Manage the Dependency, or Build the Autonomy? 

- EuroStack {"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/eurostack.eu\/blog\/manage-the-dependency-or-build-the-autonomy\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/eurostack.eu\/blog\/manage-the-dependency-or-build-the-autonomy\/"},"author":{"name":"EuroStack","@id":"https:\/\/eurostack.eu\/#\/schema\/person\/ba1c1d6a3697b78cfe6283a5216a25e7"},"headline":"Manage the Dependency, or Build the Autonomy? The assumption is that the main motivation is “security and resilience”, which are described as overblown concerns – in part because (it asserts) there are likely sufficient protections in the law to our data, and in part because it will simply be too hard and too costly for Europeans to achieve “foreign law immunity” – as indeed our dependencies are too extensive and we cannot sterilize suppliers fully from application of “extraterritorial foreign laws”. The Commission’s own April 2026 sovereign cloud tender we mentioned explicitly notes that the awarded providers (Post Telecom/OVHcloud/Clever Cloud, StackIT, Scaleway, plus the Proximus consortium) “deliver a high level of technical quality” and that “EU providers are closing the gap.” Three of those reached SEAL-3 in the EU’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Recent first-hand accounts from a former Microsoft engineer (isolveproblems.substack.com; see also ProPublica’s reporting on the “Digital Escort” programme) describe what the engineer calls “a sophisticated system perpetually on life support”: ~14,000 Just-In-Time access requests in two months (Aug–Oct 2024) for manual interventions on production nodes — including government cloud regions. European and Open Source alternatives for core needs — IaaS, PaaS, collaboration and productivity suites, file storage and sharing, video conferencing, messaging, identity and access management — are in many cases simply cheaper than their US counterparts on raw sticker price, and the gap widens further once data egress fees, forced bundling and exit costs are properly counted. Whether one gives credit to a “kill switch” scenario or not, there is no denying for instance that European regulation like the DMA has been on life support – go sloooow – since the Trump administration publicly threatened the EU with tariffs and export restrictions on “Highly Protected Technology and Chips” if it continued enforcing the DMA – an explicit linkage of European regulatory sovereignty to US economic coercion.