The problem with Europe’s Big Tech breakup: It’s still hooked

AMSTERDAM — Inside Amsterdam’s red-brick city hall, Alexander Scholtes, the official who spearheaded the Dutch capital’s push to break up with U.S. technology, looked down at his tablet.

How often does he still rely on Big Tech? “Right now, all the time,” he said, waving the device loaded with Microsoft software — an active reminder of a hard reality that stretches far beyond his city.

European governments are actively trying — and struggling — to move away from American tech amid mounting fears that U.S. President Donald Trump could weaponize years of heavy reliance.

From Germany and France to Finland and the Netherlands, more and more politicians are questioning the wisdom of handing over critical operations and troves of sensitive data to a few giants tied to Washington. For them, the question is no longer if the U.S. will leverage one of Europe’s digital services dependency — but when.

“President Trump gave us a lot of arguments every week, every day, every minute to start thinking about this scenario,” said Scholtes. “There’s not that much that you can do if you’re an American company that has the disadvantage of operating under U.S. law and listening to the U.S. president.”

Brussels, for its part, is working to boost digital sovereignty across the EU, with a new legislative package slated for May 27. But the more ambitious steps are being taken at the national, regional and municipal levels.

Visitors crowd the Microsoft stand at the 2026 Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Germany on April 20, 2026. The company is one of the U.S. tech giants that dominate the market in fields ranging from everyday tools to critical infrastructure. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

France, for example, has moved to restrict the use of U.S. video tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and has joined Germany, the Netherlands and Italy to develop so-called digital commons to help build sovereign and scalable digital infrastructure. Just this month, all French ministries were also asked to come up with a sovereignty plan by the fall.

The Netherlands, formerly among the loudest advocates for flinging Europe’s doors open to U.S. tech, strongly reversed course in its capital city, with Scholtes launching a multi-year program to break from U.S. software during his tenure as a deputy mayor of Amsterdam from 2023 to 2026.

The Dutch effort follows a pioneering plan from Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein — the first in Europe to fully free its public administration from the U.S. chokehold.

But as they found out, the process won’t be easy — or cheap.

How Big Tech locked Europe in

For years, Europe relied on U.S. technology to run much of its digital footprint — so much so that it’s hard to imagine getting by without it.

According to a recent European Parliament study, Amazon, Microsoft and Google account for about 70 percent of the EU’s cloud market, powering the internet as we know it today. And 80 percent of European corporate spending on enterprise software is going to U.S. vendors.

The American dominance spans everything from everyday tools to critical infrastructure: Apple’s iPhones and Google’s Android system, Microsoft Office and Windows used across government offices and businesses, social media and messaging platforms like WhatsApp — down to the digital backbone powering emails, streaming and payments.

But how did that happen? 

Europe’s reliance on U.S. tech comes down to timing, scale and a strong first-mover advantage.

Today’s tech giants expanded rapidly as the internet was taking off, backed by a large, unified market and deep funding. They swiftly outpaced European players, scaling up at record speed by breaking technological boundaries and gobbling up smaller competitors. 

That early lead grew even stronger thanks to “lock-in effects.” Once organizations build their systems around a provider — storing data, training staff and relying on integrated tools — it becomes increasingly costly and complex to switch. A change often means rebuilding large parts of an entire IT setup, which can be risky and disruptive, and when combined with the lack of equally scaled European alternatives, it becomes exceedingly difficult.

At the time, European governments also saw little reason to try an alternative. U.S. tech outperformed others, the transatlantic relationship was strong, and all these companies had deep business ties in Europe — it would make little economic sense for either party.

Dirk Schrödter, who led Schleswig-Holstein into rolling out LibreOffice in place of Microsoft Office as part of an ongoing shift away from technological dependence, at a meeting of the state’s Finance Committee and the Economic and Digitization Committee in Kiel in May 2025. | Frank Molter/picture alliance via Getty Images

“We built up this dependency over years or even decades,” said Scholtes, recalling that until a few years ago, the policy was to move everything toward “one big provider” because it was “easy.”

