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The concern over "digital sovereignty" is motivated by the US wielding sanctions as a political tool against Europe. It's impossible to fully eliminate any exp

The concern over "digital sovereignty" is motivated by the US wielding sanctions as a political tool against Europe. It's impossible to fully eliminate any exposure to US sanctions. If the EU wants to fully shield itself, it should aggressively counter-sanction American entities. If the US government knows that every time it sanctions some EU entity, an American entity will get sanctioned just as hard, it will think twice. For some reason, the EU has been unwilling to go down this obvious path.

graemep 5mo ago
The problem is that European (in the EU and outside) countries do not have the same ability to sanction the US as the US has to sanction them. If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down. Take what happened to the French ICC judge and imagine that happening across a whole country and far more pervasively (because a lot of people he deals with will not follow US sanctions, but would have their own services cut off if his country was sanctioned): https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-turn-international-criminal-court-judges-daily-life-into-a-nightmare https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-t...
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  > If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down. You don't think they'd rather maybe find alternatives rather than shutting down? Sure, it'd be sucky probably for a long-time, but it's not like we don't have IT professionals who can stand up physical servers, email servers and what not, plenty of local municipalities do so already, so somewhere there is expertise already. People generally don't just give up and throw their hands in the air in the face of difficulties, even less so when the governance of their country depends on it.
  - jandrewrogers 5mo ago
    I think you are underestimating the supply chain problem. You can't stand up extra servers you don't already have in extra data center capacity you don't already have. The whole point of the cloud is that you don't have these assets. While you can acquire these assets the lead times would be several months at a minimum, and probably years if everyone is trying to do it at the same time. It isn't an issue of knowhow, the required physical infrastructure doesn't exist.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      Say Microsoft/Google/whatever my local municipality is using right now, gets blocked tonight, and tomorrow everything US-related is offline. It won't (and can't) take months for them to get one server up and running for them to continue with their administration. As mentioned, other municipalities in the country already are 100% independent, running everything themselves, either they're willing to help out the rest of us, or at least provide expertise enough so we can. Then the country is filled with FOSS nerds like myself, who wouldn't shy away from stepping in to help either. Probably the larger cities would take longer to solve, but I don't think "We cannot get server hardware from the US" will be the biggest problem, it'll be around national organization until the biggest fires been put out. Putting one server in each ajuntament would basically be enough to get 80% of the local municipalities up and running again.
      - mike_hearn 5mo ago
        It wouldn't only affect local governments, it'd also trash all the businesses, banks, national governments, etc. Google on its own getting blocked breaks the entire internet because so many websites rely on the free services they host. Remember there are no European search engines of any quality and only Mistral as a European AI provider, so even just findings things would be difficult.
        embedding-shape 5mo ago
        You underestimate how resilient and effective people can be when needed. Yes, as mentioned earlier, it'd suck for a while, but we'd come up with solutions pretty quickly, as the entire country would rely on that. Pretty much exactly a year ago, I was about leave home to go buy something, when the power was cut, garage door didn't open. Fine, jump into a taxi, and both of us notice that seemingly the entire town is without power. Once we arrive at the store in another town, same thing. Turns out, the entire country had lost power, and would be without power for pretty much the rest of the day, and same thing in neigboring Portugal. We were literally without power, internet and cell-phone service for pretty much the entire day. Did the entire of society pretty much was put on hold for a day? Yeah, but still we managed to go on with our day. I owed the taxi driver until the next time I saw him, the store accepted the same thing so we could buy some stuff, they noted down everything on paper, and so on. We did survive, and thanks to humans being humans, we all could pretty much survive even that day. Loosing Microsoft/Google/AWS would indeed be pretty much on a smaller scale, mostly impacting IT and everything related to IT, which is large swaths, but just like every other problem, it'll be worked around both temporarily and permanently, it's just in human nature to do. Again, I'm not saying it wouldn't suck, nor that it wouldn't be difficult, but also, it wouldn't take a year before emails are being sent between companies again either.
