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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.
These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.
The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe’s own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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Sounds great on paper but my bet is it’ll take a decade or more and cost tens of billions to hire and retool everything. It’s not just install Linux on all the machines of every beurocrat and call it a day. So much SharePoint, Netsuite, Salesforce, and more need alternatives built out. Thousands of hours or more spent retraining decades of learned computer skills. A deep lack of technical talent due to brain drain over the last two decades thanks to huge US tech salaries.
Not saying they shouldn’t. I’m just expecting a big push and then a bunch of failed projects to move that leave systems spread across two platforms.
I think you’re overestimating the brain drain. Most people who emigrate from EU countries do so to another EU country.
We’re not India.
And if you go to the right type of tech company in the right member state, you can easily get a salary over 130k USD with just a few years of experience. With much better job security and work life balance.
The best time to start is now, so 10 years down the road you get it happening.
What the fuck does Salesforce do?
Again, we don’t need our very own local Torment Nexus.