Europe wants out from under US tech – but first it has to find the exits

In late December, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned former European Commission tech chief Thierry Breton for his role in leading "organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose."

The architect of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) – a pet hate of the Trump administration – has yet to be deterred. Last month, he joined a chorus of calls for Europe to end its reliance on dominant US tech companies. "The time for an apologetic Europe is over," the former Atos CEO said in a rallying cry that points out we now live in a world "where digital sovereignty has become one of the central arenas of power politics."

But what to do about it? US companies hold overwhelming positions in markets including cloud infrastructure and personal productivity tools, to say the least. Breton says Europe has a "constellation of [tech] players that, together, form a considerable base," but offers little explanation of how it might extract itself from the incumbent providers and what the new world might look like.

One of his compatriots has, though. Nicolas Roux, systems engineer at French aerospace research lab ONERA, has put together a comprehensive analysis in an attempt to understand which systems might fail first under the kind of pressure the US has already exercised on European institutions and individuals. It also looks at how long they would take to recover and how Europe can reduce its exposure, and which levers – organizational, sectoral, or political – it should pull to ensure better digital sovereignty.

The 137-page report is designed for Europe's decision-makers on tech and policy. The details are too numerous to summarize, but it offers a glimpse of some worst-case scenarios as well as cause for optimism.

As the report points out, a sense of urgency has gripped European institutions following US sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan, which led to his Microsoft services being suspended. Microsoft denied responsibility, saying it was the ICC's decision. The Dutch press later reported that the decision was made under duress after Microsoft pointed out that its obligations under the sanctions meant it would have to cut off service to the entire organization unless the ICC removed Khan's access.

In March, Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission with responsibility for technological sovereignty, said that Europe's dependence on American technology had become a security concern visible beyond specialist circles.

There are so many layers of technology in which the US dominates, with so many interdependencies, any effective move toward digital sovereignty should be based on an understanding of which are the most vulnerable and which are hardest to replace.

Roux zeros in on Identity and Access Management (IAM). The US dominates enterprise deployments with few exceptions. "Microsoft, Ping Identity, and IBM as the market's leading operators, with Okta, Oracle Identity Governance, and CyberArk accounting for the majority of remaining enterprise contracts," the report says.

"No European vendor appears in any tier of the competitive landscape. For European public administrations, this means that the layer of infrastructure responsible for authenticating every user and authorising every access decision is, in most cases, operated by a vendor incorporated in the United States and subject to American law."

Roux points out that Microsoft 365, the service for productivity apps on which nearly all organizations rely, runs the Redmond vendor's Entra ID as its identity provider by default.

The report says: "The strategic sensitivity of this layer is compounded by a property it shares with no other: IAM dependency is invisible in normal operations and total in failure. An organization discovers its IAM dependency not when costs increase or performance degrades, but when access is denied it represents an actionable 'kill switch.'"

There is a European alternative in Keycloak, but even if a European organization chose to self-host the service on a European cloud, it would not be free from dependencies on US companies, which could be compelled to turn off services under US legislation, the report argues.

"What does not hold is inter-organizational authentication. As long as partner organisations (ministries, contractors, other public bodies) operate Entra ID as their identity provider, external authentication chains pass through Microsoft infrastructure by default. Under pressure, the first thing that breaks is the ability to collaborate securely with anyone outside the organisation's own perimeter."

There is a gap in the market for a European IAM provider as a fully managed service with the SLA guarantees and support model that public sector organizations can buy through existing procurement vehicles. But to counter the problem with inter-organizational authentication, Europe needs not a product, but a standard – "a shared European public sector identity federation framework, mandatory for public administrations, built on open protocols, and interoperable by design," Roux says.

The market for cloud infrastructure and services is overwhelmingly dominated by US providers, which often interlock infrastructure and platform services with other technologies. "The lock-in is architectural: organizations have built dependencies on platform-specific services (Lambda functions, BigQuery pipelines, Azure Cognitive integrations) that have no direct drop-in replacement. Infrastructure can be migrated but application architecture cannot be switched without rethinking," the report says.