- DiogenesKynikos 5mo ago
  The EU could absolutely find ways to hurt the US economy just as much as vice versa. It doesn't have to use the same tools as the US. Just ban major US companies from doing business in the EU. Impose massive fines. Get creative. The EU economy is on par with the US economy. The EU has plenty of ability to hurt the US economy. The reason this doesn't happen is because the EU isn't a country. It doesn't have a unified central government. It's 27 different sovereign states, each with their own completely different foreign policy. The type of policy I'm describing requires a unified political leadership willing to play for high stakes. This is why China has been so much more effective than the EU in the trade war with the US. It's not that China theoretically has better cards to play. It just has a central government.
  - mike_hearn 5mo ago
    EU economy is not on par with the US economy. This is a dangerously old belief. That was maybe true in 2000 but not in 2026. EU GDP per capita is ~$48k and US GDP per capita is ~$94k. US economy is nearly twice as big. Quarter of a century of higher growth will do that. EU does run a trade surplus with the USA. In a big fight the USA would, strictly speaking, have to replace more stuff than the EU would. However that ignores the makeup of the things being traded. EU exports to the US is dominated by pharma products that the US could make generics of, misc machinery that can often be replaced by Chinese competitors now, and luxury goods the US doesn't strictly need. US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports). It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days. There are no home grown replacements for most US software and no ability to make them anytime soon (especially as any broad spectrum sanctions would include frontier AI models).
    - ben_w 5mo ago
      > EU economy is not on par with the US economy. This is a dangerously old belief. That was maybe true in 2000 but not in 2026. EU GDP per capita is ~$48k and US GDP per capita is ~$94k. US economy is nearly twice as big. Quarter of a century of higher growth will do that. I think per capita is not a useful measure here? The populations are unequal. By nominal exchange rates, the US economy is estimated to be $31.856T this year; the EU's $23T; by purchasing power parity exchange rates, the EU is $30.678T. Exchange rates matter for what actually gets traded, but they're also easily shifted by interest rate policies. But even with this, any simplification of economics sufficient to fit in a comment is going to be very misleading about questions of who is more or less dependent on global free trade, the US or the EU. Even the complexity you list: I suspect there's an office or five in various EU nations filled with economists trying to work out exactly what would go down if there was an EU-US trade war and how to remove the critical points of failure. > US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports). > It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days. Yes, but this is kinda the point of all the digital sovereignty stuff. It was already weird to me, as an iPhone app developer in Germany making apps for Germans living in Germany where sometimes the only language option was German, that I had to tick a box while uploading apps confirming that any encryption in the app would be in compliance with US export laws*; now, it's unacceptable. * https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-app-information/overview-of-export-compliance https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-ap... (Irony, that page links to https://bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption https://bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption which for me has an SSL error)
traceroute66 5mo ago
> the EU has been unwilling to go down this obvious path Well, the EU in general tends to favour the "lets sit down in a room and talk like grown-ups" approach to finding solutions to problems. Wielding sanctions as a first/second choice option is a very US thing, even more so with the present administration. In theory the EU does have a lot of options available to it beyond sanctions, such as making life difficult getting Schengen visas for all those US citizens you constantly read about on the CNN website who are flocking to Europe .... but that sort of action would be very un-European[1][2] [1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-family-relocated-miami-italy https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-family-relocated-miami-ita... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/central-eastern-europe-american-relocation https://edition.cnn.com/travel/central-eastern-europe-americ...
