The USA Lock-In: When Tech Dependency Becomes Geopolitical Vulnerability

I often say that “everything is political,” and I’ve never been able to fully separate tech from politics—this article is no exception. I promise I’ll try to publish more purely technical posts soon, but in the current context, it’s hard to focus on anything else. For context: I’m French, and this perspective comes from someone watching the United States from outside its borders.

I won’t dwell on the current president’s domestic policies—despite the tragedy unfolding for many American citizens, that’s not the focus here. However, Umberto Eco’s checklist in “Ur-Fascism”¹ seems pretty well checked… But let’s examine the recent geopolitical events and decisions:

• A military operation in Venezuela resulting in the abduction of President Maduro²
• Explicit threats to acquire Greenland, a territory of Denmark, a NATO ally, followed by threats of tariffs against countries opposing this acquisition and questioning US commitment to NATO³
• Sanctions imposed on the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor, with the executive order explicitly targeting anyone providing “technological support” to the Court⁴
• Visa restrictions imposed on Thierry Breton and four other European officials in retaliation for their enforcement of the Digital Services Act⁵
• A general escalation of tensions between the United States and the European Union

These aren’t isolated incidents. They represent a pattern of increasingly assertive—some would say imperial—foreign policy. Add to this ecosystem of threats figures like Steve Bannon, Trump’s former advisor, who openly advocates for sanctions against French judges involved in Marine Le Pen’s trial: “I’m 100% for it, that’s how you hold people accountable. […] If you start a judicial war, well, you’re no longer welcome in the United States.”⁶

The Architecture of Dependency

The tech industry warns constantly about vendor lock-in: depending on a single provider makes switching prohibitively expensive or impossible. Companies invest millions in multi-cloud strategies to avoid being trapped.

Yet while we obsess over which cloud to choose, we’ve ignored a more fundamental dependency: Europe has no digital sovereignty.

When European developers collaborate, they use GitHub. When businesses communicate, they use Slack or Teams. When startups build products, they deploy on American platforms. The entire European digital ecosystem runs on infrastructure controlled elsewhere.

US companies control 70% of Europe’s cloud market; European providers hold just 13%⁷. Around 80% of EU corporate spending on software flows to US vendors—€264 billion per year, roughly 1.5% of EU GDP⁷. But these aren’t just statistics about markets:

Development Infrastructure:

• GitHub (owned by Microsoft): The de facto standard for version control and collaboration
• GitLab: A US company
• CircleCI, Travis CI: US-based CI/CD platforms
• npm (owned by Microsoft), PyPI (Python Software Foundation), Maven Central (Sonatype): Package registries operated by US organizations

Communication and Collaboration:

• Slack (owned by Salesforce), Microsoft Teams, Zoom: Dominate enterprise communication
• Google Workspace, Microsoft 365: The backbone of European office productivity
• Atlassian (Jira, Confluence): US-Australian company controlling project management

Core Internet Infrastructure:

• Content Delivery Networks: CloudFlare, Akamai, Fastly—all US companies
• Domain registrars: Most major registrars subject to US law

Payment Processing:

• Stripe, PayPal: Most digital commerce
• Modern payment APIs: Predominantly US-controlled

European alternatives exist—OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner—but they’re marginalized. OVH’s entire market cap is smaller than AWS’s quarterly revenue. This isn’t market dynamics; it’s decades of strategic advantage combined with political protection. The same government that now weaponizes that infrastructure.

When Geopolitical Conflict Meets Critical Infrastructure

What happens when this dependency meets political conflict? Your infrastructure becomes someone else’s weapon.

The Public Sector

France’s Health Data Hub runs entirely on Microsoft Azure. Former Health Minister Agnès Buzyn, under oath: “It was Microsoft or nothing […] I was given no choice”⁸. Six years later, France’s centralized medical data—patient records, research, health analytics—depends entirely on American infrastructure. One executive order, and French health goes dark.

We’ve seen this before. In 2019, GitHub restricted access for developers in Iran, Syria, and Crimea⁹. Iranian developers lost access to their private repositories without warning. Years of work, unreachable. The justification? “GitHub is subject to US trade law.”

A developer in Tehran, cut off from their own code. Not because of what they did, but where they live. Now scale that to a continent.

The Private Sector

A French e-commerce company: Stripe for payments, AWS for hosting, Slack for communication, GitHub for code. One executive order targeting their country? Everything stops. Website offline, payments frozen, team silenced. Not over days—over hours.

