Not content to wait for open letters to influence the European Commission, Dutch parliamentarians have taken matters into their own hands by passing eight motions urging the government to ditch US-made tech for homegrown alternatives.
With each IT service our government moves to American tech giants, we become dumber and weaker…
The motions were submitted and all passed yesterday during a discussion in the Netherlands’ House of Representatives on concerns about government data being shipped overseas. While varied, they all center on the theme of calling on the government to replace software and hardware made by US tech companies, acquire new contracts with Dutch companies who offer similar services, and generally safeguard the country’s digital sovereignty.
“With each IT service our government moves to American tech giants, we become dumber and weaker,” Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four of the motions, told The Register. “If we continue outsourcing all of our digital infrastructure to billionaires that would rather escape Earth by building space rockets, there will be no Dutch expertise left.”
Kathmann’s measures specifically call on the government to stop the migration of Dutch information and communications technology to American cloud services, the creation of a Dutch national cloud, the repatriation of the .nl top-level domain to systems operating within the Netherlands, and for the preparation of risk analyses and exit strategies for all government systems hosted by US tech giants. The other measures make similar calls for eliminating the presence of US tech companies in government systems
39 Comments
riskyingo
I hope more countries will follow suit
regularjack
This is the way.
ForTheKidz
I guess it's better than nothing.
eurocopium
[flagged]
spiderfarmer
I have a goal to get rid of all US based software. I already replaced some services but I will continue to look every chance I get.
This is the best thing to ever happen to EU based tech companies.
damnitbuilds
Yeah, that Military-Industrial Complex thing that we hated?
Well, now we want one.
dist-epoch
Makes sense to prepare for the Greenland war
stego-tech
Called it, again.
Data sovereignty is the true trend of the next decade. Not Quantum, not AI, but the new multi-pole world order divesting from Americentric technologies and back into the sort of locally-grown economies that children of the Cold War would be familiar with. Local vendors serving local needs with a focus on regional, not global, scale and service.
Us Cassandra types have been screaming for years that the US-centric technology catalog (from hardware to software to services to clouds) cannot be trusted long term, as just a single bad administration will expose how easily the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China or Russia. Welp, now we’re here.
Man, I hate being right.
schnitzelstoat
> Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four of the motions, told The Register. "If we continue outsourcing all of our digital infrastructure to billionaires that would rather escape Earth by building space rockets, there will be no Dutch expertise left."
This kind of casual anti-technology attitude among European politicians is part of the reason we are in this mess.
Mvandenbergh
I mean, ok, fine guys but this is just more empty gestures from a club of empty heads in the GroenLinks/PvdA clown-car.
I don't recall that they were against (in fact they were in favour) of the removal of the 30% tax rules intended to attract expats in, among other things, tech businesses. I don't recall that they've ever done or said anything to make the country a more attractive place to start or grow a business of any kind, let alone the kind of venture capital funded technology startups that would allow us to move a substantial fraction of our tech consumption to homegrown alternatives.
Maybe they're at least in favour of permitting for data centres so that we can at least host our own services… oh wait, they don't want those either.
FlorisWie
I am curious if this post will be deleted by the moderators, like the last time a discussion about European tech sovereignty was brought up on this American website.
pbiggar
100%! Between US tech surveilling the population, selling their data to data brokers, controlling what content they see, and surveilling even their customers customers, this has to happen extremely quickly.
The end goal has to be that EU businesses should be able to easily ensure that their customers' data is never accessible to US companies. This is incredibly challenging at the moment due to SaaS – the amount of subprocessors that a company uses, and then transitively uses, makes it impossible at the moment imo.
bittermandel
Finally! At least one parliament wants to invest in local technology and give the region a fair chance, rather than going with the (today) technically superior hyperscalers.
