Rare Unity to Block U.S. Dominance
Germany has swung behind a push from France to make Europe more reliant on its own technology companies, as the bloc’s two powerhouses come together for a meaningful effort to wean the bloc off American giants.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged France may have a point in its years-long push to reduce dependence on American companies, just hours after an outage by a U.S. cloud computing company provided a timely reminder of the potential vulnerabilities.
“We want to speak with one European voice, and we work together toward one goal: that is European digital sovereignty,” Merz told an audience at a joint summit in Berlin, days after admitting he was warming up to what he previously considered “more of a French concept.”
Germany and France have long taken different paths on tech policy amid US dominance. Now, the two powers are converging in a rare show of unity.
Recent outages from major U.S. cloud providers as well as massive shortages in the chip industry “showed us that we are dependent on digital technologies from China and the U.S.,” and “these dependencies are being used for power politics,” Merz said.
Sharing the stage, French President Emmanuel Macron said: “Europe doesn’t want to be the client of the big entrepreneurs, or the big solutions, either from the U.S. or China.”
As the two leaders openly warned of the “costs” of digital dependency, their words illustrated a remarkable convergence in an area that has long seen markedly divergent approaches. In Paris, sovereignty has been about forcefully prioritizing local champions and breaking reliance on the U.S., while Berlin has focused on boosting innovation without severing important trade ties.
As the sheer dominance of American tech giants raises genuine questions about how Europe can achieve sovereignty in a meaningful way, the two countries used the Berlin event to outline a host of initiatives they argue will move the needle.
That included promises to move forward with earmarking European solutions for public technology contracts, keeping European data fully shielded from foreign snooping — and even confronting abusive dominance by major U.S. cloud providers.
In perhaps the most explosive move of the day, France and Germany backed a call from Brussels to bring the largest cloud computing players, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, within the scope of its landmark antitrust regulation. The EU also announced parallel investigations into the two services that could serve as a direct hit on the U.S. titans.
On a day when one of a host of recent cloud outages — this time from U.S. company Cloudflare — saw ubiquitous sites, including ChatGPT and X, go down, the timing was striking.
As well as pushing Brussels on U.S. dominance in the cloud, Macron and Merz also both voiced strong hopes that an effort coming Wednesday to cut red tape in the EU’s digital rulebook — including an expected delay to the bloc’s landmark AI Act — will help Europe stay competitive.
“If we let the Americans and the Chinese have all of the champions, one thing is certain: we may have the best regulation in the world, but we won’t be regulating anything,” said Macron.
The summit was accompanied by a host of business tie-ups — including a significant partnership between the French AI star Mistral and German software company SAP to build “Europe’s first fully sovereign AI stack.”
Both the French and German governments also promised to use the solutions that the partnership produces, over those from U.S. tech giants.
Despite the strong show of unity from Macron and Merz, the bloc’s powerhouses acknowledged they still need to iron out some details.
The two countries announced a new “working group” to define what digital sovereignty means in areas such as public procurement contracts, as the European Commission starts to draw up a legislative update that could drive a shift away from foreign-owned technology.
“We need a uniform set of criteria in the EU that defines what sovereignty really means,” Austrian Digital Secretary of State Alexander Pröll said in an interview, echoing repeated demands among EU countries meeting in Brussels.
Austria successfully spearheaded an effort to have member countries rally behind a side declaration calling to boost Europe’s digital sovereignty “in an open manner” — a phrasing that has historically been used to show any move on independence won’t isolate the U.S.
France’s Digital Minister Anne Le Hénanff also acknowledged some lingering divergences with her counterpart in Berlin, Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger, that the working group will tackle — particularly on the issue of public procurement — which she identified as something Wildberger doesn’t “openly embrace, at least not to the same extent.”
She later told reporters that she attributed this caution to not having the “same relationship” with international partners.
Germany is keen to pursue tech independence that still supports a spirit of “friendship” with the U.S., Wildberger said in an interview.
Yet for many at the summit — who saw the fact that it even took place as a positive signal in itself — the day’s proceedings offered a promising glimpse of Europe’s digital future.
“This is a decisive moment for Europe when we decide to be players, not just watching the game,” said Gonçalo Matias, Portugal’s minister for state reform.
It’s important that “we talk in the same language,” said Denmark’s Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen, while cautioning that change shouldn’t take too long.
============================
If you feel powerless to help Gaza, you still has a choice: donate. When so much of what exists is false, authenticity is a powerful weapon we can wield that the state never could. So if you feel lost, hopeless, depressed, angry and afraid, I implore you to return - again - again - and again - to the feeling of love that exists within you that brought you here in the first place. It is only through this that we can remake the world. To redress Gaza’s famine, displacement, and destruction, independent and impartial humanitarian organizations - UN agencies, international and national NGOs - must be allowed to deliver relief at scale. To salvage Gaza’s people from the devastation inflicted by Israel, it must be unified with the West Bank to form an independent and sovereign Palestinian State, not to be parceled and colonized by the former.
Meanwhile, children continue to be shredded by US bombs, and the starvation reaches new depths of hellish collective punishment. If both parties are going to continue to support an ongoing genocide, at least they can both be honest about doing so, rather than having one openly bloodthirsty party, and another—unconvincingly—playing the role of powerless, bumbling humanitarian.
Please keep donate Gaza especially if you, as reader, has [background] International Relation [whatever universities]. IR Graduate means [you must, at least] get some semester [about] studying Middle East [in macro, not specifically Gaza].
We need more people to share fundraisers instead of only talking about Gaza. Some people think that those in Gaza don’t need money but that’s wrong. Almost everyone lost their source of income while essentials, food & medicine get sold for astronomical prices. So I put my attempt in all social media as I can, in twitter / X, in substack [since October 2023 I put link donation], in bluesky or bsky, in threads, in instagram.
Link to donate World Food Programme - Palestine appeal: click here
[Daniel Brühl]
Most campaign shared or circulated in social media are for REAL people in Gaza. They’re legit. There are a lot of small campaigns for struggling families. This is their only lifeline. By donating & sharing, you are literally making history and alleviating part of their pain
Please do not rely on me alone for sharing your campaign. I’m only 1 person and sometimes I’m not online which is unreliable. I never ignore anybody on purpose but I have a very limited capacity & very little energy and time.
[Refaat Rafiq Alareer IF I MUST DIE] Refaat Rafiq Alareer was extremely hungry, November 2023, days before Refaat killed by Israel airstrike. If November 2023 already [one-by-one Gazan] extremely famine, extremely hungry, imagine November 2025 or more than 2 years Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.
Thanks for reading Prada’s Newsletter.
This article comes at the perfect time. My AI modl was offline!