EU governments try to exit US tech platforms

A French judge at the International Criminal Court found last summer that his Visa and Mastercard stopped working, his Google and Microsoft accounts became unusable, and routine purchases via Amazon or Airbnb were suddenly off-limits. The trigger was not a cyberattack but US sanctions announced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, according to EUobserver.

The episode is now being treated inside European administrations as a stress test of “strategic autonomy” that no white paper anticipated. When a single foreign decision can freeze payments, email access and cloud logins for officials, the immediate fear is not only personal inconvenience but institutional paralysis: procurement portals, identity management, case files and internal communications are increasingly built around American vendors and standards. EUobserver reports that governments including France, Austria, Finland and Germany have begun looking for alternatives to US platforms such as Gmail, Zoom, Microsoft services, Visa and Amazon.

What they are discovering is that dependency is not a matter of swapping apps. It is embedded in public procurement rules that reward incumbents with compliance paperwork already on file; in licensing models that make exit expensive and slow; and in data formats and integrations that have quietly become the default language of administration. Even when an alternative exists, it often fails at the hard edges: interoperability with other agencies, audit trails, security certifications, and the ability to hire staff who already know the tools. The result is a familiar pattern in large organisations: the cost of changing course is borne upfront by the buyer, while the benefits are diffuse and uncertain.

The ICC case also shows how payment rails can be the choke point. Email can be routed elsewhere, but salaries, travel bookings and per-diem expenses still run through card networks and bank compliance teams that respond to US sanctions risk. In practice, that shifts power to private intermediaries with no political mandate but strong incentives to over-comply rather than litigate. A ministry can declare itself “cloud sovereign” on paper; it still needs vendors willing to process transactions and host data without touching US jurisdiction.

Europe’s autonomy debate often treats technology as a procurement category—another line item to diversify—rather than a stack of dependencies that accumulates over decades. If sanctions can reach prosecutors in The Hague, they can reach any agency whose daily operations are routed through the same handful of platforms.

The ICC staff did not lose access to their systems because a server failed. They lost it because someone else controlled the switch.