Nonetheless, there are a bunch of European alternatives on the market. France's OVHcloud and Scaleway are among them, as are German providers Hetzner, IONOS, and STACKIT, owned by retail group Schwarz.

It may seem impossible for European providers to replace AWS, with its mammoth scale and buying power, but for Roux, replacing AWS is the answer to the wrong question.

"No European provider will replicate the full AWS service catalogue. That catalogue was built over twenty years by a company with access to essentially unlimited capital, operating in a continental domestic market with no regulatory friction. The conditions that produced it do not exist in Europe and will not be manufactured by policy. Asking for a European AWS is asking for a different history. The right question is different: for each layer, what does a given organization actually need, and is a credible European alternative available for that specific need?"

The report points out that the most serious gaps are in three areas of cloud services. The first is advanced workloads, such as managed AI/ML pipelines and high-concurrency serverless functions. But the constraint only affects a small minority of public sector organizations and is "an irrelevance for the majority."

Secondly, there is scale. OVHcloud's total 2024 revenue is approximately 0.9 percent of the figure AWS publishes. But a coordinated policy of investment at both EU and state level can help close that gap.

Lastly, Europe struggles to coordinate services between providers that "operate excellent but largely siloed platforms." Roux says this problem might be solvable "through open standards and interoperability frameworks, but it requires deliberate architectural choices that organizations accustomed to single-vendor convenience are not always prepared to make."

Although starting from a low base, the European cloud market is set for rapid growth as investment mirrors geopolitical concerns.

European spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure services is forecast to more than triple from 2025 to 2027, from $6.9 billion to $23.1 billion, Gartner reported in February, well ahead of any established region. Speaking to The Register, Rene Buest, Gartner senior director analyst, said European businesses are considering local and regional sovereign cloud providers for new cloud workloads, while they work to understand the complexities of migrating established workloads.

This is just a glimpse of the problems – and practical measures – the report outlines. Some of the solutions lie at a policy level by driving demand through public procurement and by creating standards. Breton also sees Europe gaining the upper hand through policy, the single market, and by imposing EU rules on data, competition, algorithmic transparency, and taxation.

But continuing to create rules that allow for digital sovereignty can be an uphill struggle in the face of US industry lobbying. Roux quotes the NGOs Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl, which studied the EU Transparency Register. They concluded that the tech industry spent a record €151 million on EU lobbying, a figure that has increased by a third in two years. "Big Tech" employs more full-time lobbyists in Brussels than there are Members of the European Parliament.

The European Commission is expected to address parts of the issue through a technological sovereignty package set to arrive at the end of May. It is likely to draw on a €234 billion European competitiveness fund, including a €20 billion package for AI infrastructure, supply chain cybersecurity liability provisions for digital infrastructure, and a strong orientation toward sovereign cloud and open source principles.

The hope is that through policy and investment, Europe can get CIOs and tech buyers to overcome the barriers to collective action – that is, "each individual sourcing decision is locally rational, while the aggregate outcome (a continued and deepening operational and economic dependency, in the terms defined above) is collectively irrational."

Europe may have been slow to address weaknesses in its digital sovereignty, but it has already proved it has the staying power to take on US might. It took 50 years for a consortium of European aerospace businesses from the UK, France, Germany, and Spain to take on dominant aircraft manufacturer Boeing. In 2023, the number of Airbus aircraft in service surpassed Boeing for the first time.

Catherine Jestin, executive vice president of digital at Airbus, told The Register last year that the same could be possible in tech. "It's a long game. And if you look at the way China is approaching it, it takes time. It takes political will and the alignment of the industry," she said.

Europe doesn't need to dominate the tech market to ensure its digital sovereignty. It only needs viable alternatives to US providers at each layer of the stack, rather than direct replacements for the biggest suppliers. It will take time, but it will never get there unless it makes a start. 

As Roux shows, there are those willing to provide a map. ®