The rallying call to put European tech first — backed by companies including Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton, to name a few — follows the shock of the Munich security conference, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe like an attack dog, leaving delegates in no doubt that the post-War international order is in tatters and all bets are off when it comes to what the U.S. might do under President Donald Trump.
Key tech infrastructure that’s owned and operated by U.S. companies doesn’t look like such a solid buy, from a European perspective, if a presidential executive order can be issued forcing U.S. firms to switch off service provision or terminate a supply chain at a pen stroke.
“Imagine Europe without internet search, email, or office software. It would mean the complete breakdown of our society. Sounds unrealistic? Well, something similar just happened to Ukraine,” Wolfgang Oels, COO of the Berlin-based, tree-planting search engine Ecosia — one signatory to the letter that was already taking steps aimed at reducing its dependency on U.S. Big Tech suppliers — tells TechCrunch.
We’ve been the US’ bitch for far too long. It will be extremely difficult and painful to become independent
I push for FOSS everywhere I can at work, but then we acquire a company and they casually drop “oh yeah we’ve built $solution on Azure Containers using Azure SDN with Azure API Gateway and Azure LoadBalancer and Azure Firewall and Azure Backups and Azure Georedundancy and we use Azure SAST and Azure pipelines (replace with microsoft marketing lingo as applicable - I don’t care to learn it). Aside from that we’re vendor-agnostic”.
It’s astonishing how “we can use Azure/AWS but let’s not lock ourselves into proprietary solutions for which FOSS alternatives are readily available” is somehow a controversial statement in some software outfits. Ignoring the sovereignty concerns for a minute, from a business perspective you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping really hard that Microsoft or Amazon don’t pull a Broadcom and bankrupt you one day by hiking prices a few hundred percent.
It boggles the mind how existentially reliant most of the digital world is on the whims of like, three unchecked billionaires.
Silver lining is that’s a great opportunity for development. Even more so, we’ve seen how things play out when such platforms are left unchecked, so we can try to avoid the downfalls of big tech.
All the more reason to do it. Better a hard struggle with freedom at the end than being someones bitch forever
as someone in the US, I would likely welcome some EU competition, the US is just a bunch of monopolies and trying to stay ahead of the enshitification is turning into a skill in itself, but now with the presidency akin to the paid programming infomercials, open markets are going to get worse as the convicted rapist shits diaper and gets upset with which ever CEO in the room winces at the smell first