Europe

Deepl translation of this Dutch article by Marloes de Koning in NRC Handelsblad (30 Dec. 2025)

Cristina Caffarra is wearing a dark red evening gown. Her hair is styled in a sleek wave, Beatrix-style. With a smile, she walks around the tables and introduces people to each other during the speakers' dinner prior to the annual conference she organises in Brussels. This time, her theme is digital sovereignty.

It is 29 January, just over a week after Donald Trump began his second term as president. The bosses of American tech companies sat in the front row at his inauguration. The Trump administration, together with the leaders of the tech companies, forms a front against European tech regulation. According to the new American president, enforcing those laws is tantamount to unfairly taxing American companies. And that makes him angry.

Governments, companies and citizens in Europe are vulnerable. Over the past decades, they have become almost completely dependent on American tech companies. This realisation is causing growing unease in the European capital. The motley crew gathering for drinks and dinner in Brussels on 29 January believes it is high time for action. They believe that European governments should do some of their procurement in Europe, rather than spending all their software and data storage budgets in America.

Italian economist and competition expert Cristina Caffarra is one of the driving forces behind this group. She uses the hashtag “EuroStack” in her efforts to spur European governments into action. Entrepreneurs, academics, tech lawyers and politicians from different countries usually communicate online and via Signal. The chic dinner at the Bellevue Museum in Brussels is an opportunity to get to know each other better. Hostess Caffarra has earned well from jobs for large American tech companies such as Apple and Amazon and the European Commission (in lawsuits against Google) and can now afford to do what she enjoys and considers important. She is good at networking and giving pep talks. And she does not mince her words, clearly preferring doers from the business world to politicians and think tankers.

We need to get cracking now, Caffarra kicks off as she says a few words during the starter. The next day, she repeats this from a high stool on stage, wearing another red dress that stands out among the suits. ‘In previous years, we were optimistic. Looking back, you could say that Europe was sleepwalking. (...) Now, the prevailing feeling is that we are under serious threat in Europe.’

Caffarra has seen from the inside how the power of the big American tech companies has grown. European companies were taken over and could not compete with the Americans. Talented Europeans emigrated. Entrepreneurs in need of capital moved to the US. And the EU rapidly turned into what Caffarra calls a ‘digital colony of America.’ It frustrates her, and she wants this development to stop. But how do you get entrepreneurs, politicians and regulators in 27 member states to take action?

Launching a movement

Together with another passionate Italian economist, Francesca Bria, and the boss of messaging service Signal, Meredith Wittaker, Caffarra is organising a meeting in the European Parliament in September 2024 entitled “Toward European Digital Independence”. The subtitle is “Building the EuroStack”. A long list of speakers explains to politicians what it will take to make European alternatives to the overwhelming American tech offering succeed.

In hindsight, the meeting marks the launch of a movement. The speakers and some of the attendees found common ground on the theme of digital sovereignty. They started a Signal group and met online a few times. The term “EuroStack” rolls off the tongue nicely and helps to clarify that digital infrastructure consists of layers. A “stack” that starts with the (submarine) cables and ends with the software. Only by cultivating serious European players in all areas, from cables and data centres to chips and clouds, can you achieve a degree of independence. According to Caffarra and his colleagues, this can be achieved through demand. From autumn 2024 onwards, they attach the hashtag “EuroStack” to all kinds of communications.

At the dinner prior to Caffarra's conference, they are physically together again for the first time. Trump's re-election has significantly fuelled the sense of urgency. Among those present are many tech entrepreneurs, but also regulators, bankers, consultants, politicians and journalists. The atmosphere is informal and cheerful. A German MEP from the Greens and a French specialist in tech regulation are engaged in lively conversation at one of the round tables.

The Frenchman is delighted. The Brussels lobby group for major American tech companies, the Chamber of Progress, has calculated what it would cost the EU to replace the services of current American tech companies in Europe with its own products. The result: at least 25 times the The calculation was leaked to the media outlet Politico, which published it that morning. When he heard about it, he high-fived his EuroStack allies, he says. In his view, this is recognition that EuroStack is gaining traction. ‘Otherwise, they would just ignore us.’

