Interview Europeans are starting to worry that US companies’ dominance of the cloud represents untenable risk.

In a recent blog post titled “It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds,” Bert Hubert, an entrepreneur, software developer, and part-time technical advisor to the Dutch Electoral Council, articulated such concerns.

“We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire large-scale US business world bows to Trump’s dictatorial will, but we STILL are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds,” wrote Hubert.

There’s a real fear in Europe that if China ever disrupts Microsoft operations that we would be out in the cold

Hubert didn’t offer data to support that statement, but European Commission stats shows that close to half of European enterprises rely on cloud services, a market led by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM – all US-based companies.

While concern about cloud data sovereignty became fashionable back in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed secrets revealing the scope of US signals intelligence gathering and fled to Russia, data privacy worries have taken on new urgency in light of the Trump administration’s sudden policy shifts.

In the tech sphere, those moves include removing members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that safeguards data under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and the alleged flouting of federal data rules to advance policy goals. Europeans therefore have good reason to wonder how much they can trust data privacy assurances from US cloud providers amid their shows of obsequious deference to the new regime.

And there’s also a practical impetus for the unrest: organizations that use Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 have to decide whether they want to move to Microsoft’s cloud come October 14, 2025, when support officially ends. Microsoft is encouraging customers to move to Microsoft 365 which is tied to the cloud. But that looks riskier now than it did under less contentious transatlantic relations.

The Register spoke with Hubert about his concerns and the situation in which Europe now finds itself.

The Register: We’ve been through data sovereignty concerns before, particularly in the wake of the Snowden revelations a decade ago. What’s changed for Europeans since then?

Hubert: The major thing that changed is that last time around, Microsoft 365 was not that much of a thing. Whereas we are now seeing that most large enterprises have changed over to Microsoft 365 and put everything on the cloud. And that was not the case like 10 years ago or eight years ago.

So back then the question was, would you put your email there?

But if you look at a modern Microsoft desktop, it is actually configured in such a way that it’s very difficult to save a file on there that does not go to the cloud. It’s actually sort of barely possible to prevent that from happening. That’s the one thing that changed so much – there is just much more at stake, which increases people’s worries.

The other thing … was when Trump said, look, Ukraine, you’re on your own. And we’re not going to involve Europe with that in any way.

That was such a major insult to European governments, or maybe a shock to European governments. You have to realize these governments are on the brink of outsourcing their IT operations to the US.

And then we saw Trump sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) here in The Hague. The ICC has already indicated that most of their stuff runs on [Microsoft] Azure. They feel that they’re being locked out of their work right now.

I think these things combine, so there’s just much more on the cloud. And Trump is just being much scarier than last time around. And that has galvanized some thinking here and there.

Finally, there’s the other thing which The Register broke really well, is the Microsoft Exchange license expiration issue in October.

Many governments have to decide this week if they’re going to migrate to the new as yet unreleased version of Microsoft Exchange over summer, or if they’re going to give up and migrate to the cloud.

If you look at the government schedule of things, if you want to make this happen before October, then you would likely want to do this in August, maybe. Because then everyone is on holiday and here in Europe. So if you want to do it in August, the time to make that decision is like this month.

The Register: This is not the first time data sovereignty and security has been raised in the context of cloud computing. Have Europeans simply lost confidence in the assurances offered by US tech companies that their data won’t be subject to US demands?

Hubert: Microsoft and Amazon and Google have been talking this up for years now.

But it has only recently, if you look at the statements that these companies make, they went by legal first, these statements. And if you parse them carefully, and people have now parsed these statements carefully, they all say only limited amounts of data [might be transferred abroad]. Or under most circumstances, we will not.

If the US demands your email, Microsoft will hand over your email

If you look at their formal statements, they’re all like, yeah, well, it’s highly unlikely that this will happen. But if you look at the legal situation…

Interestingly, the Dutch government got sort of in a fight with itself. And then they hired a New York legal firm, a very, very good one. And they asked that New York legal firm, can you analyze the legal situation for us? And they came back with, yeah, if the US demands your email, Microsoft will hand over your email. And there are no ifs and buts about it.

There were even no ifs and buts about it under the Biden administration, who sort of were attached to this rule-of-law thing.

But even if you believe in the rule of law thing, then the US legislative situation is very clear. If the NSA wants to get their hands on the French email or the Dutch email, they’re going to get it.

And legally speaking, there’s nothing Microsoft and Google and Amazon could do about that. And you can even wonder these days if there’s anything they want to do about that.

The Register: In the US, the argument against China supplying network hardware has been based on the concern that the Chinese government can just order China-based vendors to insert a backdoor. It sounds like you’re saying that, essentially, an analogous situation exists in the US now.

