How Europe Is Replacing American Technology

For much of the last year, a quiet but decisive shift has been unfolding across Europe. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, a growing number of governments, companies, and public institutions have accelerated their efforts to reduce dependence on American technology. While the continent hasn’t completely severed ties with Silicon Valley, the momentum toward digital sovereignty has become unmistakable.

A WIRED analysis has identified dozens of documented cases where European entities,from national governments to local schools and NGOs,have replaced U. S. tech products with open source or homegrown alternatives. These moves, experts say, likely represent only a fraction of what is happening behind closed doors.

“The aggressive policies by the Trump administration, attacking international law, as well as the EU and democratic principles, has led to several wake-up calls,” says Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament and now a non-resident fellow at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

The pivot is broad and accelerating. Just last week, the European Commission unveiled its long-term strategy to reduce reliance on U. S. technology. The European Parliament has already switched its default search engine from Google to Qwant, a French alternative. In France, thousands of government workers now use LaSuite, a homegrown open-source office software suite, as part of a broader push to “break free” from American tech giants. Meanwhile, a coalition of more than a dozen European tech companies is preparing to launch Euro-Office, an open-source document platform. Cities across the Netherlands, France, and Germany are also migrating away from Microsoft Office and Google Docs.

The changes extend well beyond productivity tools. The Dutch government is moving its code repositories away from Microsoft-owned GitHub to its own infrastructure. Finland has decided not to host its election data on Amazon Web Services. The organization managing Belgium’s .be top-level domain is also leaving AWS. In the social media space, Eurosky has emerged as an interoperable alternative to Bluesky, built on the same AT Protocol.

WIRED has compiled a timeline of these publicly known defections, which can be viewed in a Google Sheet or a Proton Sheet. While many of these digital sovereignty initiatives predate Trump’s return to office, the immediate catalyst often cited is the fallout from U. S. sanctions against officials linked to the International Criminal Court. The court itself has since moved away from Microsoft’s technology.

Other driving concerns include the lack of control over sensitive data, shifting international alliances, the concentration of power among a few U. S. tech firms, and the risk of data access under U. S. laws like the CLOUD Act and FISA. The increasingly cozy relationship between Big Tech and the Trump administration has only sharpened the urgency.

“Citizens, companies, and organizations are energized to take their digital future into their own hands,” Schaake says. “Untangled from billionaire interests as well as Trump’s policies.”