European users step up bid to break away from Big Tech

Share Copy Link Share on X Share on Linkedin Share on Facebook In the vanguard of European efforts to wean themselves off Big Tech is the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Credit: Cristina Ionescu / Shutterstock.com. On 1 April 2026, a report in the online politics title Politico discussed how European Union (EU) lawmakers had fallen out with the European Commission over plans to open up a dialogue with Washington over the EU’s tech regulation rules. The lawmakers fear such a move risks watering down the EU’s digital services laws and could block plans to step up Europe’s path to greater tech sovereignty. According to Alexandra Geese from the Greens political party, allowing US Government officials to take part in talks about the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act would let (tech) “platforms … grade their own homework” — amounting to a “fatal decision for our companies and our democracy,” she told Politico. It is this quandary over the power and reach of Big Tech that is driving European organisations to take bolder steps to water down the reach of Silicon Valley by using home-grown or open-source products. Schleswig-Holstein’s alternative to Microsoft In the vanguard of European efforts to wean themselves off Big Tech is the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Schleswig-Holstein is Germany’s northernmost federal state, located between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, bordering Denmark to the north, with Kiel as its capital. According to a Financial Times (FT) article, Schleswig-Holstein first considered moving away from Microsoft around 15 years ago. Then, the driver for action was a financial one, with state officials unhappy about the growing cost of software licences, as well as being reliant on a sole provider. Now, continued concerns about Europe’s political relations with the US, exacerbated by President Trump’s fractious relationship with the continent, exemplified by his threat to annex Greenland, have pushed a desire for digital sovereignty higher up the political – and technology – agenda. That Schleswig-Holstein has seen some success in its efforts to forge a different tech path has raised the stakes. The state’s progress reached its peak two years ago after its cabinet, the FT reported, “agreed to begin actively replacing all Microsoft products and services with open-source alternatives — freely available software that developers can build upon and tweak.” However, the move away from Microsoft’s products and instead adopting open-source alternatives is not without its challenges. Coping with cybersecurity risks, for example, is a particular concern, the FT reported. Instead of just having to work solely with Microsoft’s products from a cybersecurity point of view, Schleswig-Holstein now must understand the threats and manage the risks from multiple providers. Other public sector initiatives In a similar vein to the state of Schleswig-Holstein, the French Government has long been a proponent of open source, and recent mandates have only accelerated the timeline. In January 2026, the French Government announced that French civil servants would stop using US-based video tools (Teams, Zoom, Webex) by 2027 in favour of a homegrown, open-source alternative called Visio. Other European public organisations to move away from Big Tech are the Austrian military, which transitioned to open-source office software to ensure secure, offline capabilities, and the Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs, which announced a move towards LibreOffice in 2025 to reduce vendor lock-in. It has not all been plain sailing in the public sector, however. The city of Munich was one of the first governments in the world over 20 years ago to attempt a full-scale migration to open source. In 2004, it launched the LiMux project, replacing Windows with Linux and Microsoft Office with LibreOffice across 15,000 government PCs. Then a new city government came in amid a narrative that Linux had failed. Munich’s political leadership then changed further, and now the city is moving back again towards open source under a broader EU sovereignty policy. T Cloud Public takes on the hyperscalers Private companies are more likely to be cagey about their systems than their public sector counterparts. And yet a trend towards sovereign cloud adoption is emerging among some European enterprises. For example, Deutsche Telekom’s Open Telekom Cloud (OTC), which started in 2016 as a public cloud solution for highly regulated industries, has now evolved into a European alternative to hyperscalers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. The platform is now transitioning to a new name, T Cloud Public, while also undergoing significant expansion to compete directly with US hyperscalers. By the end of 2026, the platform is expected to further close the feature gap with US providers while delivering scalable infrastructure and specialised AI services at a competitive level. The reality, however, is that the number of alternative solutions to those of Big Tech remains tiny. Innovation never stands still, and the US technology juggernaut has long since shifted gears to spend outlandish sums of money on AI and data centres. And yet, despite that spending, alternative solutions such as DeepSeek and Anthropic have emerged. And there will be others. The mantra may be that if the alternative technology is good enough, then organisations can and will make a choice to use it.