Europeans seek 'digital sovereignty' as US tech firms embrace Trump

The Star

4 hours ago

BERLIN (Reuters) -At a market stall in Berlin run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge their phones of the influence of U.S. tech firms. Since Donald Trump's inauguration, the queue for their services has grown.
Interest in European-based digital services has jumped in recent months, data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb shows. More people are looking for e-mail, messaging and even search providers outside the United States.
The first months of Trump's second presidency have shaken some Europeans' confidence in their long-time ally, after he signalled his country would step back from its role in Europe's security and then launched a trade war.
"It's about the concentration of power in U.S. firms," said Topio's founder Michael Wirths, as his colleague installed on a customer's phone a version of the Android operating system without hooks into the Google ecosystem.
Wirths said the type of people coming to the stall had changed: "Before, it was people who knew a lot about data privacy. Now it's people who are politically aware and feel exposed."
Tesla chief Elon Musk, who also owns social media company X, was a leading adviser to the U.S. president before the two fell out, while the bosses of Amazon, Meta and Google-owner Alphabet took prominent spots at Trump's inauguration in January.
Days before Trump took office, outgoing president Joe Biden had warned of an oligarchic "tech industrial complex" threatening democracy.
Berlin-based search engine Ecosia says it has benefited from some customers' desire to avoid U.S. counterparts like Microsoft's Bing or Google, which dominates web searches and is also the world's biggest email provider.
"The worse it gets, the better it is for us," founder Christian Kroll said of Ecosia, whose sales pitch is that it spends its profits on environmental projects.
Similarweb data shows the number of queries directed to Ecosia from the European Union has risen 27% year-on-year and the company says it has 1% of the German search engine market.
But its 122 million visits from the 27 EU countries in February were dwarfed by 10.3 billion visits to Google, whose parent Alphabet made revenues of about $100 billion from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2024 - nearly a third of its $350 billion global turnover.
Non-profit Ecosia earned 3.2 million euros ($3.65 million) in April, of which 770,000 euros was spent on planting 1.1 million trees.
Google declined to comment for this story.
Reuters could not determine whether major U.S. tech companies have lost any market share to local rivals in Europe.
DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY
The search for alternative providers accompanies a debate in Europe about "digital sovereignty" - the idea that reliance on companies from an increasingly isolationist United States is a threat to Europe's economy and security.
"Ordinary people, the kind of people who would never have thought it was important they were using an American service are saying, 'hang on!'," said UK-based internet regulation expert Maria Farrell. "My hairdresser was asking me what she should switch to."
Use in Europe of Swiss-based ProtonMail rose 11.7% year-on-year to March compared to a year ago, according to Similarweb, while use of Alphabet's Gmail, which has some 70% of the global email market, slipped 1.9%.
ProtonMail, which offers both free and paid-for services, said it had seen an increase in users from Europe since Trump's re-election, though it declined to give a number.
"My household is definitely disengaging," said British software engineer Ken Tindell, citing weak U.S. data privacy protections as one factor.
Trump's vice president JD Vance shocked European leaders in February by accusing them - at a conference usually known for displays of transatlantic unity - of censoring free speech and failing to control immigration.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened visa bans for people who "censor" speech by Americans, including on social media, and suggested the policy could target foreign officials regulating U.S. tech companies.
U.S. social media companies like Facebook and Instagram parent Meta have said the European Union's Digital Services Act amounts to censorship of their platforms.
EU officials say the Act will make the online environment safer by compelling tech giants to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material.
Greg Nojeim, director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said Europeans' concerns about the U.S. government accessing their data, whether stored on devices or in the cloud, were justified.
Not only does U.S. law permit the government to search devices of anyone entering the country, it can compel disclosure of data that Europeans outside the U.S. store or transmit through U.S. communications service providers, Nojeim said.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
Germany's new government is itself making efforts to reduce exposure to U.S. tech, committing in its coalition agreement to make more use of open-source data formats and locally-based cloud infrastructure.
Regional governments have gone further - in conservative-run Schleswig-Holstein, on the Danish border, all IT used by the public administration must run on open-source software.
Berlin has also paid for Ukraine to access a satellite-internet network operated by France's Eutelsat instead of Musk's Starlink.
But with modern life driven by technology, "completely divorcing U.S. tech in a very fundamental way is, I would say, possibly not possible," said Bill Budington of U.S. digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Everything from push notifications to the content delivery networks powering many websites and how internet traffic is routed relies largely on U.S. companies and infrastructure, Budington noted.
Both Ecosia and French-based search engine Qwant depend in part on search results provided by Google and Microsoft's Bing, while Ecosia runs on cloud platforms, some hosted by the very same tech giants it promises an escape from.
Nevertheless, a group on messaging board Reddit called BuyFromEU has 211,000 members.
"Just cancelled my Dropbox and will switch to Proton Drive," read one post.
Mastodon, a decentralised social media service developed by German programmer Eugen Rochko, enjoyed a rush of new users two years ago when Musk bought Twitter, later renamed X. But it remains a niche service.
Signal, a messaging app run by a U.S. nonprofit foundation, has also seen a surge in installations from Europe. Similarweb's data showed a 7% month-on-month increase in Signal usage in March, while use of Meta's WhatsApp was static.
Meta declined to comment for this story. Signal did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.
But this kind of conscious self-organising is unlikely on its own to make a dent in Silicon Valley's European dominance, digital rights activist Robin Berjon told Reuters.
"The market is too captured," he said. "Regulation is needed as well."
(Additional reporting by Riham Alkousaa in Berlin, Charlie Devereux in Madrid, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam and AJ Vicens in Detroit; Editing by Catherine Evans)