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

Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president?

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

They do though, and they are happy to.

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 it’s important to focus on the momentum. It’s not easy to redesign and re-engineer systems that have taken years and decades to develop and span many layers of integrations. There is also the issue of retraining as everyone is happily used to whatever system they currently have. It’s unfortunate the US decided to go back in time rather than look to the future but eventually, very few (if any) services would rely on US corps.