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > such as making life difficult getting Schengen visas for all those US citizens you constantly read about on the CNN website who are flocking to Europe Trashing your own tourism sector is a very European defense mechanism. The truth is there is one and only one way Europe can try reclaiming sovereignty, and it’s the one that’s most painful—rebuilding its own military.
  - traceroute66 5mo ago
    > Trashing your own tourism sector is a very European defense mechanism. Please re-read my post .... in particular the first two words "IN THEORY". As far as I am aware, the option I mentioned has never, ever been mooted as a possibility. It was something I invented as a random example of a non-sanction possibility. > rebuilding its own military Aah yes, because a strong military has been so awesome for the US in the US–Iran war where IIRC the Iranians managed to destroy lots of very expensive US military radars[1] and other expensive assets[2][3] in the region despite your president having claimed to have "destroyed 100% of Iran's military capability". But let's not get in to politics.... [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us-missile-defense-iran-war-intl-invs https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/middleeast/us-air-force-awacs-jet-destroyed-saudi-arabia-intl-hnk-ml https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/middleeast/us-air-force-a... [3] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-aws-data-center-uae-iran-bahrain-71066b0a822c4cfd88b61e3fe79af917 https://apnews.com/article/amazon-aws-data-center-uae-iran-b...
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> If the EU wants to fully shield itself, it should aggressively counter-sanction American entities This isn’t a realistic option without an independent security posture. Washington could bankrupt Europe overnight right now with targeted tourism, technical and financial sanctions. (And increasingly, energy.) All of that before considering kneecapping Europe’s NATO-integrated kit.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  > Washington could bankrupt Europe overnight right now with targeted tourism, technical and financial sanctions. Yet again the American exceptionalism bleeds through and shows why the hegemony is currently dying. Maybe with a slight bit of humbleness it could have survived but no, the exceptionalism is so well encoded that it seems short of impossible to stop the decline at this point. Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too, which based on the current goings, isn't going so well. How do you expect that to be true for the second/third largest economy in the world, when the US can't even do so with Iran, one of the already most sanctioned countries in the world?
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > American exceptionalism bleeds through None of this requires America be better at anything. It just requires the current finance and trade flows to be what they are. > Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too The analogy doesn’t work. American sanctions and adversarialism with Iran have famously granted us few grabholds on their system. Tehran is sovereign. To the extent there is an analogy here, it’s in European reliance on America being its Hormuz. The obvious vulnerability that gives America asymmetric capability over Europe is the financial, security, energy and trade reliance. Unlike the Hormuz, those aren’t geographic features. But if Brussels is content with mincing around with their own special pile of AMD chips (or tourism bans or whatnot), it might as well be carved into rock.
  - mike_hearn 5mo ago
    The Iranian economy is in a state of total collapse! That's not something to aspire to. It's not good to be in denial about this. Even small amounts of US pressure would create chaos in Europe at this point. Multiple European countries are heading towards a major financial crisis entirely on their own, even without any US involvement at all. See e.g. the UK, whose debt is now much too large for even an IMF bailout to work. Only massive austerity of the type that makes 2008 look like splashing around in warm water will be enough to turn that around. Europe is not independent. Even ignoring basics like oil and gas, the choices of the EU ruling elites in Brussels have, over a period of many years, broken any ability to create a competitive domestic tech industry (something very difficult even with China-style global cutoffs). Even if it was all fixed tomorrow it's far too late. Building a competitive domestic office suite is far beyond what the EU can achieve, let alone everything else required.