But Trump’s return to the White House and the volatility that followed have Europeans confronting a hard truth: Their overreliance on U.S. companies is now a strategic liability.

This specter of a tech “kill switch” — where Washington could order U.S. companies to suspend their services in Europe — first crystallized when the International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft account after being sanctioned by Washington last year. Months later, ICC Judge Nicolas Guillou received similar treatment.

These sanctions bar the use of payment systems like Visa and Mastercard, and services including Amazon, Airbnb and Booking.com. It amounts to “a kind of civil death,” Guillou said in an interview with POLITICO.

“Beyond the big bad wolf theories, there is a legal dimension that shows that the ‘kill switch’ has been used in a very tailored way until now,” argued Theodore Christakis, a professor of international law at Université Grenoble Alpes. It isn’t some “sci-fi scenario where Trump signs an executive order and cuts off Europe,” it’s the hard legal reality of sanctions, and whether the interruption of digital services is part of that equation, he said.

The legal intricacies of sanctions aside, this once far-fetched hypothesis is now a widespread concern: A recent survey from SWG and Polling Europe shows that 86 percent of Europeans think a sudden U.S. move to restrict the EU’s access to digital services is “plausible” and “should not be ruled out,” while 59 percent call it “already a real and concrete risk.”

Sensing a change in the air, Big Tech firms have wasted no time rolling out offerings meant to soothe — and cash in on — Europe’s unease.

Over the past year, U.S. hyperscalers have rushed to build products with EU-based governance structures and local operators, while doubling down on technical and legal safeguards. “Our industry, frankly, is doing a lot to address [the concerns] insofar as possible,” said Guido Lobrano, the director general for Europe of tech lobby ITI.

But critics have been dismissing their attempts as “sovereignty washing.” “Marketers realized it sells. Trump was a great salesman for this idea,” said Philippe Latombe, a centrist member of the French parliament.

And while U.S. firms downplay fears that they could be forced to shut down their European services — or how far Washington’s authority over them really goes — European alternatives are becoming very popular.

Nextcloud, a German-based alternative to Microsoft Office, was increasingly picked up by administrations and businesses after Trump’s inauguration. “Last year was exceptional, but we anticipate a continued increase in demand in 2026,” said CEO Frank Karlitschek in a statement, reporting a tripling in leads and 2 million new professional users.

Germany’s pioneering plan

Even Germany — long a champion of keeping the bloc’s doors open — now acknowledges the “costs” of digital dependency: “[It is] being used for power politics,” warned Chancellor Friedrich Merz at a Berlin summit late last year. Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger is also eager for Europe to build an alternative to American data analytics giant Palantir. But it’s the country’s northernmost state that took on a truly trailblazing role — and was faced with the myriad challenges that came with it.

Nextcloud, a German-based alternative to Microsoft Office, was increasingly picked up after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration and expects continued growth in 2026. | Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

In 2024, Schleswig-Holstein began phasing out key foreign technologies from its public administration, turning to open-source software as a replacement.

Led by its Digital Minister Dirk Schrödter, the state’s first step was rolling out LibreOffice as the local government’s standard software in place of Microsoft Office. Shortly after came the migration of its email system: “From April to October 2025, we migrated 40,000 email accounts with 110 million calendar entries and emails from Outlook to OpenXchange,” Schrödter told POLITICO.

But that’s not all: Before summer 2026, the state’s telephone infrastructure will switch to open source. And later this year, Schleswig-Holstein will start migrating all Windows systems to Linux — a process it aims to complete by 2028.

The broader strokes of this transition began more than five years earlier, but the motivation back then was largely financial: “We saw that our technological dependence was leading to economic dependence, and we were defenseless against rising license fees and monopolistic pricing,” said Schrödter.

