One sensible choice at a time
How European businesses ended up running on tools they don't control, and the one question worth asking about it.
June 25th, 2026
Nobody sat down one afternoon and decided to run their entire working life through software built on another continent. It happened the way most things happen: one sensible choice at a time. MS Teams was already there because the company had Office. The client was on WhatsApp, so that's where the conversation went. The file went to the place the last file went. Each decision made sense on its own, and added up over a decade they became something nobody quite chose, a working day that runs almost entirely on tools controlled from somewhere far away.
For most of that time there wasn't much reason to examine it, because the tools did what they were supposed to, and they still do. This is worth saying plainly, since a lot of writing on the subject hurries past it: the software most European businesses use every day is good, often better than what came before, and the reliance didn't grow out of carelessness but because the convenient choice was usually the reasonable one too.
Working well and being within your control are separate qualities, though, and a tool can have the first without the second. For most of the last decade that gap stayed abstract enough to ignore, and it has only lately become harder to keep at arm's length.
Scope of the Exposure
The European Commission, setting out its case for technological sovereignty this June, put Europe's reliance on providers outside the EU at over 80% for key digital products, services, and infrastructure, alongside roughly €264 billion spent each year, mostly on US proprietary tech. A separate study by Proton, which looked at the email records of publicly listed European companies, found more than 74% of them running on non-European services. Curiously, the reliance tends to run deepest in the most digitally advanced economies, above 90% across much of the Nordics and 88% in the UK.
Even for a business that's perfectly content with the tools it has, there are a few reasons to still be cautious:
Someone else holds the off switch. The decision to keep a service running, or to stop it, sits with someone else, in a place where you have no standing. Most of the time this is invisible and stays that way, though occasionally it surfaces. For example, Anthropic was recently restricted from offering its AI model Claude Fable 5 to non-US nationals shutting off millions of users.
Your data lives under someone else's laws. When your email and files sit with a company based in a foreign country, that country's laws can apply to your data even when it physically rests in a European data centre. The location of the server settles less than it appears to, because the laws that travel with the data follow the company that holds it rather than the building it sits in.
Some are Taking Action
Europe has begun to respond and a number of serious institutions are moving. Airbus is shifting sensitive systems to a European cloud, with one of its executives saying that the information needs to remain under European control. DNS Belgium, which runs the country's web addresses, left Amazon's cloud after deciding the convenience no longer outweighed the risk of access being restricted in a tense moment. Cities, ministries, and universities across the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Denmark are working through versions of the same decision.
We're seeing a smaller version of the same pattern in our own data. We asked a sample of our users who'd recently joined BirdyChat what brought them here (n=86), and the most common answer, nearly four in ten, was that they were looking for a European alternative to the larger global platforms.
Start with a Question
That brings us to something any informed professional can actually do. For the tools your work depends on, it's worth asking: what would happen if you lost access to one of them tomorrow?
It could be any reason: an outage, a change in price, a dispute over a contract, a shift in policy somewhere upstream. For some tools the honest answer is that it would mean an irritating afternoon, while for others it would critically reach into the actual running of the business.
If the answer turns out to matter, the next step is knowing where to look for alternatives. A handful of directories now catalogue European options across most of the categories a business actually uses, from email and storage to messaging and collaboration. European Alternatives is the broadest of them, sorted by category so you can look up a specific tool and see what sits near it; EuroStack takes a wider view, mapping the effort to build out a European technology stack as a whole; and there are smaller, more curated lists like European Purpose that point to individual products, BirdyChat among them.
This is why asking where a tool is built is well worth your time. Control must reside somewhere, and that 'somewhere' always resolves into a jurisdiction, an owner, and a body of law that can reach your data and govern your access. Where that 'somewhere' is located is a choice you can make—and here again, you can arrive at the setup that works for you one sensible choice at a time.
Productively yours,
Rolands
P.S. BirdyChat is proudly built in Europe. If you're looking for a European messaging app for your team's group chat or for your next project, you can download BirdyChat here.