There's no discussion that e.g. Azure solves a lot of problems that EU clouds don't solve today, but diversifying some bets to a local market will definitely pay dividends in terms of local economy and knowledge growth. I hope it pays off.
gryzzly
Hopefully this will also be a push for public sponsored open source / free software dev.
xbmcuser
Lets see if they put cash where there mouth is they should have been pouring billions of dollars into opensource software instead of paying Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle etc in the first place. Europe countries have been client states of the USA for decades and just do whatever USA wanted first time USA has hurt their own interests so are waking up to the fact.
egorfine
And replace with what, more regulations?
Source: am a startup in the EU. The amount of bureaucracy is kafkaesque.
kalium-xyz
Somehow i doubt it coming from a country which could be described as a datacenter for big US tech
amelius
I wonder what they will replace their MacBooks with …
hnthrow90348765
Hopefully we'll see non-US tech salaries increase due to its importance.
DaveMcMartin
TBH, while I feel like this is the way, I’m noticing more and more politicians using this as a way to simply gather more votes with a "cause US bad" angle.
Companies are eager to get your money, so they'll try to get an "EU made" label and use it as marketing as hard as they can, even if 90% of their operation happens outside the EU.
And the way they talk, it seems like decoupling from the US is something trivial done overnight. No, it is not, it’s a kind of a slow process in some areas, and pragmatic decisions must be made along the way.
debo_
Related:
"Dutch parliament calls for end to reliance on US software" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43401487
"Dutch government urged to stop using "unsafe" US cloud services " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411061
tonijn
The Dutch government however transferred everything to Microsoft Cloud last year.
donohoe
What’s the Google Sheets/Excel of Europe?
maciejw
Europe's problem in this area seems to be inability to build a mechanism to realize large, unprofitable projects. It looks like the whole continent operates on thin margins, and has no resources set aside to pursue strategic initiatives.
US is building its pile of resources by capitalising on its current advantage, but also by pushing larger and larger parts of society into poverty. Europe is maybe more fair, but ultimately unable to keep up and very vulnerable because of that.
Even Russia, a country with much smaller economy is able to concentrate its resources to affect politics and develop few important techs (missiles). Of course it achieves the goal even more by expoiting its own population. Few people benefit from it, but their wealth is immense. Before 2022 whole regions of Europe catered to needs of foreign millionaires, not few homegrown ones. Lack of large projects translates to little opportunities to become rich.
I have no idea how Europe can build institutions to develop large projects without impoverishing lots of its citizens.
everfrustrated
This would be the same country (The Netherlands) that is prohibiting construction of new data centers…
Really joined up thinking!
janaagaard
I really hope Europe seizes this as an opportunity to start pushing public money, public code.
https://publiccode.eu/en/
hsuduebc2
It always surprises me that people only act when a problem becomes undeniable, rather than preventing it in the first place. In a country with a voting system and power structure like US, where a single person can abruptly shift the entire nation's direction, this has always been a security flaw for others. It's the same as relying on Russian gas, people pretend the worst can't happen because it would be harmful to everyone, right up until it does.
jmyeet
This is simply the American empire in decline. Maybe with the ascendancy of China, we'll at least get trains.
This is what people need to understand about the current US administration: there's no grand plan. There's no deep strategy. The people in charge have absolutely no idea what they're doing. I'm not even sure if people at the top even know how tariffs work, like is the idea that foreign countries pay it just propaganda? I hope so. But do they believe it? I'm actually not sure.
It's just a bunch of Ayn Rand devotees who are out to destroy the government that made their wealth possible to begin with. to try and recreate a "traditional" society like the 1950s, just without the 91% top marginal rate of taxation that made prosperity possible. It's only when neoliberalism fully took hold in the 1970s did the standard of living start to decline and the wealth gap rise, just so the very wealthy can have just a little bit more wealth.
Gutting USAID says it all. That money mostly went to US firms, so they've lost that income, and the purpose was to project US soft power. Through organizations like NATO, the US used its military to get allies to do what they want and to buy US arms. Withdrawing F16 support to Ukraine, for example, completley undermines confidence in US arms.
