Europe is experiencing a crisis of digital autonomy. Our dependence on US big tech has been growing for decades and is now nearly total, at a time when worries about our former ally are no longer theoretical. Might we, like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, find ourselves locked out of our own mailboxes if we say something that is upsetting to the US government?
This post was written in response to an article in the Financial Times.
I get where the author comes from, but this isn’t a skill issue. Of course Europe has all the expertise and access to hardware it would need, but we have a political class that ideologically deeply committed to neoliberalism, meaning they will always prefer a public tender with competing private enterprises over a state run and owned utility.
The problem is that the way the US providers have cornered the market, and the overly bureocratic tender procedures, you end up with only a few eligible bids from the three US firms and a few others like T-Systems, that have such a bad track record of actually delivering working solutions that no one interested in something other than a future board position with them will ever choose these companies.