In the article, Chamber of Progress uses the term ‘digital curtain.’ The suggestion is that Europeans are putting themselves behind a digital curtain when they try to cobble together all the technology themselves – a reference to life behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

The EuroStack people are not advocating a total disconnection from the US. Their message is: governments, stimulate demand for alternatives to the services of large American companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Make a percentage – for example, 20 or 30 per cent – of government spending European. This will stimulate demand and encourage European companies to develop those products and services. In this way, European companies can flourish alongside the American giants. And freedom of choice will be created. Nevertheless, with their digital curtain warning, they are cleverly touching on a sensitive issue. Because EuroStack sounds attractive, but it is a hashtag behind which lies a question mark. How do you free Europe from the American digital stranglehold? And how do you sell something that does not yet exist?

Fragmented industry

Frank Karlitschek feels a sense of responsibility; he wants to help build the European “tech stack”. With his company NextCloud, the German software developer and entrepreneur offers office software similar to Microsoft, but with two major differences: it is European and open source. Two hundred people work there, mostly from Stuttgart and Berlin.

Karlitschek works closely with Caffarra. In addition to being an entrepreneur, he is also an activist for privacy and open internet standards, ensuring that software remains accessible and affordable. He is someone who feels at home behind his computer but is less comfortable at networking events than Caffarra. This is evident in the many photos taken after meetings with politicians, in which they appear together throughout the year. Caffarra always poses professionally, with a big smile, while Karlitschek looks a little uncomfortable.

Interest in NextCloud's products and the idea of a “EuroStack” is growing exponentially as Trump and his vice-president JD Vance seek confrontation with the EU. During a speech at the annual security conference in Munich, Vance says, among other things, that Europe is undermining itself from within. Democracy in the EU is no longer functioning, he says, partly due to European regulations for the digital world – which in practice mainly affect large American social media companies such as Meta and X.

Caffarra is inundated with calls, she says in mid-February on the phone from her car. ‘I'm on Zoom eight hours a day. It's like during the coronavirus pandemic.’ She notices that the message is getting through in France and Sweden. The position of Europe's industrial powerhouse Germany, which is on the eve of an election, is still a question mark. Caffarra wants European industry to speak out in favour of European procurement and is discussing this with her contacts in the business community. In mid-March, this results in a joint letter from European CEOs to the President of the European Commission and the European Commissioner for Digital Affairs. ‘You cannot regulate yourself out of a position of lagging behind,’ it says, among other things. The long list of names below it illustrates above all how unknown most European tech companies are. There are also bigger players among them, such as the CEO of Airbus.

Karlitschek is extremely busy. Everyone wants information about his “European alternative”. But NextCloud is not a European Microsoft. It only offers office software for things like video calling, collaborating on documents and what resembles Excel services. But it has no cloud and does not make the specialist software for businesses that “hyperscalers” such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google do offer.

What makes these companies so attractive to their customers is that a whole world lies behind a single point of contact. Anyone in Europe who wants to buy something similar has to do business with all kinds of small and medium-sized companies. And take into account the possibility that these technical “solutions” (ICT jargon) may not quite fit together.

If the European tech industry wants to have any chance of flourishing in the shadow of the American giants, companies will have to ensure that their products are interchangeable and can be used in conjunction with each other, Karlitschek explained in a video call in early March. ‘I strongly believe that we need to work together,’ he said. He sounded somewhat subdued and busy. ‘It has to work, for the future of Europe. But I'm not sure if we as Europe can deliver that.’

And so the NextCloud CEO is trying to get the fragmented European ICT industry moving. On 4 March, Karlitschek will fly to Milan for a EuroStack meeting with mainly European entrepreneurs. The aim is to take steps towards a joint European ICT offering. They agree on a first step towards a joint European standard for clouds.

Politics gets the message

In the Netherlands, ICT expert Bert Hubert has been passionately advocating the need for greater digital autonomy for years. The former entrepreneur and former intelligence service regulator gives lectures on the subject, writes blogs and LinkedIn posts, and collaborates with researchers. He has found little resonance. But after Trump's inauguration, his inbox has been overflowing with requests to speak, and journalists call him daily. He has been given a leading role in an item by Arjen Lubach on digital sovereignty and is occasionally recognised on the street and on the train.

