American technology firms are increasingly dominating the world’s digital economy, and Europe’s answer is a familiar one: worry, panel discussion, and a lot of talk about sovereignty while the infrastructure stays in someone else’s hands. On DW’s The Dip, in an episode dated Sept. 4, 2026, Kassandra Sundt put the problem bluntly when she said, "Europe is dependent on American tech. That much is clear. Whether it's the cloud, the apps on your phone or increasingly artificial intelligence." She asked whether Europe was already "a colony of American companies" and whether European alternatives could challenge U.S. tech titans before China took a share of the market.
The Stack Runs the Show
Cristina Caffarra, co-founder and chair of the Euro Stack Initiative, cut through the usual app-store theatre and pointed to the machinery underneath. She said the issue was not about apps and services but about "the stack, the infrastructure on which those services run." Europe, she said, had spent the last generation trying to regulate companies for bad behavior instead of addressing the infrastructure layer. The power, she said, sits in hardware, software, connectivity, operations and controls. Europe, in her words, does not own or control the infrastructure on which its life depends.
That dependence is not a minor inconvenience. Sundt said the European Commission says the EU relies on non-EU countries for 80% of its key digital projects. Caffarra’s response was pure contempt for the Brussels apparatus: "The European Commission is the last we should be listening to over here." She called Europe "a digital colony" and said China would take a significant piece because of its capability, authoritarianism and will. She also said Europe has tremendous capabilities, calling it "an economic superpower" with incredible talent, companies and capabilities. The contradiction sits there, neat and ugly. Plenty of talent. Little control.
Raphaël Auphan, chief operating officer at Proton, described a market where dependence becomes a trap. He said Proton started 12 years ago as a project at CERN in Geneva and has grown into a company of more than 650 people with a million users around the world. He said he had previously worked at Quant, a European search engine out of France with a privacy focus, before joining Proton two years ago. He said he chose smaller tech companies because, as a European, it was important to fight for European values and be part of the growth story of European companies.
Locked In, Priced Out
Auphan said digital sovereignty means having the choice of alternatives and being able to invest in them as a private player or individual. Proton’s survey last year found that 74% of public listed companies in Europe relied on U.S. email services. That’s not a footnote. It’s the operating system of dependence. Auphan said digital sovereignty is about having an equivalent email player in Europe that can provide an alternative to Microsoft and Google.
He also described the threat in language that sounds less like a market and more like a hostage note. The "kill switch" risk, he said, refers to companies being told, through a major price increase or another notification, that they will not be able to use their digital email services. Companies had come to Proton, he said, because they were exposed to that risk and wanted digital infrastructure resilient to it. He said an international organization with 5,000 users worldwide, operations everywhere in the world including Europe, and headquarters in Europe came to Proton because it could not be sure Google would run for it under the current U.S. administration.
Caffarra widened the frame. She said 90% or 85 of the cloud sector in Europe is owned by others, and that AI models and applications would still run on infrastructure owned by hyperscalers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Europe cannot be sovereign in anything unless it tackles its dependencies in the layers below the application layer, she said. Sovereignty, in her telling, means creating assets that Europe controls and on which it can invest and capture value. Without that, she said, Europe is like somebody building an extension on somebody else’s house.
Who Owns the House
Auphan said Proton invested early in its own infrastructure, including its own data centers, and that about 10% of its staff run its internal clouds. He said Proton is not dependent on any U.S. cloud provider. But he also said the company still relies on Nvidia, AMD or Intel chipsets, and that Europe needs to invest over the whole stack for autonomy and digital sovereignty. The dependency doesn’t vanish. It just shifts one layer down.
He said more than 100,000 organizations and businesses of different sizes rely on Proton’s products and already see them as competitive with Microsoft and Google. Large organizations, he said, often become locked into a Microsoft or hyperscaler ecosystem over time, making it difficult to untangle. In Europe, he said, using multiple components can create more independence and autonomy, while a full Microsoft or Google stack can leave IT "completely, in jail for the coming years." That’s the language of the cage, not the marketplace.
Caffarra said Europe has innovation, strong universities and a startup creation rate higher than the U.S., but it struggles to productize ideas and turn startups into products because of funding and fragmented markets. She said Europe saves €1.4 trillion a year, compared with €0.7 trillion in the U.S., and that pension funds and insurance companies sit on €14 trillion of assets under management. Yet, she said, they send money to retirement homes and bonds instead of funding European tech, while sending €300 billion to the U.S. stack to fund it. CEOs of big companies, she said, should put billions behind European tech.
Auphan said Europe has lost an appetite for risk and has invested heavily in medium tech, especially automotive, over the last 15 to 20 years, instead of tech that could give it an edge. He said Europe should invest in its future, with European entrepreneurs and startups winning customer by customer through excellent products. Caffarra said Europe can be active from software to hardware to data centers, cloud and AI, and that it is not trying to replace American companies but to increase its share of its own market. She said the continent needs capital allocators and funders, not deference to people whose opinions on the tech industry do not matter.
The whole exchange had the polished desperation of a continent trying to buy back control after handing the keys to someone else. The language was all sovereignty, autonomy and values. The facts were about dependence, lock-in and infrastructure owned elsewhere. The gap between the two is where Europe’s digital order lives.