At a recent “counter-disinformation” conference at the University of Cambridge, European technologist Robin Berjon suggested that “military force” may have to be used against American tech platforms to bring them into line.
“I’m not advocating that we should go and start shooting Google just yet,” said Berjon. “But the thing is, if you want to do just regulation, you have to be willing to go all the way up to force.”
Later in the panel discussion, Berjon doubled down. “It’s not as if I want kinetic options,” he said. “But the more we push, the more it’s likely that they will use them. We just have to be ready.”
These are not the ravings of a lone madman. They represent a wider fear and hostility towards American tech platforms that has gripped Europe, one that has escalated rapidly in the year-and-a-half since President Trump took the oath of office for a second time.
For two decades, Europeans seemingly had little to say about the dominance of American tech platforms. From the late 2000s to today, there were few objections to the dominance of companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook in European markets. There was no cause for complaint from political elites – for much of this period, American tech companies were perfectly content to censor political dissidents, from Tommy Robinson in the UK to trans-critical feminists in France.
There are two approaches to Europe’s war on tech companies. The first involves the imposition of European and British hate-speech and anti-disinformation directives onto American companies. For example, both the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act were immediately used to exert influence over X’s content moderation policies – the latter, by forcing X to work with “expert” anti-hate organizations on content moderation (including the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which once vowed to “kill Musk’s Twitter.”) And the former, with a $140 million fine against X for daring to build a subscription revenue stream independent of boycottable advertising – and, similarly to the UK enforcement, refusing to give “disinformation” experts free access to X’s API data.
This approach, which does not seek to replace American tech platforms but rather restore the status quo of political censorship, bears the fingerprints of the Biden Administration. As well as funding many of the civil society organizations that shaped and now enforce the Digital Services Act, the previous administration directly encouraged the EU censorship regime via the US International Trade Administration, which encouraged the Europeans to punish American tech platforms for “harmful content.”
This was nothing less than the foreign outsourcing of government censorship – the First Amendment prevented the previous administration from directly suppressing disfavored online content, so it leaned on the EU, which has no such legal obstacles, to do it instead.
As insidious as this was, it still accepted the basic fact of US tech dominance, and was thus less radical than the path now being seriously entertained by Europe: the idea of “digital sovereignty,” which envisages a Europe-wide decoupling from American tech altogether.
The most serious initiative is the EuroStack plan, outlined in a 128-page blueprint published in February 2025 by the Bertelsmann Stiftung institute and led by the economist Francesca Bria.
Its starting premise is dependency: more than 80 percent of Europe’s digital technologies and infrastructures are imported, and 70 percent of the foundational AI models used globally originate in the United States, while European companies account for just 7 percent of global research spending on software and the internet.
To reverse this, the report proposes a mission-driven industrial strategy — one its authors compare to the euro and the single market itself — to build out every layer of a homegrown technology stack, spanning semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, software, and foundational AI models now dominated by non-European firms.
The Bertelsmann analysis estimates the transformation will take roughly a decade and require investments of around €300 billion, financed through a coordinated partnership of European governments and private industry.
If this were solely about sovereignty, one might be sympathetic. Doesn’t Europe deserve to have its own independent tech sector? And yet, the lack of objections to American tech during the era of peak censorship reveal the project’s true purpose: censoring the domestic opposition.
This is apparent in the EuroStack report itself, which blames American tech platforms for creating “fertile ground for fake news, conspiracy theories, and extremist ideologies.” Silicon Valley’s algorithms, the authors argue, prioritize “sensational content,” which “exacerbates social divisions, undermines democratic discourse, and supports the rise of populism, which exploits these dynamics to spread misinformation and erode institutional trust.”
In a recent op-ed, the report’s lead author went even further, arguing that American tech platforms have turned to “techno-nationalism” under the Trump Administration, an “authoritarian political project” rooted in “anti-democratic philosophies.”
As hysterical as this sounds, the EuroStack project is far from fringe. It has received the support of the European Parliament’s ITRE Committee (Industry, Research and Energy), and it has been officially endorsed by France and Germany in national strategies and is backed by over 200 European businesses. Despite its €300 billion price tag, the momentum is there to bring EuroStack to life.
European governments are increasingly sensitive to criticism of their sprawling censorship regime, as evidenced by recent online sparring on the matter between the French ministry of foreign affairs and the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Sarah Rodgers. Interestingly, the French government account was not defending French government policy – it was defending Germany’s online censorship regime.
The European war on tech therefore has two prongs: on the one hand, draconian like the Digital Services Act have the potential to force American tech platforms out of the continental market with crippling fines. On the other, a state-funded industrial strategy builds the European alternatives that will replace them, motivated by the increasingly frantic efforts of European governments to obtain the unobstructed power to censor their own citizens.
What can be done about this? There is diplomatic pressure, of course. The State Department under Trump has been admirable in its defense of free speech around the world, and its condemnation of foreign censorship laws. The administration could perhaps go further in tying trade and security agreements, which are still vital to Europe, to a cessation of hostilities against its tech stack.
The second bulwark is domestic: the EuroStack report correctly identifies data centers as critical infrastructure to support its domestic tech industry, calling for state funding to match the “enormous” spending on such projects in the US, with the caveat that such projects must be powered by renewable sources. Even with this concession, the report is clear that such projects are critical to the future of the tech sector.
If even the Europeans – more sensitive than even Californians when it comes to the politics of energy consumption – recognize this, it’s a clear signal that Americans, and the American right especially, should avoid jumping on the burgeoning bandwagon against AI data centers. With foreign governments set on destroying or displacing the American tech stack, it would be the height of foolishness to give them a helping hand domestically.
Above all, it must be remembered that this new hostility to the tech giants, from every corner of the progressive universe both foreign and domestic, is almost entirely downstream of Silicon Valley’s relative relaxation of political censorship in the past few years. This is not merely a matter of tech, but politics – the Europeans are determined to censor their own populist-right opposition, and are furious with American tech companies for their ambivalence towards this goal.
In such an environment, it is a blessing for not just Americans, but also ordinary Europeans, that so much of the tech stack is concentrated in the United States, where both the First Amendment and the Trump Administration can restrain the worst impulses of online censors. Let’s keep it that way.
Read the full article here