graemep 5mo ago

The problem is that European (in the EU and outside) countries do not have the same ability to sanction the US as the US has to sanction them. If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down. Take what happened to the French ICC judge and imagine that happening across a whole country and far more pervasively (because a lot of people he deals with will not follow US sanctions, but would have their own services cut off if his country was sanctioned): https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-turn-international-criminal-court-judges-daily-life-into-a-nightmare https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-t...

embedding-shape 5mo ago
> If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down. You don't think they'd rather maybe find alternatives rather than shutting down? Sure, it'd be sucky probably for a long-time, but it's not like we don't have IT professionals who can stand up physical servers, email servers and what not, plenty of local municipalities do so already, so somewhere there is expertise already. People generally don't just give up and throw their hands in the air in the face of difficulties, even less so when the governance of their country depends on it.
- jandrewrogers 5mo ago
  I think you are underestimating the supply chain problem. You can't stand up extra servers you don't already have in extra data center capacity you don't already have. The whole point of the cloud is that you don't have these assets. While you can acquire these assets the lead times would be several months at a minimum, and probably years if everyone is trying to do it at the same time. It isn't an issue of knowhow, the required physical infrastructure doesn't exist.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Say Microsoft/Google/whatever my local municipality is using right now, gets blocked tonight, and tomorrow everything US-related is offline. It won't (and can't) take months for them to get one server up and running for them to continue with their administration. As mentioned, other municipalities in the country already are 100% independent, running everything themselves, either they're willing to help out the rest of us, or at least provide expertise enough so we can. Then the country is filled with FOSS nerds like myself, who wouldn't shy away from stepping in to help either. Probably the larger cities would take longer to solve, but I don't think "We cannot get server hardware from the US" will be the biggest problem, it'll be around national organization until the biggest fires been put out. Putting one server in each ajuntament would basically be enough to get 80% of the local municipalities up and running again.
    - mike_hearn 5mo ago
      It wouldn't only affect local governments, it'd also trash all the businesses, banks, national governments, etc. Google on its own getting blocked breaks the entire internet because so many websites rely on the free services they host. Remember there are no European search engines of any quality and only Mistral as a European AI provider, so even just findings things would be difficult.
      - embedding-shape 5mo ago
        You underestimate how resilient and effective people can be when needed. Yes, as mentioned earlier, it'd suck for a while, but we'd come up with solutions pretty quickly, as the entire country would rely on that. Pretty much exactly a year ago, I was about leave home to go buy something, when the power was cut, garage door didn't open. Fine, jump into a taxi, and both of us notice that seemingly the entire town is without power. Once we arrive at the store in another town, same thing. Turns out, the entire country had lost power, and would be without power for pretty much the rest of the day, and same thing in neigboring Portugal. We were literally without power, internet and cell-phone service for pretty much the entire day. Did the entire of society pretty much was put on hold for a day? Yeah, but still we managed to go on with our day. I owed the taxi driver until the next time I saw him, the store accepted the same thing so we could buy some stuff, they noted down everything on paper, and so on. We did survive, and thanks to humans being humans, we all could pretty much survive even that day. Loosing Microsoft/Google/AWS would indeed be pretty much on a smaller scale, mostly impacting IT and everything related to IT, which is large swaths, but just like every other problem, it'll be worked around both temporarily and permanently, it's just in human nature to do. Again, I'm not saying it wouldn't suck, nor that it wouldn't be difficult, but also, it wouldn't take a year before emails are being sent between companies again either.
DiogenesKynikos 5mo ago
The EU could absolutely find ways to hurt the US economy just as much as vice versa. It doesn't have to use the same tools as the US. Just ban major US companies from doing business in the EU. Impose massive fines. Get creative. The EU economy is on par with the US economy. The EU has plenty of ability to hurt the US economy. The reason this doesn't happen is because the EU isn't a country. It doesn't have a unified central government. It's 27 different sovereign states, each with their own completely different foreign policy. The type of policy I'm describing requires a unified political leadership willing to play for high stakes. This is why China has been so much more effective than the EU in the trade war with the US. It's not that China theoretically has better cards to play. It just has a central government.
- mike_hearn 5mo ago
  EU economy is not on par with the US economy. This is a dangerously old belief. That was maybe true in 2000 but not in 2026. EU GDP per capita is ~$48k and US GDP per capita is ~$94k. US economy is nearly twice as big. Quarter of a century of higher growth will do that. EU does run a trade surplus with the USA. In a big fight the USA would, strictly speaking, have to replace more stuff than the EU would. However that ignores the makeup of the things being traded. EU exports to the US is dominated by pharma products that the US could make generics of, misc machinery that can often be replaced by Chinese competitors now, and luxury goods the US doesn't strictly need. US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports). It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days. There are no home grown replacements for most US software and no ability to make them anytime soon (especially as any broad spectrum sanctions would include frontier AI models).
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    > EU economy is not on par with the US economy. This is a dangerously old belief. That was maybe true in 2000 but not in 2026. EU GDP per capita is ~$48k and US GDP per capita is ~$94k. US economy is nearly twice as big. Quarter of a century of higher growth will do that. I think per capita is not a useful measure here? The populations are unequal. By nominal exchange rates, the US economy is estimated to be $31.856T this year; the EU's $23T; by purchasing power parity exchange rates, the EU is $30.678T. Exchange rates matter for what actually gets traded, but they're also easily shifted by interest rate policies. But even with this, any simplification of economics sufficient to fit in a comment is going to be very misleading about questions of who is more or less dependent on global free trade, the US or the EU. Even the complexity you list: I suspect there's an office or five in various EU nations filled with economists trying to work out exactly what would go down if there was an EU-US trade war and how to remove the critical points of failure. > US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports). > It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days. Yes, but this is kinda the point of all the digital sovereignty stuff. It was already weird to me, as an iPhone app developer in Germany making apps for Germans living in Germany where sometimes the only language option was German, that I had to tick a box while uploading apps confirming that any encryption in the app would be in compliance with US export laws*; now, it's unacceptable. * https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-app-information/overview-of-export-compliance https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-ap... (Irony, that page links to https://bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption https://bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption which for me has an SSL error)

