Time for the gloves to come off in digital policy

It is official: the US wants global digital domination and nothing less will do. On 23 July 2025, the White House published an Executive Order that does not mince its words:

‘The United States must … ensure that American AI technologies, standards, and governance models are adopted worldwide ... and secure our continued technological dominance. This order establishes a coordinated national effort to support the American AI industry by promoting the export of full-stack American AI technology packages.’

The first-mover concept that spearheading the AI revolution ensures the top spot in the global pecking order is not new. Russia Today quoted Vladimir Putin in 2017 saying that ‘whoever leads in AI will rule the world’. Beijing, too, sees tech policy as the continuation of geopolitical competition by other means. And keen observers like Ophélie Coelho, Anu Bradford or Bruno Maçães have chronicled how geopolitics has seeped into digital policy.

Europe has always viewed Chinese digital overtures with suspicion, and Russian ones even more so. America was different. US Big Tech has long dominated digital technology in Europe, but that triggered little more than mild annoyance or injured technological pride on the continent. The US was the senior partner, but it was seen as a partnership all the same.

The 2025 Executive Order still mentions ‘allies’, but speaks the language of empire. It mandates an ‘all of government’ push to promote US companies’ control of digital technologies in foreign countries. Trump has forced tech giant NVIDIA to divert 15 per cent of Chinese chip sale revenues to government coffers. His government has also taken a ten per cent stake in Intel, the leading US chip manufacturer. In digital tech, US corporate and political power are increasingly indistinguishable.

Meanwhile, Brussels’ foreign digital policy has concentrated on defending regulatory red lines. The official approach is that central legislative pillars like the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act or AI Act must be protected against Silicon Valley or White House intimidation, even as the EU unilaterally accepts humiliating US tariffs on its goods and apparently soft-pedals antitrust enforcement against Google. At the same time, European civil society organizations have cried foul over the privileges the Commission extended to US tech giants as it finalized detailed AI rules this summer.

A regulatory approach is no longer sufficient. In-house control over digital infrastructure is a matter of self-determination. Tech companies like Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft have become irreplaceable in our lives and institutions. Our reliance on their products and services weakens public authorities’ ability to impose regulations to restrict their operation. How much can a government running on Azure and Windows push Microsoft around, if the latter has the power to pull the plug?

With foreign governments exploiting such dependencies for geopolitical influence and extortion, it is clear that we are at a crucial and dangerous juncture. Still, the dominant Brussels mindset embraces appeasement, especially of the US. In the digital arena, the EU is still playing a rules-based version of nobody-gets-hurt judo, whereas the other major players have shifted to something more like mixed martial arts. If Europe wants to wrest some control over its digital future and see its values solidly embedded in the tech stack used on its turf, it will have to make that happen itself.

The Russian threat on Europe’s Eastern flank provides Trump with his key bargaining chip. Time and again, EU leaders admit that serious pushback against Washington tech bullying will endanger US commitment to European security. Seen that way, a robust and credible European security architecture would also be a boon for Brussels in other policy fields, allowing it to confront the US without having its hands tied behind its back.

There is no need to panic and immediately shut down every Android phone or Apple computer. But the direction of travel must be clear: digital chokepoints should be brought back under EU domestic control. The different Eurostack initiatives have mapped these chokepoints and offered roadmaps to boost European independence across the whole gamut of strategic digital technologies – from critical raw materials and hardware to connected appliances and cloud services all the way to software and AI.¹ But at present, we lack the EU leadership to enable us to push these ideas forward with the necessary direction and determination.

Digital self-determination has a price tag attached to it. It requires not only taxpayer money but also withdrawing from services and the convenience we have come to rely on. Trading WhatsApp for home-grown alternatives is irritating, and there will be features that users will sorely miss. Many European products lag the US market leaders, and switching will often feel like a step back. But it is a sacrifice worth making to regain collective digital sovereignty. Like the green transition – a fundamental shift from one way of generating energy to another – regaining digital control requires major investments and determined policy.

At the same time, this is also an enormous chance for Europe. The business models of many tech behemoths are extractive at their core. They milk users and clients for data and money, concentrating power and wealth in the hands of the few, while transforming everything from educational systems to healthcare with little democratic control. Here is an opportunity to fuse European innovation and expertise with public support through funding and targeted public procurement, to foster a home-grown tech scene based on European values – for example non-discrimination, fair access and reasonable privacy – and boost self-determination.

European start-up executives may not care where the money comes from that allows them to scale up. Public authorities, in contrast, should watch out. They need to ensure that foreign juggernauts and their copious capital are not permitted to pick the cherries off the European tech cake. By being willing to take risks with public money and invest in R&D – just as venture capitalists do – and to push back against tech founders for whom commercial motives and global corporate success may crowd out everything else, Europe can create a dynamic and disruptive tech sector of its own.

In the meantime, the European public’s criticism of digital tech in general is swelling, particularly in response to social media and children’s wellbeing, and the political division it can stoke and the violence it has incited with both careless and deliberate posts. Many European users have abandoned X, appalled by Elon Musk’s antics and contortion of the platform. They may well be willing to base their digital product choices – which phone to use, which messenger app, which cloud service – on such political considerations too, not just on inertia and convenience.

For now, navigating digital policy requires a mix of realism and pragmatism: boosting self-determination in the field is a stepwise process. It involves trade-offs and concessions that are the unavoidable price of decades of strategic complacency. EU Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunen has ‘Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy’ as her dossier. Fulfilling that mission will require a shift of gears, however, as digital superpowers’ own mandates actively try to sabotage her mission.

Washington’s declaration of digital imperialism is an invitation to realize that self-determination in tech is the prelude to democratic digitization. Given Brussels politics’ notorious inertia, Donald Trump throwing down the gauntlet in digital power politics may have been just the push the EU needed finally to take its own gloves off.