“But our data is in an EU region!” The CLOUD Act doesn’t care where data sits physically¹⁰. The company controlling it is American. They can be compelled to cut access, delete data, or hand it over.

GDPR compliance? “Sovereign cloud” offerings? The European Parliament calls it “sovereignty-washing”⁷. You can’t regulate your way out when the infrastructure itself is the weapon.

The ICC sanctions are instructive: the executive order explicitly prohibits providing “technological support” to the Court⁴. The framework is clear: an executive order declares sanctions, US companies comply, accounts freeze, access revokes. No appeal, no transition, no alternatives.

The message: access to American infrastructure isn’t a service you purchase. It’s a privilege, revocable for political reasons.

The Cost of Lock-In

The USA lock-in isn’t just a technical problem that can be solved with better architecture. It’s a geopolitical vulnerability with three compounding costs.

Economic Leverage

€264 billion per year flows from Europe to US vendors—roughly 1.5% of EU GDP⁷. The European Parliament report estimates that retaining just 15% of these outflows could create around 500,000 jobs in Europe by 2035⁷. But the economic cost isn’t just the money leaving—it’s the leverage this dependency creates.

When Europe enforces its own laws—the Digital Services Act—five European officials get sanctioned by the US government. The calculus becomes clear: every regulatory decision that affects American tech companies carries the risk of retaliation. The infrastructure Europeans depend on daily becomes a bargaining chip in geopolitical negotiations.

Data Sovereignty Theater

Europe has spent years building regulatory frameworks around data protection. GDPR is championed as the gold standard for privacy. Companies advertise their “EU data centers” and “data residency compliance.” European regulators tout “sovereign cloud” offerings from American hyperscalers.

But as the European Parliament report notes, this is largely “sovereignty-washing”⁷. The CLOUD Act gives US authorities the power to compel American companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world, regardless of local data protection laws¹⁰. Your data sitting in a Frankfurt data center doesn’t matter when the company operating that data center is subject to US jurisdiction.

The issue isn’t just surveillance—it’s control. When a company can be compelled to revoke access, delete data, or hand it over to foreign authorities, regulatory compliance becomes meaningless.

Single Point of Failure at Continental Scale

With traditional vendor lock-in, alternatives exist. If AWS becomes too expensive or unreliable, migrating to Azure or Google Cloud is painful and costly, but architecturally possible.

With USA lock-in, there’s no alternative at comparable scale. When US sanctions hit Iran in 2019, Iranian developers couldn’t simply “migrate” from GitHub to another platform—no equivalent alternative existed. Their code remained inaccessible, their collaboration tools unusable, their work frozen. Not because of technical failure, but political decision.

Now scale that scenario to an entire continent. Europe’s digital ecosystem—from healthcare to commerce to government services—could be disrupted by a single executive order. Unlike technical dependencies that can be refactored over time, geopolitical dependencies have no gradual migration path when crisis hits.

What Now? Building European Sovereignty on Open Foundations

The mechanisms that enable USA lock-in—the CLOUD Act, executive order powers, sanctions frameworks—exist regardless of which administration wields them. Even with a different US government, the structural vulnerability remains. Europe cannot afford to depend on infrastructure subject to foreign political decisions.

What won’t work: Hoping for a more stable US political climate. The current administration’s unpredictability is absolutely part of the problem, but even with different leadership, these legal mechanisms persist. Individual companies migrating to European cloud providers won’t solve the systemic dependency—market dynamics and network effects are too powerful. And regulatory pressure alone has proven insufficient, often provoking retaliation rather than reducing Europe’s structural dependence.

What Europe needs: Real digital sovereignty. Not “EU regions” of American clouds that remain under US legal jurisdiction, but infrastructure under European legal control that can’t be switched off by foreign executive orders.

This requires treating digital infrastructure as strategically critical—comparable to energy independence or defense capabilities. It means public investment at a scale that matches the problem: the European Parliament report estimates that retaining just 15% of the €264 billion annual outflow could create 500,000 European jobs by 2035⁷. But the goal isn’t just economic—it’s ensuring Europe can function independently during geopolitical crises.

The smarter path: Building on open foundations

Here’s where it gets interesting: European sovereignty works best when built on common goods rather than simply replicating American business models under European flags.

Why? Because it addresses two vulnerabilities simultaneously.

