this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 days ago by randomname@scribe.disroot.org to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
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...

While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own โ€˜sovereignโ€™ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.

These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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[โ€“] theBronzeShoe@feddit.org 0 points 7 hours ago

Naturally, we all want this effort to succeed. However, even if many projects fail, directing this funding toward local providers is already a major improvement. Keeping capital investment within the local economy is far preferable to exporting it abroad where it ultimately strengthens the American tech ecosystem instead of our own.

Beyond the immediate economic impact, investment in training and retraining local talent is especially valuable. It helps develop skills not only for building new tools, but also for enabling local companies and institutions to understand emerging technologies and create their own training capabilities. This builds long term capacity rather than short term dependency.

As a result, it becomes far less unrealistic for local companies to invest in new technologies. They gain practical experience in adapting systems and training people to use new software services. This lowers both the perceived risk and the real cost of innovation.

Over the long term, this shift will also affect the salary dominance of Big Tech. Their exceptional margins are largely sustained by monopolistic control over key software services. If Europe, one of their largest markets, begins importing less while actively fostering local competition, that balance will change. A gradual but meaningful shift in power and pricing will follow. I am cautiously optimistic their arrogance will be their downfall. Let's see.