When Trump administration sanctions froze the accounts of Slovenian judge Beti Hohler last year, she lost access to everything at once: her Apple account, Amazon services, credit cards from Visa and Mastercard, her PayPal wallet. All gone. The message was stark and immediate. Europe's dependence on American technology infrastructure isn't just a business reality anymore. It's a political vulnerability.
Hohler's case is extreme, but it exposes a creeping problem across the continent. Tens of millions of Europeans wake up each morning reliant on US tech platforms for basic digital life. They book travel on Airbnb, reserve hotels through Booking.com, pay with cards routed through American networks. When Washington flexes its political muscles, Europe discovers it has almost no way to push back.
The risks have only sharpened. Elon Musk has leveraged his control of X and Starlink to shape European politics and Ukraine's war strategy. The Trump administration ordered AI company Anthropic to restrict foreign nationals from accessing its tools on security grounds. The EU already depends on non-EU countries for more than 80 percent of its technology and 70 percent of its cloud computing. What stops Washington from weaponizing that dominance during a trade war, or using control of social media and cloud systems to spy on European governments and swing elections?
The European Commission tried to answer this question last week with its digital sovereignty package, a long-anticipated response designed to nurture homegrown technology and shield Europe from foreign interference. The centerpiece is the Cloud and AI Development Act, or Cada, which would rank cloud providers based on sovereignty standards. In theory, the most sensitive government operations and data would flow only to providers meeting the highest bars, effectively locking out US tech giants from those contracts.
The framework sounds promising on paper. In practice, it crumbles under scrutiny. The strictest assurance level, the only one that would actually ban US companies from bidding, applies only to a tiny slice of public-sector cloud procurement. That's already a sliver of total European cloud spending. Even that narrow protection depends on individual EU governments to enforce the rules, many of which have strong reasons to ignore them. Ireland's financial dependence on big tech investments and tax revenues already crippled the EU's data protection rulebook. The same pattern will repeat.
The Commission's AI strategy reveals a deeper problem. Rather than develop an independent European vision for how artificial intelligence should work in society, Brussels essentially defers to the Silicon Valley blueprint. In that worldview, AI is the goal itself. Deploy it fast, maximize its reach, and ignore the consequences. The Pope's recent encyclical on AI offered a sharper critique: technological progress divorced from ethical and social progress means more tools, not more humanity.
The Commission proposes tripling European datacentre capacity in five to seven years, forcing every EU country to create datacentre acceleration zones where local authorities must approve applications within 12 months. Environmental reviews get watered down. Planning processes get streamlined. Democracy gets squeezed to move faster.
These zones won't even achieve their stated goal. Without rules on company size or nationality, they'll likely entrench the US hyperscalers that already dominate Europe's cloud market. Public opposition to datacentres is already surging because of their environmental footprint and impact on electricity bills. The Commission is bulldozing through those concerns anyway.
Digital sovereignty means more than owning your own servers. It means having an independent ideology about how technology should work in society. Europe is trying to break free from Silicon Valley's control without breaking free from Silicon Valley's ideology. Until that changes, Europe won't make decisions. It will just manage them.
Author James Rodriguez: "Europe's digital sovereignty plan looks tough until you read the fine print, then it looks like more of the same subservience with better optics."
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