Europe Has Alternatives to American Software. Nobody Uses Them.

Europe's relationship with American technology increasingly resembles an addiction. The patient knows it is bad for them but cannot quite bring themselves to break it, largely because they do not know where to start. And everyone agrees that the longer the wait, the higher the eventual price.

That is the question decades of conferences on "digital sovereignty" have circled without ever answering.

What has actually been lost

The conventional framing — that Europe missed out on the consumer internet — understates the problem considerably.

What Europe has lost is not leadership in what we call digital markets. It is control over the data that now runs every other industry, which steadily erodes the position of the wider European economy from automotive to pharmaceuticals. A car company that does not control its own telemetry, or a drug company that runs its research pipeline on someone else's cloud, has ceded something more consequential than market share in software.

The alternatives exist

This is the part that surprises people. European alternatives already exist for almost everything, and somebody has catalogued them on a website called, aptly, European Alternatives.

France's Qwant and Germany's Ecosia are search engines that compete with Google, albeit ones still running partly on Microsoft's infrastructure. Nokia still sells mobile handsets, although they run on an American Android operating system. Those caveats matter, but they do not erase the point: the capability gap is narrower than the usage gap.

Nokia still makes mobile phones — running an American operating system, which is precisely the dependency the sovereignty debate keeps circling. Photograph: Andrew Sozinov

The clearest illustration is Visio, a French video-conferencing service no less capable than Zoom, which almost nobody uses for the simple reason that few people know it exists — except the civil servants obliged to use it for official meetings.

That is not a technology failure. It is a distribution failure, and they require completely different remedies.

America's real advantage

The US technological edge is genuine, even though American firms depend on partnerships that are themselves global. But the decisive advantage is not superior engineering. It is that everyone already uses their platforms.

Network effects mean a marginally better product arriving second loses to an entrenched one. No amount of research funding fixes this, because the barrier is not the quality of the alternative but the cost to each individual user of being the first to switch.

The uncomfortable precedent

Development economics — and plain common sense — suggests autonomy from another country's technological dominance is won by carving out protected space in which a domestic alternative can grow.

A protected space is, in essence, what allowed China to build the only systemic competitor to the United States: a shield against American platforms, in a country with the scale to grow its own champions, which produced Alibaba, Tencent, TikTok and DeepSeek.

This is where the argument becomes politically awkward. The Chinese playbook worked, and almost none of it is available to Europe. China in 2005 could make choices that would not suit Europe today — it had a closed information environment, no meaningful commitment to open markets, and a willingness to impose costs on its own citizens that a democratic bloc cannot replicate.

The argument that survives

What remains is narrower but not trivial. Building European alternatives matters for the reverse scenario too: that someone else decides to cut Europe off from connections it has come to depend on. That risk has moved from theoretical to plausible in a short space of time.

A gradual, sectoral protected space — public procurement mandates, interoperability requirements, default placement in institutional software — is a smaller intervention than the Chinese firewall and works on the actual bottleneck, which is adoption rather than existence.

It is vital, as the phrase goes, to walk the talk and ensure EU digital policies are both robust and effective. The evidence of the past decade is that Europe has produced a great deal of policy and very few users.