Microsoft and Amazon appear to be increasingly concerned about growing demands in Europe to say goodbye to big tech. Both are promising to offer ‘sovereign’ independent cloud solutions for their European customers. In a way their concern is a good sign: the message is being heard. But their actual proposals are meaningless and mere sovereignty-washing.
Why?
First of all, the European variants of their clouds will still fall under the American CLOUD Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Meaning that data from European citizens can still surreptitiously be collected by the United States law enforcement and intelligence services, even if processed in Europe by these European branches of Microsoft and AWS. That’s not sovereign at all.
Second, American companies like Microsoft and Amazon are legally bound to comply with sanctions imposed by the US government. (Any company with significant business in the US is in practice bound to comply to such sanctions as well.) A ‘kill switch’ to turn off a large part of the European IT infrastructure is therefore still in the hands of the US government. Note that this is not just a theoretical threat. Again, not very sovereign.
Thirdly, we often forget that the way products and services are designed determines how they can be used. By still doing European things the Microsoft Office or Amazon AWS way we are still relegating control over how we do things to the American way of doing things. Like using the American trained AI offered by Copilot, for example.
Moreover, by still using the products and services offered by Microsoft and Amazon, albeit through a European counterpart, we still allow them to consolidate their power. The have (ab)used that power to exert control over ever more spheres of society, including health, education, news provision and urban planning.
Finally, money paid to Microsoft and Amazon is not spent in Europe. The whole sovereignty charade is simply a ploy to divert money that could otherwise have been spent here. The one thing we in fact need our governments, institutions and businesses to do is to invest more in European technology, to create a thriving market place for European technology, that better aligns with our European values. (And yes, that also means we have to very careful in selecting our European business partners: copying the American start-up culture of moving fast and breaking things is not a solution.)