The state says it has saved €15 million in licensing costs so far, after investing €9 million in the transition.

“The geopolitical crises of the following years only confirmed that the decision was the right one,” he said.

As with most groundbreaking initiatives, however, the rollout proved far messier than expected.

“In the first few weeks after the changeover, we only had limited access to our emails,” said Michael Burmeister, director at the District Court of Ahrensburg. “This was a major problem, especially in time-sensitive cases, such as search warrants, the hospitalization of patients with mental health conditions and requests for call data records.”

Even months later, “major issues still [remained]. Circumventing them costs 10 to 20 percent more working time. For example, the new email program does not have a functioning spell checker,” he said.

Unions and opposition politicians echo this sentiment: Labor union ver.di warned of a “high workload” and “insufficient training,” while Kianusch Stender, the Social Democratic Party’s regional spokesperson for digital affairs, argued the rollout was rushed and poorly prepped because of “time pressures,” technical shortcomings and a lack of consultation.

“Employees, representatives from the justice and police departments reported limited workability, missing functions, incompatible specialist applications and a high level of additional effort in their daily work,” said Stender.

For Schrödter, the lesson to be learned is this: “The challenge in making the switch is not that the solutions are not available, but mainly the question of political will to take responsibility,” he said, calling on Berlin to follow suit.

Dutch Digital Minister Willemijn Aerdts, who said “the U.S. is still a valued ally, but we want to be able to make choices”, looks on during a debate in parliament in The Hague in February 2026. | John Beckmann/DeFodi Images/DeFodi via Getty Images

Indeed, the German federal government also started trying sovereign alternatives to power its day-to-day operations, including trialing the openDesk platform — a solution the ICC turned to after ditching Microsoft.

Amsterdam’s cautious exit

Some 400 kilometers west, in a country that once laid out the red carpet for Big Tech, Amsterdam is plotting a similar yet more cautious escape route. Mindful of the risks exposed in Schleswig-Holstein, the city’s plan was devised by former Deputy Mayor Scholtes and is set to be implemented by a new city council elected in late March.

“They did it just, like, overnight,” observed Scholtes of his German counterparts. “We are going to make mistakes, we are going to have some struggles, but at the same time, when we start doing things, we do it in a responsible way,” he said, making clear the Dutch capital is in no rush to rip out its American systems.

Instead of a clean break, Amsterdam’s solution is a long transition, unwinding decades of dependence with a three-step plan: initiating pilot programs and groundwork now, scaling up in the coming years, and ensuring sensitive data and critical systems are all hosted on European or Dutch infrastructure by 2035.

A midway target is for the city to reach 30 percent of European cloud services by 2030.

And much like in Germany, as the roadblocks become clear, so do the reasons to press on. “The continuity risk has become more urgent,” said Scholtes. “We would have a huge problem if Microsoft stopped [offering] its services.”

“That would mean — because we moved so much of our data and systems into one provider … that we cannot use our email anymore, our welfare and health systems break down, we cannot issue any permit or cannot communicate with our citizens,” he cautioned, citing the ICC precedent.

Still, the transition will not be cheap. Just its first phase of mapping dependencies and testing European alternatives is projected to cost several million euros.

The scale of the task is daunting too, as Amsterdam, like the rest of the Netherlands, once championed free trade and openness to U.S. tech. In fact, The Hague was among the most vocal critics of EU plans to sideline U.S. tech giants in sensitive parts of the cloud market, warning against the economic downsides.

But those concerns have been overtaken by bigger ones. The U.S. “is still a valued ally, but we want to be able to make choices,” said new Dutch Digital Minister Willemijn Aerdts in an interview. “But the supply at the moment is not sufficient to make a free choice.”

Scholtes echoed a similar line: “To be honest, the frame of the free market being good for innovation is a fake frame. It is not a real free market because there were just a few very dominant companies, and the European market didn’t really have a chance.”