The EU Is Going Through a Trump

As tensions between President Donald Trump and Europe continue to simmer, the continent is accelerating its moves to reduce its addiction to US technology. Cities and governments are ditching Microsoft Office for open-source alternatives, shifting to European cloud hosting for local AI, and moving defense data to systems without American involvement. Nowhere has this been more clear than in France. Over the last few months, the French government has sped up its efforts to develop and deploy its own technology for government officials. The country has, arguably, emerged at the head of Europe’s growing digital sovereignty push, which aims to cut some reliance on US-based technology over concerns around data security, the Trump administration’s unpredictability, and changing prices. French budget minister David Amiel recently called for the state to “break free” from American systems and use those it can control. “We are not just explaining what we want to do,” Stéphanie Schaer, the head of DINUM, France’s digital transformation ministry, tells WIRED over a call on the nation’s video-calling platform Visio. “We already did it in a few matters.” So far, more than 40,000 French government staff have started using the home-grown video platform, while the rest will move away from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others by 2027. “We are confident enough to use it every day and we are not dependent on just one actor that will tell us you have to use my video conference,” Schaer says. Across France’s central government agencies and vast civil service, officials plan to shift to as many French, European, and open source technology alternatives as possible in the coming years. Schaer says it is important for the French government to be in control of the technology that it is using, with data being stored locally in the country, not abroad. As part of this, DINUM has been developing a set of productivity tools, collectively called “LaSuite,” since at least 2023. As well as Visio, it includes instant messaging app Tchap, Messagerie instead of Gmail or Outlook, Fichiers for documents and file sharing, plus text editing software Docs, and Grist for spreadsheets. Some of the software is still in beta and has not been fully rolled out to French officials yet. However, Tchap already has 420,000 active users, Schaer says, with 20,000 civil servants adopting it each month. “We are based on open source software. So we don’t develop all the code,” Schaer says. There are public plans for new features, although code is published on Microsoft-owned Github. All data handled by the alternatives has to be processed in France and stored with providers who have approval from the country’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI. Earlier this month, the Dutch government moved its open-source code off of GitHub and onto a Forgejo instance hosted on government-owned servers. While open source is key, the French government is also working with other countries and private firms on the development of its tools. “We can reuse what has been developed by the community and we contribute to this community,” Schaer says. For instance, Visio, which can host calls of up to 150 people and has AI transcription of calls, is built on technology from French firms Outscale and Pyannote. While Schaer’s department is aiming to lead by example, all of France’s central government agencies have to come up with plans to move away from US tech—across office software, antivirus, AI, databases, and more—by this fall. On April 23, French officials also announced the country will move its health data platform away from Microsoft to local cloud provider Scaleway, after a years-long decision process. Across Europe—as well as in Canada—politicians have been increasingly vocal about ditching US technology since the start of the second Trump administration. The Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Finland all have ongoing sovereignty efforts, with German officials and regions also prominently pushing the movement. In December, eight countries, including France and Germany, announced they would partner on their efforts. “The one that’s probably moved fastest has indeed been France,” says Martha Bennett, a principal analyst at Forrester who has been tracking open source developments since the 90s. France has a strong history of software development and open source contributions, Bennet says, with the French national police force adopting GendBuntu, a customized version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, on thousands of devices over the last two decades. “Where France has the advantage is that it's a very centralized, centrally controlled country,” Bennett says. The French efforts are not limited to the central government. “There’s a lot of cities in France that are going in this direction,” says Valentin Lungenstrass, the deputy mayor of Lyon, which has around 9,000 employees. Efforts to eradicate American technology from its stack started around 2020 but have accelerated over the last year. Like the central government, Lungenstrass says European or, ideally, open source software is the goal. “Being on open source platforms is not only about sovereignty, it’s also about maintenance, because when you have proprietary solutions, we always rely on one company that can do the maintenance,” he says. So far, Lyon has moved around 70 percent of its employees away from Microsoft’s Office software, switching to the open source OnlyOffice instead—power users make up some of the holdouts. The city is shifting from Outlook for email, Lungenstrass says, with plans to start using Linux as an operating system in the future. “If the UI is pretty simple and straightforward, it won’t be so much of a problem,” he says. At the start of April, DINUM announced its 250 employees would start to trial Linux, and Schaer says 30 employees have already made the move. “France has had a clear view about what we call ‘strategic autonomy’ forever,” says Henri Verdier, the country’s former ambassador for digital affairs. “A lot of other European countries, they did trust the US much more.” But the 2024 presidential campaign stirred some initial concerns. At the time, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance implied that attempts to regulate X, the social media company owned by billionaire Elon Musk, under the terms of the Digital Services Agreement (DSA), might be seen by a second Trump administration as a reason to reconsider its support for NATO. But the true wake up call came in May 2025, when the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, lost access to his email, which was hosted on Microsoft Outlook, and found his bank accounts frozen. In February 2025, Trump had signed an executive order sanctioning Khan after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though Microsoft later said that it had not suspended Khan’s email access, the incident served as a stark reminder of exactly how much power US tech companies could exert to push American interests far beyond the country’s borders. In November, the ICC announced that it would be moving away from Microsoft to a European open-source alternative called OpenDesk. On top of this warning shot, Frank Karlitschek, the founder and CEO of Nextcloud, says the movements in Europe have accelerated over the last decade due to the Snowden revelations and multiple unlawful EU-US data sharing agreements, as well as Trump. “With each of those events, the skepticism towards overseas cloud services was growing,” Karlitschek says. Since the start of last year, Karlitschek says, Nextcloud, which creates video conferencing and work tools such as Microsoft Office alternatives that can be run locally, has seen a threefold increase in potential new customers. Customers are concerned about the availability of US services if privacy rules change; tariff-induced price increases; and the threat of espionage or data access, he says. The Cloud Act, which gives US law enforcement the ability to request access to data stored on servers internationally, is often cited as a worry. “We know extraterritorial law can allow some access even if the data is stored in France and it’s not acceptable. It’s a red light for us,” DINUM’s Schaer says. Despite the momentum, European efforts to untangle themselves from American technology can only go so far. “US firms dominate all major software layers,” one recent European Parliament report concluded. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s cloud services are used by about 70 percent of the EU market; and 80 percent of European company software spending goes to US firms, the report says. At least 23 countries depend on US tech firms for “critical national security functions,” research from the Future of Technology Institute think tank says. Open-source technology might be one way of moving away from US tech companies. Verdier says that the changing views on US tech companies might push European countries closer to “the movement for digital public infrastructure, like in India.” The Indian government has rolled out several government-owned, open-source technologies, collectively called the “India Stack,” to manage things like identity verification, payments, and document storage. It’s one possibility in a “diversity of solutions,” says Verdier. “Because this is open source, we’re very deliberate that we're not building the end product for them, but we kind of sit side by side,” says Yousef El-Dardiry, the creator of BlockNote, an open-source text editor. BlockNote has been working with the French and German governments on their offerings. For instance, El-Dardiry says, the teams are working collaboratively on track changes for editing, with bi-weekly meetings to discuss progress. “This is going to be critical for public sector workers but it’s also something that’s going to be very nice to have in BlockNote. So we can work on this together.” But Verdier says that moving entirely away from US tech companies is not wholly possible, or even preferable right now. Even if European businesses or governments get off of services like Microsoft Outlook, “you likely still have a US operating system on your phone, or will need to use a US-controlled internet,” he says. “We don't have real alternatives to some of the tech giants today.”