Hubert is adept at using metaphors to make complex technology accessible to laypeople. To explain what dependence on an American hyperscaler entails, for example, he shows slides with pictures of coffee machines. We can all make coffee, but in recent years, IT administrators have switched en masse to Senseo, and now they can only buy those expensive coffee pods from that one brand. In the spring, Bert Hubert joins EuroStack. He quickly becomes part of the active core.

At first glance, the EuroStack movement appears to be successful. Under the leadership of Francesca Bria, the EuroStack recommendations are compiled into a voluminous report that is embraced by most political groups in the European Parliament in early June. And in April, thanks in part to German think tanks with good ties to the CDU, EuroStack is mentioned in the German Elon Musk inadvertently helps by interfering in the German elections via his platform X and supporting the radical right-wing AfD.

Politically, the message seems to have landed. Bert Hubert attends a series of meetings in Brussels, including an hour-long conversation with European Commissioner for Digitalisation Henna Virkkunen on a hot day in July. Afterwards, Caffarra is delighted and convinced that the message is getting through, as Virkkunen has repeatedly said that the European Commission is working on the tendering rules. Caffarra plays the schoolteacher for a moment when they are back outside. ‘Class, I am proud of you.’

Sovereignty washing

American companies are cleverly responding to the European desire for technological sovereignty by suddenly calling all kinds of products and services “sovereign”. Microsoft offers a sovereign cloud solution, as do Amazon and Google. The companies promise, for example, to use data centres in Europe. Or they add an extra – European – layer of management to their company.

Does this give Europeans the independence they desire? The ultimate owners remain American. Caffarra's group calls this “sovereignty washing”, analogous to “green washing”, the established term for companies that pretend to be sustainable.

American companies say exactly what their customers want to hear. Satisfied customers, with whom they have long-term relationships. The small European companies are the newcomers, who look and sound different. They are being cautiously sniffed out. European companies and governments are starting pilot projects, but are still hardly buying in any other way.

NextCloud organises presentations to dispel the unfamiliarity. Initially, the company had booked a small room for fifty people. More than three hundred turned up. On 5 June, it will also be packed when they organise a “summit” at the Mariott hotel in Munich with panels on sovereignty. Caffarra gets a laugh when she calls the idea that more European regulation can build a tech industry ‘a collective hallucination’.

The company is bending over backwards to make the threshold for users as low as possible. In their NextCloud Hub 10 update, they are adjusting the colour palette. Are users accustomed to a Word-style word processor being blue, Excel green and PowerPoint red after years of experience with Microsoft? Fine, then NextCloud will use similar colours.

However, government departments that are actually making the switch are still few and far between. Since March 2024, the government of the state of Schleswig-Holstein has been replacing Microsoft services with open-source alternatives for its 30,000 civil servants. An Austrian and a French ministry are following suit. The opposite is also happening. Parts of the government, such as the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, are continuing the migration to Microsoft that was already underway. They do not see any European alternatives in the short term.

Politics and ICT procurement are two completely separate worlds, writes Bert Hubert on his blog. ‘Regardless of what parliaments and ministries say, the procurement department will continue to buy what it has always bought.’

Cristina Caffarra gives her pep talks almost daily. As the year progresses, she increasingly does so via video link, because travelling is no longer possible. In July, she launched her own podcast, Escape. She remains enthusiastic and outspoken on LinkedIn. However, her posts reveal growing frustration. ‘European elites are destroying Europe themselves,’ she writes, for example, when Europeans react with shock in early December to the American national security strategy, which is openly anti-EU. ‘They talk about their values and the wonderful European way of life, but they have no interest whatsoever in building their own digital infrastructure.’

During his presentations, Hubert is always asked the same question. What is the alternative to the American offering? What can we switch to? And at the end of 2025, he still has to give the same answer as a year earlier. Namely, that European companies need to get their act together.

He is disappointed with the attitude of European companies, especially cloud providers such as Hetzner, Leaseweb (Dutch), OVH and Ionos. ‘You would expect them to be at the forefront of the battle. But instead, they say, “It's not our fault that people don't buy our stuff”.’

The big boys

On 18 November, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz jointly take to the stage in a former gas factory near Berlin Airport. France and Germany – the driving force behind the EU – have organised a summit on European digital sovereignty. There are more than a thousand guests and ministers from 23 EU Member States.

