POLITICO: “Trump really hates Europe” – Trump can pull the plug on the internet, and Europe can’t do anything about it!

Pic.: POLITICO

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet, POLITICO predicts.

As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand.

The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers.

Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines.

Sovereignty hawks in Europe have long voiced concerns that cloud reliance means U.S. agencies can snoop on sensitive data of Europeans stored on American-owned servers in any location, thanks to U.S. laws.

Now, in a political cycle that has seen the U.S. president flip laws on a dime and the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor lose access to his Microsoft email after being sanctioned by Washington (following arrest warrants for top Israeli officials), there are genuine fears the U.S. could weaponize its tech dominance for leverage abroad.

“Trump really hates Europe. He thinks the whole purpose of the EU is to 'screw' America," said Zach Meyers, director of research at the CERRE think tank in Brussels. “The idea that he might order a kill switch or do something else that would severely damage economic interests isn't quite as implausible as it might have sounded six months ago.”

Alexander Windbichler, the CEO of Austrian cloud firm Anexia, said he wished the “IT guys” like him had spoken up earlier about the “unhealthy dependency,” arguing that the European cloud industry has for too long avoided lobbying and politics in favor of focusing on technological competitiveness.

Would Trump pull the plug on cloud services in Europe? “I don't know. But I never expected that the U.S. would be threatening to take Greenland away,” Windbichler said. “It's crazier than shutting down the cloud.”

“The risk of a shutdown is the new paradigm,” the boss of French champion OVHcloud, Benjamin Revcolevschi, told the same event. “Cloud is like a tap of water. What if at some moment the tap is closed?”

The technology equivalent of turning off the tap would be cloud companies being ordered by the U.S. administration to stop services in Europe. Cloud computing works by giving businesses virtual access to data storage and processing power, massively widening capabilities thanks to their vast networks of physical data centers around the world.

And while a breakdown in service remains an extreme scenario, U.S. tech giants no longer dismiss it as a possibility.

Microsoft in April said the company would add a binding clause to its contracts with European governments to keep them online, and fight any suspension orders in court. While President Brad Smith claimed the risk of the U.S. administration ordering American tech firms to stop operations in the EU was “exceedingly unlikely,” he admitted this was “a real concern of people across Europe.”

“If you look at the cloud, if you look at artificial intelligence, data centers, unfortunately, there simply aren’t sufficient alternatives to the offerings by the American digital industry,” Germany’s former Finance Minister Jörg Kukies said in April as he urged the bloc to proceed with caution on trade retaliation against Trump.

One industrial policy initiative gaining steam as a blueprint for how the bloc might go about rebalancing the scales puts the price tag at €300 billion. Authored by a group of tech experts and economists and supported by the European industry, the so-called “EuroStack” initiative aims to make Europe self-reliant in digital infrastructure all the way through to software.

The movement wants the EU to rally around three goals: “Buy European,” “Sell European,” and “Fund European.” They urge decision-makers to give EU firms priority in public contracts, setting quotas for government purchases and launching a EuroStack fund to back homegrown tech.

It won’t be that easy, says Meyers from the CERRE think tank. "They are asking a lot of money for this project. Hundreds of billions. The idea that it is going to magically appear is pretty fanciful,” he said. Opponents such as the American trade group the Chamber of Progress argue the costs could soar past €5 trillion.

“No country or region can lead the technological revolution alone,” the EU’s tech sovereignty chief Henna Virkkunen told reporters in Brussels on June 5, presenting a strategy that also acknowledged the bloc “faces the risk of weaponisation of its technological and economic dependencies."

“Europe blindly trusted the U.S. to always be there, and always on their side,” said Bria, the University College London professor. “The situation feels very different now.”

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