We tend to take for granted the infrastructure on which our economies and societies run – until something goes wrong. Just ask residents of Spain and Portugal, who were suddenly faced with a total blackout last April, when a series of cascading voltage surges shut down their electricity grids. Both Spain and Portugal are now pursuing massive investments in strengthening their grids’ resilience. But citizens should not have to wait until after disaster strikes for their leaders to commit to investing in critical infrastructure, which nowadays includes cloud services.

From storing and backing up data to powering and deploying artificial intelligence ( AI ) systems, “the cloud” underpins the digital economy. But control over this infrastructure is highly concentrated, with just three US companies – Amazon, Google and Microsoft – controlling over 60% of the global market. As a result, the failure of just one of these services can cost the global economy billions of dollars. That is not a farfetched scenario. In fact, such failures happen regularly. Just last month, an Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) outage disrupted the functioning of thousands of services worldwide, including messaging apps, banking platforms and home security cameras. Days later, Microsoft Azure suffered a similar global outage.

So far, such events have been accidental. But cloud infrastructure could be wielded as a geopolitical weapon. Since the three main providers operate under US jurisdiction, they are subject to the whims of American authorities, who may well compel them to suspend services as a means of punishment or coercion.

This, too, is hardly unrealistic. After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, late last year, US President Donald Trump slapped sanctions on the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – and Microsoft cancelled his email account. The disturbing reality is that there is a kill switch on much of the global digital economy, and Trump can flip it whenever he feels like doing so.

If the cloud services provided by these US behemoths were so technologically advanced – requiring such rare expertise and highly complex and expensive equipment – that others could not easily match them, then the risk might be worth taking. But they aren’t: European firms already have the ability to operate high-quality cloud services. The only reason these three US companies – two adjudged monopolists, and one alleged – achieved dominance in the first place is that they captured enough value elsewhere in the digital stack to subsidize their takeover of the cloud market.

As the risks of this near monopoly become increasingly apparent, a growing number of corporate and public buyers are considering alternatives. This aligns with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s goal, first articulated in 2019, of achieving European “tech sovereignty” – an effort that would encompass not only cloud services, but the entire digital stack.

While Europe has so far made little progress on this front, the American cloud giants are working to remove the threat to their market share: they have begun offering “sovereign cloud” options, which can supposedly meet Europe’s “unique digital sovereignty needs”. The claim is risible. Sovereignty entails the ability to set one’s own rules in one’s own jurisdiction, and that is not something US cloud providers can offer Europe.

To make real progress toward digital sovereignty, Europe must embrace a “break and build” strategy. The “break” part focuses on dismantling entrenched monopolies. To this end, Europe can rely on existing instruments for enforcing competition, such as the Digital Markets Act ( DMA ), which currently is largely unused. But it also must strengthen these instruments, by increasing staffing for enforcement. Likewise, unaccountable bilateral negotiations between the European Commission and tech firms must give way to open standard-setting processes, which would expand the set of experts contributing to DMA remedies.

The “build” component of this strategy entails identifying Europe’s shortcomings in sovereign digital infrastructure and addressing them on a sector-by-sector basis. When it comes to the cloud, the first step may be to ensure that government procurement of relevant services aligns with European sovereignty goals.

More broadly, the European Union should devise an industrial policy that fosters the development of essential technological capabilities, possibly guided by the Eurostack initiative or the freshly-minted Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium. Emerging projects like Eurosky and Staan, if sufficiently funded, could support this effort. The Airbus for AI proposal – under which middle powers would work together to create a public AI company, following the model that created Airbus in 1970 – also warrants consideration.

Last month’s AWS and Azure outages highlighted, yet again, the risks posed by US tech companies’ stranglehold over Europe’s digital infrastructure. EU leaders must do whatever it takes to mitigate them, before it is too late.

Robin Berjon is a technologist and governance expert at Supramundane Agency and a former vice-president of data governance at The New York Times and vice-chair of the board of directors at W3C.

Copyright: Project Syndicate