What if tomorrow, Americans cut off our access to digital services, or increased prices tenfold? Or worse, what if these services became weapons against us?

This question isn't purely theoretical.

Trump has just returned to power in the United States with a strong slogan: America First, which foreshadows a significant shift in geopolitical doctrine:

The world is nothing but a vast negotiation field where America must win, even against its former allies.

The first signs have already appeared:

• Trade war on tariffs,
• Power struggle with Europe, which according to Trump "was designed to screw the US",
• Direct threats against Ukraine to take possession of its resources or nuclear capabilities.

Since January, Trump has also been using warlike rhetoric and threatening to seize Canada, Greenland, or the Panama Canal.

Trump's administration also includes several advisors whose supremacist tendencies are concerning. Between so-called Roman salutes (by Musk or Bannon), challenging diversity programs, widespread banning of school books, censorship of research concerning climate, women, or gender, targeted attacks against judges, or more recently the dismantling of the Department of Education, explicit threats to bypass democratic rules to allow Trump to seek a third term, or even the beginning of an unhealthy personality cult, the risk of seeing this state slide into dangerous totalitarianism is high.

With this now hostile state, our heavy digital dependence is concerning.

This question is not theoretical.

What if tomorrow the digital infrastructure we depend on was cut off, or turned against us?

Acknowledging Our Dependence

More than 70% of French websites rely on US cloud services.

These clouds, primarily Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, power more than 85% of digital services for CAC 40 companies (France's major corporations).

And a report from DINUM (France's inter-ministerial digital department) explains that 45% of the French government's digital services are built on American cloud infrastructure.

The consequences in case of disputes with the USA are obvious - European internet would transform into a Trojan horse.

The internet isn't just the leisure industry - I think everyone could manage without YouTube, Instagram, or Airbnb. But it's also our emails, parts of our banking infrastructure, our smartphones, GPS systems, and the infrastructure hosting our health data... The list is too long to cover entirely.

Now, try this experiment, for yourself or your company: imagine what happens if you remove all American software AND hardware. What remains?

And yet a question arises: is complete autonomy realistic?

The Myth of Autonomy

To build a phone today, you need rare earth elements that might come from China, lithium that might come from Chile or Australia, cobalt from Congo, tantalum from Rwanda.

Its OLED screen may have been created by Samsung in Korea, the glass may have been produced by Corning in the USA, its processor may have been designed in the USA by Qualcomm but built in Taiwan by TSMC, using machine tools sold by ASML from the Netherlands.

Today, no country alone could build a phone and most of its components.

Consider that regaining control over the manufacturing of chips that make up modern processors would likely cost more than €150 billion and would require at least fifteen years.

And processors are just one piece of the puzzle. So even if each country had the resources available, total independence would require investing literally hundreds of billions and would take decades to regain this expertise.

But investing so much money and time only to sell in a local market as small as France or even Europe would be economically absurd. It would never recoup the investments. And this is actually the case for most countries, with the possible exception of China with its more than a billion inhabitants.

In a sense, interdependence between countries can sometimes be a good thing.

It forces us to communicate, which sometimes has the merit of preventing us from fighting each other.

Except when the balance of power is too uneven.

So while total independence is a myth, that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek a better balance. A balance currently threatened by our digital dependence.

Toward a More Favorable Balance

€20 billion - that's the most recent figure representing this balance if we were to express it as an amount.

€20 billion is our trade balance with the USA in 2024.

A trade balance schematically represents all the goods we sell to a country compared to all the goods we buy from them.

And Europe is doing well with a trade surplus over the last 20 years with the US, meaning it sells more than it buys.

When you have a balance close to equilibrium, you can have weight in negotiations. You can avoid conflicts over critical resources.

You can say, "Don't cut off my access to clouds, or I might cut off your access to the machine tools that allow you to build transistors, for example. And don't forget that I'm also one of your biggest consumers."