traceroute66 5mo ago

> the EU has been unwilling to go down this obvious path Well, the EU in general tends to favour the "lets sit down in a room and talk like grown-ups" approach to finding solutions to problems. Wielding sanctions as a first/second choice option is a very US thing, even more so with the present administration. In theory the EU does have a lot of options available to it beyond sanctions, such as making life difficult getting Schengen visas for all those US citizens you constantly read about on the CNN website who are flocking to Europe .... but that sort of action would be very un-European[1][2] [1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-family-relocated-miami-italy https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-family-relocated-miami-ita... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/central-eastern-europe-american-relocation https://edition.cnn.com/travel/central-eastern-europe-americ...

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> such as making life difficult getting Schengen visas for all those US citizens you constantly read about on the CNN website who are flocking to Europe Trashing your own tourism sector is a very European defense mechanism. The truth is there is one and only one way Europe can try reclaiming sovereignty, and it’s the one that’s most painful—rebuilding its own military.
- traceroute66 5mo ago
  > Trashing your own tourism sector is a very European defense mechanism. Please re-read my post .... in particular the first two words "IN THEORY". As far as I am aware, the option I mentioned has never, ever been mooted as a possibility. It was something I invented as a random example of a non-sanction possibility. > rebuilding its own military Aah yes, because a strong military has been so awesome for the US in the US–Iran war where IIRC the Iranians managed to destroy lots of very expensive US military radars[1] and other expensive assets[2][3] in the region despite your president having claimed to have "destroyed 100% of Iran's military capability". But let's not get in to politics.... [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us-missile-defense-iran-war-intl-invs https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/05/middleeast/radar-bases-us... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/middleeast/us-air-force-awacs-jet-destroyed-saudi-arabia-intl-hnk-ml https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/middleeast/us-air-force-a... [3] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-aws-data-center-uae-iran-bahrain-71066b0a822c4cfd88b61e3fe79af917 https://apnews.com/article/amazon-aws-data-center-uae-iran-b...

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

> If the EU wants to fully shield itself, it should aggressively counter-sanction American entities This isn’t a realistic option without an independent security posture. Washington could bankrupt Europe overnight right now with targeted tourism, technical and financial sanctions. (And increasingly, energy.) All of that before considering kneecapping Europe’s NATO-integrated kit.

embedding-shape 5mo ago
> Washington could bankrupt Europe overnight right now with targeted tourism, technical and financial sanctions. Yet again the American exceptionalism bleeds through and shows why the hegemony is currently dying. Maybe with a slight bit of humbleness it could have survived but no, the exceptionalism is so well encoded that it seems short of impossible to stop the decline at this point. Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too, which based on the current goings, isn't going so well. How do you expect that to be true for the second/third largest economy in the world, when the US can't even do so with Iran, one of the already most sanctioned countries in the world?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > American exceptionalism bleeds through None of this requires America be better at anything. It just requires the current finance and trade flows to be what they are. > Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too The analogy doesn’t work. American sanctions and adversarialism with Iran have famously granted us few grabholds on their system. Tehran is sovereign. To the extent there is an analogy here, it’s in European reliance on America being its Hormuz. The obvious vulnerability that gives America asymmetric capability over Europe is the financial, security, energy and trade reliance. Unlike the Hormuz, those aren’t geographic features. But if Brussels is content with mincing around with their own special pile of AMD chips (or tourism bans or whatnot), it might as well be carved into rock.
- mike_hearn 5mo ago
  The Iranian economy is in a state of total collapse! That's not something to aspire to. It's not good to be in denial about this. Even small amounts of US pressure would create chaos in Europe at this point. Multiple European countries are heading towards a major financial crisis entirely on their own, even without any US involvement at all. See e.g. the UK, whose debt is now much too large for even an IMF bailout to work. Only massive austerity of the type that makes 2008 look like splashing around in warm water will be enough to turn that around. Europe is not independent. Even ignoring basics like oil and gas, the choices of the EU ruling elites in Brussels have, over a period of many years, broken any ability to create a competitive domestic tech industry (something very difficult even with China-style global cutoffs). Even if it was all fixed tomorrow it's far too late. Building a competitive domestic office suite is far beyond what the EU can achieve, let alone everything else required.