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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A group of technology companies and lobbyists want the European Commission (EC) to take action to reduce the region's reliance on foreign-owned digital services and infrastructure.
In an open letter to EC President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, the group of nearly 100 organizations proposed the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to invest in key technology and lessen dependence on US corporations.
The letter points to recent events, including the farcical Munich Security Conference, as a sign of "the stark geopolitical reality Europe is now facing," and says that building strategic autonomy in key sectors is now an urgent imperative for European countries.
Signatories include aerospace giant Airbus, France's Dassault Systèmes, European cloud operator OVHcloud, chip designer SiPearl, open source biz Nextcloud, and a host of others including organizations such as the European Startup Network.
OVHcloud said the group was calling "for a collective industrial policy strategy to strengthen Europe's competitiveness and strategic autonomy. We are convinced this is the premise of what we hope will be a larger movement of the entire ecosystem."
Proposals include the sovereign infrastructure fund, which would be able to support public investment, especially in capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, with "significant additional commitment of funds allocated and/or underwritten" by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and national public funding bodies.
It also suggests there should be a formal requirement for the public sector to "buy European" and source their IT requirements from European-led and assembled solutions, while recognizing that these may involve complex supply chains with foreign components.
[...] This isn't the first time that concerns about US hegemony in technology have been raised. Recently, the DARE project launched to develop hardware and software based on the open RISC-V architecture, backed by EuroHPC JU funding, while fears have been aired about the dominance of American-owned cloud companies in the European market.
Such concerns have been heightened by recent actions, such as the suggestion that the US might cut off access to Starlink internet services in Ukraine as a political bargaining strategy. Starlink owner Elon Musk later denied that this would ever happen.
The letter notes that these issues have already been set out by the EuroStack initiative, made up of many of the companies that signed the letter to EC President von der Leyen. The Register asked the European Commission to comment.
On the other side of the pond, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) recently published a report claiming that US companies face "substantial financial burdens" due to the European Union's digital regulations.
It says that US tech companies are losing "billions" through having to comply with regulations such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and having to obtain user consent for their data to be used for advertising purposes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 22 2025, @01:11PM
They couldn't lose billions doing something, if they weren't doing that something. Basically, they're saying that they could be making more, if it weren't for those pesky rules. We assume they're still making profit, but it is possible for a business to lose money, but still lose less money than if they discontinued the activity in question.
These losses can be achieved in a subtler fashion too. If a business does business in the EU as well as elsewhere in the world, they often have to follow the EU rules elsewhere. For example, I work in Wyoming, US yet I have received basic training on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Wyoming doesn't have a thing concerning data protection and the US is relatively limited. But my employer has some dealings in the EU - and more importantly, gets a lot of business from EU businesses that have to follow this regulation (a regulated business doesn't get a pass if a third party violates GDPR with the business's data). These regulations can be very sticky.
So someone could lose some money in order to comply with a regulation that they aren't required to follow, merely because their customers are so required.
My view is that there is some case to be made for these regulations, but the regulators are notorious for their disinterest in reducing the cost of regulation. And there's a lot of EU (or member state) regulation that sticks (mandatedcompliance with ISO standards are another example). What turns these into naked protectionism are funding policies like the proposed one above where EU companies are subsidized (here with alleged infrastructure funding) in large part so that they can afford to comply with regulation.
Keep in mind the alleged problem: big US companies dominating EU markets. Well, why aren't the big EU businesses dominating their own home field? My take is that the reason is that government isn't paying them to do so. This is a common problem with the EU approach (and shows up in a lot of other places too). Once they get reliant on public funding to do anything, then they won't do it otherwise.