What Europe is calling a push for digital sovereignty increasingly feels, from the outside, like a slow-motion unforced error, a choice to trade competitiveness and openness for an illusion of control that satisfies politics more than users or builders. The AP News reporting on governments across the continent quietly or explicitly sidelining American digital services in favor of “domestic” or state-approved alternatives captures the mood well: anxiety about dependence on U.S. technology hardened into policy, then wrapped in the language of resilience and autonomy. France nudging public institutions away from Zoom or Microsoft Teams isn’t really about a concrete security failure or a clearly articulated technical shortcoming; it’s about origin, symbolism, and the belief that regulation can compensate for the absence of globally competitive European platforms. That instinct, repeated often enough, becomes a system, and systems shape outcomes whether policymakers intend them to or not.
The real story here isn’t any single company, fine, or legal skirmish. It’s the cumulative regulatory climate of the European Union, where layers of rules, fast-expanding mandates, and politically charged enforcement actions create an environment that is hostile to scale and allergic to ambiguity. Digital sovereignty, in theory, should mean Europe becoming strong enough that others want to build, invest, and host critical infrastructure there. In practice, it’s drifting toward something narrower and more brittle: control through compliance, preference through procurement, and deterrence through penalties that are designed to send messages rather than solve narrowly defined problems. You can almost hear the subtext in Brussels and national capitals alike: if we can’t dominate these markets, we can at least tightly supervise those who do.
That backdrop matters when voices from U.S. tech start speaking up, not as protagonists but as early warning indicators. When Matthew Prince of Cloudflare publicly pushed back against Italian regulatory demands, the significance wasn’t really about DNS resolvers, piracy shields, or the exact euro amount of a fine calculated against global revenue rather than local presence. The significance was the tone and the logic of the objection: that infrastructure providers are being treated as political actors, that technical systems are being conscripted into enforcement roles without due process, and that national rules are creeping outward in ways that ignore how the internet actually works. Strip away the headlines and the company names, and what’s left is a familiar business concern: unpredictability. Companies can plan for strict rules, even expensive ones, but they struggle in environments where rules expand quickly, enforcement feels symbolic, and legal clarity arrives only after penalties land.
From a U.S. perspective, this pattern is especially jarring because American tech firms are already operating under heavy scrutiny at home. Antitrust pressure, export controls, congressional hearings, and public skepticism are part of the daily background noise. The difference is that those debates, however messy, unfold within a shared legal and political framework. In Europe, the same companies increasingly find themselves drawn into disputes that feel less like consumer protection and more like proxy battles over cultural influence and geopolitical alignment. Digital sovereignty becomes the banner under which everything from procurement decisions to technical mandates can be justified, even when the practical outcome is slower services, fragmented standards, and higher costs passed on to users.
There’s an irony here that’s hard to shake. Europe worries, often correctly, about losing ground to the U.S. and China in AI, cloud infrastructure, and advanced digital services. At the same time, it is constructing one of the most complex regulatory environments in the world for exactly those sectors. Over-regulation doesn’t just inconvenience foreign companies; it shapes domestic behavior too. European startups grow up learning that compliance and political acceptability matter at least as much as speed, risk-taking, or global ambition. That’s not a moral failure, just an economic reality, but it helps explain why so many European tech successes end up scaling elsewhere or selling early.
None of this is an argument for a laissez-faire internet or blind trust in large American platforms. Sensible oversight, transparency, and accountability matter, and they matter everywhere. The problem is proportion and intent. When regulation becomes a substitute for competitiveness, when enforcement becomes a signal rather than a solution, and when foreign companies are framed primarily as strategic risks rather than market participants, the system starts eating its own future. Europe’s digital sovereignty push risks becoming exactly that: sovereignty in name, but self-limitation in practice, a framework that drags U.S. companies into politicized mud while quietly narrowing Europe’s own room to innovate. In a global tech race that rewards clarity, scale, and speed, that’s a price no region should be eager to pay, even if the rhetoric makes it sound reassuring in the short term.
