Brussels itself says EU countries spend €264 billion a year on American tech, with three U.S. giants — Microsoft, Google and Amazon — dominating the cloud services market that underlies everything from email communication, the storage and processing of public and private data and many of the tools powering government services.
Some EU governments have warned that it is neither realistic nor desirable to decouple the continent from U.S. tech.
With the European Parliament in the process of finalizing a controversial trade deal with the U.S., the Commission has taken pains to insist the new measures are not aimed at American firms.
The U.S. could still retain a high level of access to the European market, given an existing data privacy pact between the EU and the U.S. and recent efforts by big U.S. companies to put safeguards in place against foreign interference.
But whether the American tech sector can continue to serve some of the most sensitive sectors of the European economy is a politically charged question that will depend on the final form of the legislation — and crucially, how it gets implemented.
“We have defined here four levels of sovereignty. When we are coming higher in the levels … the requirements are very strict,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen explained. “We want to make sure that nobody has a so-called kill switch possibility there,” she added, later suggesting that the current Cloud Act — a sweeping U.S. law forcing U.S.-based companies to hand over data hosted on their services — makes it “difficult to reach” the stricter requirements.
