11 Oct 2025 Search

People mock US politicians for exaggerated claims about the importance of coal, even as coal is a steadily declining part of the energy mix here. Meanwhile, EU politicians are doing the same thing with the IT market. Somehow they assume that the problem of replacing today’s Big Tech platforms is as hard as it would have been back in the days when people were lining up for the latest Microsoft Windows version or Apple iPhone, and US-based firms such as Oracle were the leaders in large-scale server software. But all that has changed. It is not 1995 or 2007 any more, and EU policians need to catch up with the times. Johnny Ryan asks, Will Brussels ever stand up to Donald Trump and US big tech?

Trump is putting Europe under pressure to water down its digital rulebook. But now more than ever, Europe should hold large US tech firms accountable for anti-competitive market rigging, snooping on Europeans, and preying on our children. Brussels must hold Ireland accountable for failing to enforce Europe’s digital rules on US firms. Enforcement is not enough, however. Europe must progressively replace all non-EU “big tech” platforms and cloud services over the next decade with homegrown alternatives.

Fortunately, Europe is not just EU bureaucrats and European governments. In this case, Europe is every IT decision maker who wants to keep their project on track even as, well, all this. You wouldn’t make your production application depend on a database process running in a screen(1) session owned by the account of an edgelord employee who keeps getting called in to meetings with HR—and depending on a US-based Big Tech company that could do all kinds of counterproductive stuff for political reasons is the same thing at a larger scale.

Fortunately, the decision to break the dependency on Big Tech is as low-risk and justifiable as it has ever been. Big Tech product and service innovation has turned from value creation to value capture. Enshittification, growth hacking, and dark patterns have been the focus of tech here in the USA for a while, while international open source alternatives have caught up or passed the big names (and are often used within the Big Tech companies themselves). Threats to cut off the EU from Big Tech are mostly empty (notice how Meta has stopped threatening to pull out?)

Not only does the #Eurostack not have to be a top-down mega-project, it won’t work that way anyway. As Matt Stoller writes, in How to Overturn an Oligarchy, Liberty from concentrated power starts in our own minds, before it happens anywhere else. The real Eurostack is about decisions made at each individual IT-using firm, for each new project, to balance the risks of the open-source or EU-hosted alternative against the risks of Big Tech. And the risks on the Eurostack side are technical and project management risks that can be estimated and addressed, while the risks of Big Tech come down to predicting who one man will be mad at—something a CIO at an EU firm is going to have little insight into or control of.

And no, this isn’t just about IT decision-makers who are European citizens or working for EU companies. If musicians everywhere can play Eurorack synthesizers, then the #Eurostack can be international, too.