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As the bromance between tech titans and Donald Trump has unfolded—X posts about “disgusting” legislation notwithstanding—Europe has grown increasingly uneasy about relying on US tech products. In Denmark, the media industry is actively seeking out non-US alternatives. Journalisten, a Danish publication roughly equivalent to this magazine (whose name translates as “The Journalist”), asked several news outlets and communications professionals whether they are exploring other options, and found that all of them were. “Like most Danish companies, we are steeped in American technology,” one editor in chief told the publication. “If we suddenly can no longer trust American suppliers, we have a huge problem, and it will be very difficult and expensive to get out of it.” This shift is driven by concerns that Trump could one day wake up and decide to force Big Tech to pull the plug on cloud services to Europe. It’s a hypothetical risk—and, some say, a small one. But if it were to materialize, the consequences could be “a disaster of biblical dimensions,” per one security expert. As such, Torsten Pedersen, the minister of national security, recently asked Danish companies and authorities to prepare for such a scenario, and to have an exit plan.
Denmark isn’t the only European country concerned about Big Tech: in the spring, for instance, the Dutch parliament passed eight motions urging the government to reduce its dependence on US tech companies and to adopt European alternatives. But in Denmark, growing tensions over Greenland—an autonomous territory of Denmark that Trump has made no secret of wanting to acquire—have added an extra layer of anxiety among officials. Trump has said that he “doesn’t rule out” using military force to take control of Greenland, and a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the US has ramped up its intelligence-gathering efforts in the territory. Indeed, Exoscale, a Swiss-based Web-hosting provider, told Wired that it has seen an uptick in customers looking to move away from cloud giants like Amazon—and that Danish clients have been explicit that the tensions over Greenland were a motivating factor behind the shift.
At least one US tech giant—Microsoft, which generates about a quarter of its business in Europe—has pledged to protect its customers there. In a blog post published in April, the company announced plans to expand its European data-center capacity by 40 percent over the next two years, an effort intended to give Europeans more control over their data (though some have argued that physical location doesn’t matter since the US has some extraterritorial powers). Microsoft also said that, while such a scenario is “exceedingly unlikely,” it would resist any US government order to shut down cloud operations in Europe. And yet, last month, the Associated Press reported that Microsoft did “cancel” the email address of Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court, which was slapped with US sanctions after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Unable to access his mailbox, Khan (who is currently under investigation for sexual abuse, which he denies) reportedly switched to Proton, a Swiss end-to-end-encrypted email service.
Microsoft denies that it ceased or suspended services to the ICC. Nonetheless, the cancellation of Khan’s email has spurred some European cybersecurity experts to further advocate for digital sovereignty. According to DR, the Danish public broadcaster, in their search for alternatives to Microsoft, the Danes are looking south across the border to Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state in Germany, where sixty thousand public sector employees have been instructed by German authorities to replace Big Tech software with open-source alternatives. The initiative has been underway for five years, but by September, employees are expected to have uninstalled Microsoft Office and switched to LibreOffice, an open-source office suite. The shift is being driven by a desire to achieve digital independence. But there’s also a financial incentive. Licensing agreements with tech giants are expensive, and transitioning to local solutions could save the state millions of euros.
In the long term, at any rate; in the short term, transitioning to EU-based tech alternatives might be painful. The shift requires uprooting the digital habits of thousands of employees who currently rely on tools like Gmail or Microsoft Office, in exchange for alternatives that may not yet match them in quality. According to the Wall Street Journal, Europe is producing far fewer “unicorns”—privately held startups valued at over one billion dollars—than the US and China; the US currently has six hundred and ninety such companies, whereas Europe has just a hundred and seven. There’s a sea of theories explaining why Europe’s tech industry continues to lag behind. One major factor is the lack of consistency in laws, languages, and cultures across European countries, which makes it harder for potential unicorns to scale. The Journal also suggested that Europe’s commitment to work-life balance may limit its competitiveness: Europeans tend to work fewer hours, and are thought to be less productive during those hours. Fueled by rising transatlantic tensions, that pace may soon begin to accelerate.
Other notable stories:
- This week, the Trump administration informed Congress that it plans to cut nearly all of the remaining staffers at the state-backed overseas broadcaster Voice of America—leaving as few as eighteen in place—in a move that officials appear to view as consistent both with their efforts to gut the outlet and a court order that VOA keep broadcasting. Elsewhere in DC, Politico reports on chaos at the Pentagon, where press-shop departures and a lack of on-camera briefings have left it “largely silent amid months of PR crises.” And the New York Times has the extraordinary story of a Justice Department probe targeting the Harvard Law Review, based on allegations including hiring discrimination—and how it appears to have overstated its case “in pursuit of an additional way to punish Harvard.”
- Jeremy W. Peters, of the Times, has the story of Alex Shieh, a sophomore at Brown who sent thousands of university employees “pointed Elon Musk–like questions about their job responsibilities” for “a story for the Brown Spectator, a new, as yet unpublished conservative newspaper on campus”—then found himself under investigation by the school, on grounds including invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, and trademark infringement (by naming the Spectator after Brown). He was cleared, but the episode reflects how schools are struggling “with protecting the rights of students to express themselves on campus, after years of trying to adjudicate just when political expression tips into harassment.”
- For CJR, Aimee Levitt argues that we shouldn’t mourn the death of alt-weeklies—as many commentators have—since they’re alive and well. “To survive, alt-weeklies have had to evolve,” Levitt writes; the definition of the genre has arguably expanded, and some such papers no longer use the label “alternative.” And yet these papers “are an alternative—now to publications owned by large conglomerates that fill their pages with wire service copy and AI slop instead of news about the towns and cities they ostensibly cover,” Levitt writes. “The other thing they have in common is that they are still free.”
- This week, a jury in El Salvador convicted three high-ranking former officials, including the former defense minister, for complicity in the killings of four Dutch journalists in 1982, during a civil war in the country; the officials were previously protected by a general amnesty linked to the conflict, but El Salvador’s Supreme Court declared that to be unconstitutional in 2018. One of those convicted lives in the US, though judges have already ordered him extradited back to El Salvador. Nayib Bukele, the president, has also been ordered to apologize to the victims.
- And Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as White House press secretary under President Biden, announced that she is leaving the Democratic Party and writing a book, arguing, in part, that the party was wrong to abandon Biden last year. Former colleagues were scathing of the project, complaining to Politico and Axios that Jean-Pierre was bad at her job and is obsessed with promoting herself. One former official said, of the book project: “Everyone thinks this is a grift.”
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