Hubert: Yeah, exactly. And that has been the case for a while. I mean, this is not an entirely new realization.

The thing that is making it so interesting right now is that we are on the brink of [going all-in on Microsoft’s cloud].

The Dutch government is sort of just typical, so I mention it because I am Dutch, but they’re very representative of European governments right now. And they were heading to a situation where there was no email except Microsoft, which means that if one ministry wants to email the other ministry, they have to pass it by US servers.

Which leads to the odd situation that if the Dutch Ministry of Finance wants to send a secret to the Dutch National Bank, they’d have to send someone over with a typewriter to make it happen because [the communications channel has been outsourced].

There’s nothing left that we do not share with the US.

The Register: The 2022 bankruptcy of the Russian-owned Amsterdam Trade Bank (ATB) offers a cautionary tale about the cloud. Can you explain what happened?

Hubert: The story is good, but there’s a little bit of a wrinkle with it. It involves a Russian bank.

These are not our friends. Even in the Netherlands, we were busy sanctioning this bank. But then the US came in and they sanctioned the bank. And then Microsoft cut off everything. Which meant that the bank could no longer function. And they went bankrupt.

That’s probably the intended thing. Then when you go bankrupt, you have these bankruptcy proceedings, where you have to unwind the bank.

And then still Microsoft said, no, we cannot provide access to the data because we’re under sanctions. So we were left with the very painful situation that we had a bank that went bankrupt, but they couldn’t do anything.

Dutch courts tried to subpoena Microsoft. And they said, look, we need that data to unwind the bankruptcy. This is not doing business, it’s cleaning up. Microsoft said, no, you’re talking to the Dutch Microsoft entity, and this is not our thing.

And so they played hide and seek. Sometimes in the US you also get this, that people try to prevent their subpoenas from being served on them, and they go into hiding.

Eventually the Dutch government had a different legal conflict with Microsoft. And they slipped the subpoena into that one. And then they said: ‘Look, you have to do something’. And eventually something happened. But this was for the Dutch system. And I think this would, for any company, for any country, this would be extremely painful. You are ignoring our courts, doing legitimate government business.

We’re not trying to save the bank. We’re trying to avoid it. And we couldn’t. We just couldn’t for months.

The Register: Is there a viable European tech stack that’s available to European governments? Or is US tech just too dominant to displace right now?

Hubert: There are two things going on at the same time. The first thing is that users say, ‘I must have the original, real Microsoft’.

We don’t want to change. We would like to just get Microsoft Office but without Microsoft

It’s very difficult to get people to give up their Microsoft Outlook. People do not just demand a word processor or an email environment. They demand the real Microsoft Office environment. There’s not a different place right now where you could say, I would like to get an Office environment that does not run on the Microsoft cloud.

There were attempts to do that. Microsoft has blocked those attempts or has made it prohibitively expensive to the point that you just cannot do it.

There’s nowhere where you can go.

There’s not only nowhere we can go, there’s not even anywhere where the US can go. Because if you are in the Microsoft ecosystem, you could jump ship to Google, but that is extremely painful for people that are in the Microsoft ecosystem.

So there’s no one-to-one [alternative].

There are of course very capable tech companies here and you could order a different email system. But I just came back from a government meeting here in the Netherlands with a government department that is struggling with this stuff.

And they were like, yeah, we just don’t want to change. We would like to just get Microsoft Office but without Microsoft. If you want something else, you have to do some work.

Russia and China, they have moved away from the Microsoft cloud. So, apparently it can be done. But it means that you actually have to start doing it.

The Register: What’s the path forward for Europe? Haven’t there been some regions in Germany that have managed to adopt open-source software?

Hubert: There are sort of two things that you see. You see this sort of well-prepared migration where you say we’re going to give training courses, migration assistance, hands-on support, coaching, how to deal with the loss of Outlook.

And if you prepare this really well – there’s a German region that is apparently successful in it – there are few small spots that make it work.

But if you can make it work in one spot with like 50,000 seats, then you know it can work in any spot. So, there are a few ones that are very carefully doing this.

There are also failed attempts. But what happens there is that people … downloaded the copy, and we put it on 50,000 desktops and wow, people were unhappy because you did not [lay the groundwork].

And that’s actually more common. So if you ask around, you will find more failures.

A famous example is Munich. The City of Munich or the State of Bavaria, in Germany, they have been on and off Microsoft for the past decade or so now. And I think they’re now currently back on Microsoft.

There you saw that they sort of dumped people on the new platform. [It didn’t work because] you cannot just give them new software.

But there are small rays of light. There are also some regions in Spain that are successful.