The rush for US tech CEOs to kiss the ring and fall in line was always going to alienate other countries. They really are going to kill the golden goose.
nexawave-ai
I wonder what the implications are for AWS’s efforts in building the "AWS European Sovereign Cloud" in Dublin, Ireland.
They are recruiting aggressively, even offering a relocation budget of up to €9,000. Although I was tempted to interview for an SDE role, I felt it would be wrong to uproot my family and relocate from the Netherlands to Ireland. And for what? A higher-paying role at a FAANG company? Still tempting, but I decided to put my family first.
suraci
No
The US is the nasty psycho boyfriend, you can't break up with him
And if you get close to other guys, it will be even worse. He’ll show you how much he loves and cares for you if you do
dr_dshiv
I gave a workshop yesterday on the effective use of large language models. We had participants from numerous Dutch corporations.
There is a lot of unmet demand for a non-American LLM. I suggested DeepSeek, but that's Chinese. I suggested Mistral, but that's French (joke!). I found OpenGPT-X from a European consortium, but it seems quite immature as yet. https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X
Perhaps there will be a European DeepSeek replica soon — it should be quite affordable to build. But that's just one piece of the ecosystem — there is a need for a lot of digital infrastructure.
cs702
Interesting.
For the government of a country like Denmark, with 1.4% the GDP and 1.7% the population of the US, the only viable way to build homegrown alternatives that avoid relying on software controlled by big US tech companies is to invest in open-source projects like GNU/Linux.
Many other governments around the world are in the same position as the government of Denmark.
Should they decide to invest in open-source projects, the impact could be significant.
JSR_FDED
I love the idea of a bit of inspiration and invigoration of tech in Europe.
But for some reason Estonia is the only country that can execute on this, I don’t know why. The rest of Europe loves their bureaucracy too much.
ttw44
Although this isn't foreign related, I started a regional freelance software company to help build websites or software for local government and businesses or other kinds of software/IT help. It sucks to know that there are state funded organizations that just impede any sort of locally homegrown software development. And it made me realize that software is one of the strange fields where competition both feels like its extremely lacking or flourishing, depending on which sect your in.
anvarik
> there will be no Dutch expertise left
I'm curious about the kind of existing expertise they are referring to
light_triad
Data and cloud sovereignty has been a theme in Europe for many years. Most efforts to develop European 'clones' of popular US services have had mixed successes (compared to China for example).
Number of declared meetings with EU officials since 2014: Google (381), Airbus (318), the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (241), and Meta (235)
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/02/24/big-tech-banki…
The documents from Uber released a few years ago revealed a lobbying effort by some EU officials. In that context growing homegrown options will be difficult:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62057321
pembrook
Just some food for thought. The percentage of GDP generated by centrally managed government spending vs. free market participants:
– US: 34%
– China: 33%
– EU: 50%
The numbers are again similar for interstate integration (in the US) and inter-province integration (in China) vs. inter-country integration (in the EU).
Europe needs deeper inter-country integration and more decentralization of capital into private market participants.
Europe can play Soviet-protectionism and build the modern tech-equivalent of the Lada all it wants, but this issue is the root cause of why Europe is lagging behind the other two.
You can't build a tech industry without venture capital, and you can't build a venture capital industry without deep pools of decentralized, risk-tolerant private capital.
curtisszmania
[dead]
DiscourseFan
This is practically impossible, however. The entire population of the Netherlands is only about twice the size of the entire US tech sector. That would mean dedicating half the population of the Netherlands to tech work to compete with the US. The reason why China and India are competetive is because those countries have similarly sized tech sectors as the US. A single European country cannot compete with the behemoths of today’s industry. Perhaps if the EU, as a whole, sought such sovreignty it would be possible. But that infrastructure needs to be built up and that won’t happen overnight, at least not in just 4 years.