risk compared to the initial work done by the pioneers.

Translation: "Some of us in Europe are ready to drop drop bread in favor of eating cake, whatever the cost."

Easy for you to write cheques that others have to cash. Be careful with such suicidal empathy, as that has second order effects that back-fire in spectacular fashion. That's why you're supposed to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.

>It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever..

TIL that if you aren't gonna sacrifice yourself for Ukraine and prioritize your family's survival, wanting to have a job, a roof over your head and food on the table, somehow makes you a "Russian populist" now. Interesting logic.

You'd think much differently if you or your family would face unemployment, homelessness or malnourishment due to the economic damages caused by a surge in energy costs across the board. Half my immediate friend circle have lost their jobs in the last ~2 years due to the economic situation, my grandma can't afford her bills from her pension without financial support from us, while access public services like healthcare and childcare has only gotten worse, despite us paying more for everything. Not exactly the environment people feel like gutting themselves even further for a foreign country, whichever that may be.

Lots of real time material evidence exists.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z62gjfr

It's not matter of talent, its matter of investing a few tens billions into it and its not going to happen if US companies can just undercut and wait it out.

You get the point. When you are getting into an established industry see what works, skip investing billions in directions that go nowhere.

I don't know where you're from, but at least Germany's problems run way deeper than their idiotic energy policies. Lack of investment in infrastructure, lack of innovation and all that. Even with cheap energy there's no way German car makers would compete, when Chinese make better EV's for less money. Laziness and lack of innovation is the problem, just like in European IT sector, which just buys everything from America.

Also, let's not forget the huge impact Covid spending had on inflation, and in turn interest rates & people's purchasing power. Ukraine war and sanctions against Russia are completely insignificant compared to that blunder. We're living the recession that was supposed to happen in 2020.

But isn't it a matter of talent? While Americans obsess over tech and high paying jobs, Europeans seem to emphasize other subjects, not to mention have a lot more vacation days. What is to be made of that?

I don't know if you are familiar with coding or engineering but it's nor really a kind of a profession where you work all the time and the more hours you put in it the output increases linearly.

It's not like Europeans couldn't code Facebook because they were taking too many vacations, unlike Russians and Chinese that did. It's that Chinese and Russian markets had restriction and local clones or alternatives were able to flourish but EU had completely open market for US "tech".

Cut off Meta, double the vacations in EU and in a year there will be European social media. As it was demonstrated by Elon Musk, you don't need that many people to work in those "tech" companies anyway.

The expat facebook groups have exploded if you’re looking for 'evidence'.

Quick example, people who stop at headlines keep talking about Fico yapping about stopping aids to Ukraine, yet they give more as a percentage of their gdp than Germany, France, the UK, &c. Fico's a piece of shit but don't stop at what he says, half of his bs doesn't make it further than headlines in western medias

And they still aren't by any definition of the word fascism

It's 2025 we should invent new terms for new things, not everything bad is "nazi" or "fascist"

What you have just witnessed was a working civil society. I'll take that over the alternative any day.

Running a software business in Europe is not against the laws of physics or anything, but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector. The US shooting itself in the foot might help a little, but there are still lots of internal barriers, like those outlined in the Draghi report.

Why is that your impression of the software sector in Europe? Just because there isn't a "Eat the whole world Google/Amazon/Microsoft" company that ends up in American business-news, doesn't mean the it isn't one of the most well-paid and comfortable sectors in the continent, just like everywhere else, compared to other sectors.

I think as a whole it seems like Europe in general and particularly the EU has a lot more focuses than just "Tech Innovation", although it's still one part needing improvement. Even the report you referenced mentions the energy sector as a top priority, and slow steps are taken to upgrade infrastructure at all sorts of levels and sectors.

Software is but one part of life, but of course many of us here get lost in focusing a lot on software itself, I'm guilty of it myself too.

But in the context of "digital sovereignty," it seems to me that so many giant pillars of tech (desktop OSes, mobile OSes, cloud platforms, enterprise crap like Salesforce, and so on) are managed by American firms. So if Europe wanted to take all of those things in house, that would require a significant expansion of the European software sector. And that wouldn't be super straightforward due to the many obstacles to things like venture capital funding outlined in the Draghi report.