The Register: Looking at the trend toward tech-nationalism, as exemplified to varying degrees in the US, China, and Russia, is Europe going to have to become its own technology provider, at least for matters of national interest.

Hubert: I think they should.

But the reason is maybe not so much that they actually will get sanctions, because maybe that won’t happen.

But it’s already unacceptable that there is the fear that it will happen.

So if you have to operate under the assumption that they can just push the button in the US and the Microsoft cloud stops working, then you see, if you have it in the back of your mind, you will sort of adjust your policies towards that.

So, yeah, I think that there will be countries that are doing this. Germany is rather far along. The French are thinking about it. They have been thinking about it for years already.

The Register: Does AI complicate matters? In the UK, for example, recent developments suggest remaining competitive in AI will be prioritized over regulatory concerns, which would make it harder to cut ties with firms like Microsoft that are using AI to drive cloud business.

Hubert: The narrative that we hear [from] senior management within governments – and also within companies, because large companies are not much different in this respect than governments, they have this sort of similar inertia going – is that we should be in the cloud so that we can benefit from the latest and greatest in AI. There is a big belief that you will miss out.

So if you come along with this sovereign solution which is adequate and sort of functional and allows you to send email but does not have special AI sauce, then people think they might be losing out on something special.

Now I’m not so sure if they actually are losing out on something special because maybe we didn’t get it wrong here. Maybe putting AI in everything is maybe not the best idea ever.

But it’s certainly complicating the narrative where people say, look, sure, we would like to move to this European cloud and stuff, but it also must come with [AI services like Microsoft] Copilot. And that doesn’t make it easier.

There’s an interesting anecdote that I can share because it has been shared enough. Microsoft Copilot is not allowed for use in any government documents. It turns out that the desktop environment from Office and Windows 10 just turns on Copilot.

And it has been very difficult for at least the Dutch government to get it turned off again. It’s as annoying as a consumer when something like this turns itself on and you’re like ‘Hey, I didn’t ask for this!’. But it’s sort of super sad if it happens to your government documents.

So I think that not doing AI in your government documents is probably actually a good thing right now.

The Register: Is there anything else about the European cloud situation would you want people to understand?

Hubert: I think it’s maybe good to know that in equal parts it’s worry about the US government looking at our documents and about being under the red button, where at any moment they can shut it down.

And for the second part [about availability], let’s say that it was all roses and the relationships were good and everything.

Even then you would worry about 100 percent of European governments being fully dependent on one company.

You would worry about 100% of European governments being fully dependent on one company

It’s out of principle. And I know that even in the Biden administration, people were starting to get worried about the total dependency on Microsoft within the government.

So it would be prudent to be worried anyhow, even without the geopolitical stunts that are going on.

And the other thing that we worry about is that let’s say the Russians – well not the Russians because they’re sort of friendly with the Trump administration right now – but let’s say the Chinese would attack Microsoft and Microsoft would have problems.

And who would Microsoft help first to regain services? Well, of course, they would help the US government first. I mean, how can they not?

But there’s a real fear here in Europe that if China ever disrupts Microsoft operations that we would be out in the cold. Because there’s nothing we can do from here to restore the operation of the Microsoft cloud. Only the US can do that.

So there is a worry that we are relying on assets that may not be that well defended.

The Register: Does Europe bear some responsibility for the situation in which it now finds itself, given that government antitrust enforcers could have taken steps to limit the market power of US tech giants?

Hubert: Europe is squarely to blame for this stuff. And it’s not just from an anti-competition element. It’s just, I mean, the fact is that the European Commission was the first more or less government entity that moved to Microsoft 365.

Then the European Data Protection Board ruled that illegal. They said you cannot do that because of the adequacy decision and whatever.

And then the European Commission filed a lawsuit against the European Data Privacy Board, arguing that they should be, they wanted their Microsoft [then] and they want it now.

In this situation, we are squarely to blame for this kind of stuff

So let’s say you are a European entrepreneur, and you think about, hey, shall I compete with Microsoft? And you see the European Commission filing a lawsuit arguing that they do not want your services. They want Microsoft services.

So in this situation, we are squarely to blame for this kind of stuff.

It could maybe be compared to how the US forgot that they were in the semiconductor business and that they left that to all the rest of the world to do that. This is remarkably similar to that extent. And that also was a failure 20 years in the making.

European governments did not have even a smidgen of vision. Let’s say that [they had adopted a requirement to buy] five percent of their email and office somewhere else.

Then we would not be in this situation. Because then we would have a viable European industry.

But apparently here, especially here in the Netherlands, we are like bigger Microsoft fans than the US government. So yeah, we are squarely to blame. It’s our own fault. ®