Simply creating “European AWS” or “European GitHub” owned by European corporations reproduces the same lock-in dynamics that created the problem. What happens when political tensions arise within Europe—when France and Germany disagree on regulation, or when a European company faces pressure from its government? The infrastructure becomes a geopolitical bargaining chip again, just with different actors.

Infrastructure built on open-source foundations and open standards changes the equation. When European cloud providers build on open-source technologies like Kubernetes, OpenStack, or Linux, they create infrastructure that’s more portable, more auditable, and less susceptible to single-entity control. When communication platforms adopt federated protocols, users aren’t locked to a single provider.

This doesn’t mean everything needs to be fully decentralized—that’s often impractical for large-scale infrastructure. As I’ve argued before, even open-source faces centralization risks when hosted on platforms like GitHub¹¹. Projects like Radicle demonstrate how truly peer-to-peer collaboration can work for some use cases. But for cloud computing, payments, and other infrastructure that requires scale, the realistic approach is European providers building on open-source stacks.

Think: European cloud providers using open-source cloud platforms. Communication tools adopting standardized, interoperable protocols. Development infrastructure that can’t be unilaterally shut down because it runs on federated or self-hostable software.

What this requires in practice:

Massive public funding from European states, alongside contributions from European companies that benefit from this infrastructure. But the funding should prioritize open-source foundations—not just to create European alternatives, but to ensure those alternatives don’t replicate American-style vendor lock-in.

Regulatory requirements for critical infrastructure (healthcare, government, essential services) to use genuinely sovereign technology—infrastructure under European legal control, preferably built on open standards and open-source software that ensures portability.

Accepting that sovereignty has a cost. European solutions might be initially more expensive or less feature-rich than established American platforms. But the cost of dependency, as we’re seeing, is far higher.

This isn’t about building a European utopia of perfectly decentralized systems. It’s about building European infrastructure that’s resilient to both external pressure (US sanctions) and internal tensions (intra-European political conflicts). Open-source foundations and open standards make that possible in ways proprietary, centrally-controlled platforms don’t.

Conclusion: Lock-In Is Lock-In, Regardless of Scale

The tech industry understands vendor lock-in intimately. We’ve built entire architectures to avoid it—multi-cloud strategies, containerization, abstraction layers. We create standards and protocols specifically to maintain optionality. The principle is clear: depending on a single provider, no matter how reliable they seem today, creates unacceptable risk.

Yet we’ve collectively ignored this principle at a scale that matters far more. Europe has built its entire digital ecosystem on American infrastructure, creating vendor lock-in at a geopolitical level.

Everything we know about vendor lock-in applies here, but the consequences are worse. With traditional vendor lock-in, you have contracts, legal recourse, and alternative providers to migrate to. With USA lock-in, you have executive orders that override contracts, no legal recourse across jurisdictions, and no alternatives at comparable scale.

The recent escalation in US actions—from Venezuela to Greenland to sanctions on European officials enforcing European law—should be a wake-up call. I mentioned Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” checklist at the start. That checklist isn’t just about domestic politics—it includes the cult of action for action’s sake, the obsession with enemies, contempt for the weak, and selective populism. When these tendencies extend to foreign policy, they create an environment where digital infrastructure dependencies become weapons. Europe can’t afford to bet its digital future on hoping these tendencies won’t be weaponized further.

Europe needs digital infrastructure under its own legal control. But the lesson from USA lock-in is clear: the smartest path to European sovereignty isn’t simply replicating American business models under European corporate ownership. That reproduces the same lock-in dynamics, just with different actors who could face their own political pressures.

The more resilient approach is building European infrastructure on open-source foundations and open standards. Not because of ideological purity, but because it’s pragmatic: open-source stacks reduce vendor lock-in, improve portability, and limit any single entity’s ability to weaponize the infrastructure—whether that entity is American, European, or otherwise.

This isn’t anti-American. American companies have built remarkable infrastructure that powers much of the modern internet. But Europe can’t afford to depend on infrastructure that any foreign government can revoke by executive order. And having learned that lesson the hard way, Europe has the opportunity to build differently—not just European alternatives, but infrastructure that’s more resilient to political pressure from any source.

Vendor lock-in is dangerous because it gives a single entity power over your operations. State lock-in is worse because there’s no contract, no SLA, no recourse—just political decisions made for political reasons. The answer isn’t changing which state or which company has that power. It’s building infrastructure that minimizes centralized control altogether.