Now I'm more than a little skeptical of the whole "digital sovereignty" concept. There's a reason every country doesn't it make it's own airplanes, cars, wine, espresso machines, and medical devices; those reasons apply more or less equally to software development. The cost of “sovereignty” is very, very high. But, if we do buy into the idea that countries need to diversify away from American software, I think that necessarily entails a large increase in the software sector of places like Europe.

Russian IT thrived when there were no restrictions or artificial barriers. It's just different culture and different energy that EU doesn't have.

Now, India actually does have a lot of potential, and could actually do something similar. Unfortunately it is currently undergoing fairly intense and violent nativist hindu extremist fascism.

Honestly, the Hindu rashtra nonsense would be fine on its own but given how undeveloped India is, it really has better things to focus on. I mean, but yeah if India ever manages to develop and revert back to a more pluralistic society then yes it would be a potential alternative market. Unlike Europe and China, India has a long history of accepting foreign peoples and incorporating them into its society, similar to America.

Unlike Europe, India pays for its own defences and is thus a real country. Europe is a vassal of the United States.

But like realistically, I see no possible path for India to overcome its issues at this point. There are few rational voices in its politics. The Indian left wing is honestly insane. And the right wing is equally unhinged. Speaking for myself as the child of Indian christians, I know a lot of Christians secretly vote for the BJP because the alternative is honestly insanity. There is no technocratic, pluralistic, and not self hating party that is actually in it for the country's success. Thus I don't see any path forward for it. I'm not saying this out of any sense of superiority. I think it would be awesome for India to be a liveable nation. It would be nice to be able to live there frankly. However, it's just not a realistic prospect in this century

India will be a perpetual off shoring center for the US. Ambitious Indians will leave to become Americans. Those who are unable to due to American policy will flounder in India and not achieve their potential. You can frame this as America's fault. But it is actually India's.

To conclude, there is no place as diverse and welcoming as America or any place that even seems on that path. The other possible place (south America) is in many ways even more backwards than India. China will always be a Han ethnostate. Europe is also an ethnostate and has no history of assimilating anyone (see Jews and gypsies)

> any individual H1B placement in the future exists at the whim of the executive

America attracted migrants before h1b and was basically closed off to much of the world before 1965 and is still the preferred destination of pretty much anyone.

Some of this top talent is already in the EU working for US companies

Can you point the Europe country on a map?

I was unaware the country travelled back in time!

Surely you have a specific example of a way in which U.S. based technology companies have significantly and irrefutively regressed to demonstrate your point, since you appear to talk as though it's a foretold conclusion this delusion will come to pass.

Has the same energy as the people shouting "the death of Silicon Valley is neigh!!!" whenever a random washed-up company mkves their HQ from the Bay area to some tax haven state (and half the time retains their offices and personnel in SV anyway)

But america bad! Surely that's reason enough to skirt all logistic business requirements and drop U.S. companies?

Like, Trump! And... Republicans!

Clearly, their private sector doesn't exist anymore, because a guy we don't like is in charge of the public sector.

Frankly, we need to reduce our reliance on U.S. tech because of how undemocratic they have become. I, for one, think China looks like a great potential ally.

The difference is, everything of importance still happens here.

Our elections are broadcast to the world, eyes glued to the screen. All relevant private companies are headquartered out of this country, or in the process of moving more operations to it. We still have more inbound immigrants than ever, more than we can even admit into the country (and argued by the current administration, more than we should).

Versus wherever you came from, which to be honest, doesn't really matter. After all, there's reasons we're talking about my country, and not yours. Have fun with your dreams of our fall from power, though. It's the only time you can even imagine like you have a chance of possibly coming out on top.

It may not be accurate to say we have the entire global technology landscape, especially after the sellout of our manufacturing base in the 70s and 80s to Asia, but it's not exactly like Europe has it either.

Further, you can look at past migration patterns due to political changes. Like when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the people with the means and the smarts leave first, then the rich — unless they have a path to power in the new regime. Eventually you are left with a poor country.

https://www.ftadviser.com/international-advice/2025/8/1/numb...

Cashless payments around the world, mostly dominated by American companies.

A general move to doing everything on mobile apps. This includes many governments pushing mobile apps for ID, age verification, etc.

Cloud versions of MS Office replacing desktop versions is FAR more common than people moving to other office software.

Even the EU's regulation supposed to provide cloud sovereignty seem to have been designed to favour the bit American suppliers: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/cispe_eu_sovereignty_...