In the world we live in, having a powerful economy is the only way to be heard. Whether at the WTO, NATO, the UN, or COP, people are more willing to listen to the representative of a country with a $20 trillion GDP than one with $60 billion.

If we want our conception of democracy or simply our culture to be heard, it depends on our trade balance.

But that might not be enough.

It might be insufficient if digital services become backdoors to destabilize our democracies, as is the case with X, which now serves Musk against Europe, promoting nationalist movements more capable of destroying Europe from within.

It might be insufficient if digital technology serves as a large-scale listening device to spy on our industry.

So we need to continue strengthening this balance, not by rejecting all dependence, which isn't realistic anyway, but by creating a European digital identity, alternatives that allow us to have a seat at the negotiation table.

This is something we have to built by avoiding too much dependence on strategic sectors.
We don't want to be dependent on energy, cybersecurity, or cloud services where we host sensitive data.

It's also built by investing in our own economy.

If American clouds are good, it's also because the American government has placed hundreds of billions worth of orders with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Europe needs to rethink its public procurement to favor European players. This topic has already been well described here, so I'll spare myself a complete article on it, but we can summarize this as:

• Clarification of compliance requirements (indicating that compliance with EU standards is mandatory)
• Favoring local players by including criteria that only a European company can satisfy
• Using public procurement to indirectly finance companies

To which I would add:

• Relaunching an ambitious research policy (I'll come back to this later)
• Simplification of public procurement to avoid constantly having the same specialists in tenders responding, to the detriment of real subject matter experts... (Cloudwatt, Numergy, I'm thinking of you...)

Beyond governments, I would remind you that if Silicon Valley is so powerful, it's because all the companies there buy services from other companies there. That's the strength of an ecosystem.

But, given the level of investment needed, it would be unrealistic to have it financed by industry alone.

Industry must make choices and anticipate coming crises. That's certain. But it cannot do so at the price of its own economic viability.

A company cannot fall technologically and economically behind by consuming less effective services, when they exist at all.

Our trade balance remains an asset. We cannot sacrifice current digital companies so they finance certain sectors, like cloud computing, because the State has shirked its responsibilities.

Because when we do that and accept that these companies fall 10 years behind their external competitors, we worsen the trade balance and the result is worse than before. The dependence is worse than before.

But there might be reasons to believe.

Our Assets

We often forget, but Europe has 450 million inhabitants. It's the 4th largest consumer market and the 2nd if we consider purchasing power per capita.

And that's an opportunity.

This is the perfect moment for companies offering alternative services.

We've had our missed opportunities in the past, with Daily Motion, Qwant, Kelkoo, Deezer, or Alcatel.
Not all are dead, but some could have been significantly larger than they are.

Perhaps this is the time to do better.

And we have the skills for that - Europe produces very good engineers.

Europe represents 15% of the foreign workforce in Silicon Valley, with very good representation in AI, cybersecurity, or applied mathematics.

Speaking of people, there's a second opportunity not to miss.

The technological advantage in the US has been built on a brain drain from Europe for decades.

Minds that fled Nazism in the 1930s and 40s.

Minds that were attracted by greater stability after the war, minds attracted by a country with more appealing salaries, and finally minds that went to a country unafraid to invest in research.

But the reverse movement could happen.

When a country engages in a trade war with the entire planet, it will drive up prices, making the country less attractive.

Anti-foreigner rhetoric might somewhat disturb the 50% of non-American workers in Silicon Valley.

Especially since researchers are currently the subject of a witch hunt.
If your research topic uses any of these words, your program will be eliminated and you risk being fired.

So yes, this is an opportunity for Europe.

However, for Europe, beyond magnificent landscapes and a lower cost of living, it would be good if we were also more convincing about economic opportunities.

Now is the time to invest in Europe.
Now is the time to revitalize research in Europe.
And for our 450 million inhabitants to transform into a real advantage, we need to think Europe, before thinking France, Germany, Italy, or Spain.

But by putting our backs against the wall, the USA might be forcing our hand and doing us a favor. Perhaps.

It's up to us to seize this opportunity.