The focus is on plans to make it easier to exclude non-European companies from tenders, for example with reference to national security. And on “innovate first, regulate later”. There are no anti-American statements. The ministers and state secretaries present, including those from the Netherlands, sign a declaration.

It explicitly refers to autonomy and freedom of choice, not sovereignty, because everyone knows that complete decoupling is an illusion and no one wants to unnecessarily antagonise the Trump administration. Frank Karlitschek of NextCloud is one of fifteen CEOs with a seat at the round table with Merz and Macron. That sounds more special than it is, he says two days later in a video call. They had fifteen minutes in total – “you were allowed to say something for two minutes” – and then a group photo.

The summit proves that the theme of digital sovereignty has reached the highest level of European politics. Nevertheless, Karlitschek has mixed feelings about it. ‘It's becoming very broad and going in all directions. I'm a little afraid that we're losing focus.’

The threatening language of Trump and the tech bosses has also led Europe to realise that it needs to become more militarily independent from the US. And that's where the money comes in. Within NATO, it has been agreed that European governments will significantly increase their defence spending. And that industry is not standing still.

Sitting at the same table with Karlitschek are representatives from, among others, the defence and electronics company Thales and the French fighter jet manufacturer Dassault. Defence is touching on digital independence. The themes overlap in areas such as cyber security. There is money to be distributed and therefore to be earned. With his open source background and as a privacy activist, Karlitschek does not immediately feel at home in the world of defence orders.

‘We punched above our weight’

Now that the message seems to have landed politically, it is time for EuroStack to move on to the next phase. ‘Until now, we were a loose collective. Me, a few CEOs, a LinkedIn channel. We punched above our weight,’ says Caffarra in a telephone interview at the end of October. In November, when the European summit takes place in Berlin, Caffarra and Karlitschek register EuroStack as a foundation in the German capital. Caffarra becomes chairman, Karlitschek one of the board members. Others include the CEO of Proton, the Swiss provider of secure email and cloud services, and a number of French and German tech entrepreneurs and investors.

The foundation should help with the transition from ‘talk to action,’ according to the statement. And that it is time to start ‘building’ the European offering. What this means in concrete terms is not immediately clear. It is certainly not an industry organisation, says Caffarra by telephone. There are already enough of those in Brussels. Caffarra hopes that EuroStack will primarily bring together supply and demand in Europe. But the foundation is not a consortium of EuroStack companies. It is not a quality mark. And it is certainly not a think tank, “they just talk endlessly”. She reacts as if stung by a wasp to the suggestion that the EuroStack foundation is somewhat like an NGO lobbying for something, namely European digital sovereignty. ‘Nobody pays me. I advocate for a cause I believe in. In my own time and with my own money. When people pay you, they think they can give you orders.’

She is negative about politics in Europe. ‘There is no leadership, no vision,’ she said in an interview with Bloomberg TV just before Christmas. ‘But the industry is on the move. I think we're going to see a lot of confidence in European tech.’

Initially, the EuroStack appeal was mainly ‘Buy European’ (aimed at governments), then ‘Sell European’ (aimed at companies), and now it's ‘Fund European’. Caffarra believes the latter will succeed. She mentions new European tech funds, including those from (American) Sequoia Capital and the Swiss-based investment fund Lakestar. And she hints on the phone at funds whose names she does not yet want to mention, including those from wealthy European families who would like to invest in European tech, but want to use EuroStack's advice in doing so. EuroStack has successfully helped put digital autonomy on the agenda, concludes ICT expert Bert Hubert. ‘It took an Italian power lady who has nothing to do with computers to get things moving.’ In his view, a movement like EuroStack cannot do more than that: the foundation does not produce technology itself, and you cannot stand on the sidelines indefinitely and shout that everyone should do things differently.

Hubert: ‘European industry is sidelined. But then they are also not interested in taking the lead in finding a solution.’ His conclusion: ‘EuroStack faces the impossible challenge of connecting customers who don't want to buy with suppliers who don't want to make. Strategically, that's a dead end.’

He decides to distance himself from it and leaves the EuroStack Signal groups with a farewell message.