At the same time American companies are increasing their control over their established base. MS accounts needed to log in to Windows. Google eliminating other app stores. The move from desktop to phones for most users.

Most businesses are still moving to a range of American dominated cloud things. Not just hyperscalers, but SaaS is also American dominated.

The very fact that moving just 1,200 people to NextCloud is such big news underlines just how small the movement the other way is. This is despite continued reliance on Outlook and Teams!

The only way I see the grip of the US loosening a little bit is if continued outages persuade people they cannot rely on the hyperscalers to such extent there is a more back to on-prem and smaller suppliers, however the US has unshakeable and increasing control of end-point device.

As the GP said, almost all mobile apps are installed from stores run by two American companies (who also effectively control the devices) and the trend is very much to greater reliance on these devices, not less.

We may not like it, but its not going to change.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/merkel-recalls-putins-power-...

After that, this politician made Germany dependent on Russian gas. Let that sink in.

Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014. The current proposal is to stop buying Russian gas by 2028. EVERY year since 2014 the EU bought more Russian gas than the year before until 2023, and it has not yet halved from the peak (measured in money), despite constant grand claims.

Russia funds both leftist and rightist parties, in fact, for obvious reasons, they used to only fund leftists not that long ago, before a certain desperation seems to have set in. But now if they are extreme or disruptive in some way, or anti-Nato (like in the recent Irish election) they get Russian cash. The ideology does not matter to Russia anymore, illegal German openly Nazi parties have gotten Russian money (which was new not 10 years ago, as I said they were exclusively leftist before that), they are funding islamist parties, and every Marxist party in Europe gets their money. Also, Russia is still funding international socialist associations for example. Russia's goal is not one ideology above another, but to use democracy as a weapon.

And yes, cheaper gas deliveries to countries have been weaponized by Russia in addition to direct corruption, especially in the Balkans.

"The three academics won the prize mostly for providing causal evidence of the influence of the quality of a country’s institutions on its economic prosperity.

[...] a country that enforces property rights, limits corruption, and protects both the rule of law and the balance of power, will also be more successful at encouraging its citizens to create wealth, and be better at redistributing it."

"Nobel economics prize: how colonial history explains why strong institutions are vital to a country’s prosperity"

https://theconversation.com/nobel-economics-prize-how-coloni...

Because in the last ~10-15 years or so, media and politics in countries like Germany(and US and most of Europe) have made sure to erase national identity and social cohesion, in favor of capitalistic globalism and mass migration, leading to a decline in the middle class standard of living and societal trust, and dividing people against each other instead of against the government/wealthy elite pulling the strings.

So when people are divided, they're not gonna want to play ball as a united team in face of adversity, but they vote less and more extreme, get less involved in politics, engage in more tribalistic behavior, etc and now that lack of national cohesion the leaders created, is exploited by Russia and other foreign actors too in their favor.

Would you have preferred the only other choice: a rapidly dropping population that would have killed the economy? I mean that's coming anyway, just 20 years later, so I guess we'll all have an excellent basis for comparison.

That mythical "the economy" that's just the stock market and the top 10% wealthy business owners and has no trickle down to working class people who still suffer financially but now have to deal with the second order effects of that like expensive housing and safety on the streets?

How long must this gaslighting go on? That people must tolerate unpopular policies with negative consequences, all for the sake of "the economy"?

If governments actually cared about solving declining birthrates they would have tackled that, but they don't. Population replacement with conflicting cultures is much better solution for governments who then sell you the solution to that problem they created: privacy invasive chat control, digital-Euro, digital-ID, police-state, surveillance-state etc. and now also have a new voter base loyal to the government for citizenship and benefits, unlike anti-government local gen-pop, kind of like the mercenaries during Rome's collapse.

Plus, even if you were to somehow "solve birth rates", infinite population growth is unsustainable since resources on the planet are finite, and nobody in the west wants to live in places with high population growth like India, so why not build a society that can function on stagnating population instead?

Building a financial system with expectations of constant growth till infinity plus the expectation that every future generation will get to have the same prosperity boomers had, was the real mistake here from the start, which is unsalvable unless we go through another world war that kills tens/hundreds of millions and resets the monopoly board for the generation of the survivors' kids.

I still think the relative lack of vacations in the US is relevant