Breaking Free from Big Tech in 2026

Europe's dependency is measurable.

Proton's Europe Tech Watch says more than 74% of publicly listed European companies rely on US-based email or email-security providers. Proton also reports that the figure is 96% in Norway, 93% in Ireland, and 91% in Sweden. The company is explicit about its method. It uses email as a measurable signal because when a business picks an email platform, it often adopts the broader suite around it. (1)

Eurostat shows why that layer matters. In 2025, 52.7% of EU enterprises used paid cloud services. Among those companies, the most common uses were email services at 85.2%, office software at 71.7%, and file storage at 71.5%. Sovereignty is not a niche concern at the edge of the stack. It sits inside the tools people use to write, share, and coordinate work every day. (2)

This is not only a European issue, but Europe is the clearest lens for studying it because the region combines measurable dependence, active sovereignty policy, and visible public-sector alternatives. (1)(10)(13)(15)

That is the practical frame for this whole discussion. Europe is not debating an abstract dislike of foreign software. It is debating control over the systems that carry internal communication, operational documents, and day-to-day decision-making.

Why jurisdiction and control matter more in the AI era.

The US CLOUD Act is one reason this matters in practice. In its own white paper, the U.S. Department of Justice says providers subject to U.S. jurisdiction must disclose data responsive to valid U.S. legal process regardless of where the company stores the data. That does not mean every request is granted or every provider behaves the same way. It does mean data residency by itself is not a complete sovereignty answer when the provider still answers to another legal regime. (3)

The AI shift makes the question broader. Eurostat's latest enterprise figures say 19.95% of EU enterprises used AI technologies in 2025. The most common categories included analysing written language, used by 11.75% of enterprises, and generating written or spoken language or code, used by 8.76%. Office data is no longer just being stored and transmitted. It is increasingly being parsed, summarised, searched, and generated around. (4)

That changes the standard Europe has to meet. It is no longer enough to ask where the file is hosted. The harder question is who controls the service layer that can read, classify, transform, and reason over the file once AI becomes part of normal work.

Europe already has credible alternatives and public-sector deployments.

Europe is not starting from zero. The Document Foundation says LibreOffice passed 400 million cumulative downloads by the end of 2024. OpenDocument has also long been standardized as ISO/IEC 26300. The continent already has mature office software, open standards, and communities that have been operating for years. (5)(6)

The public sector has real migration examples too. Schleswig-Holstein said on December 4, 2025 that LibreOffice had become the mandatory standard for office applications across state ministries and agencies. The state said nearly 80% of workstations outside the tax administration were already using the open-source suite and that license savings had already exceeded EUR 15 million. (7)

France offers a different model. Tchap says it is used by more than 600,000 public agents and is designed and hosted in France. DINUM separately describes Tchap as the state's secure instant-messaging service built on the Matrix protocol, and says Matrix has already been adopted in several European countries. (8)(9)

LaSuite pushes that logic further into collaborative work. Its own site describes it as an open, sovereign workspace for public agents, with more than 500,000 monthly users across 15 ministries and many administrations. DINUM's April 1, 2026 announcement on the Cnam partnership says that footprint was about to expand to another 80,000 agents. (10)(11)

Policy has moved faster than product scale.

Europe has not been passive on policy. The Commission's open source strategy, adopted in 2020, says open-source solutions will be preferred when they are equivalent in functionality, total cost, and cybersecurity. It also ties control directly to open standards. (12)

The Data Act shows the same seriousness from the market side. The Commission says the regulation entered into force on January 11, 2024 and became applicable on September 12, 2025. It is meant to make switching between providers easier, improve interoperability, and add safeguards against unlawful third-country government access to non-personal data held in the EU. (13)(14)

NIS2 pushes from the security direction. The Commission describes it as a unified legal framework covering 18 critical sectors across the EU, including public administration and other digital services. Europe is clearly trying to reduce exposure through rules, procurement, and resilience requirements. (15)

But policy can lower switching friction. It cannot build the product for you. It cannot retrain a workforce overnight. It cannot erase years of ecosystem bundling, document-format lock-in, or procurement habits. That is why Europe can look serious on regulation and still feel dependent in everyday software choice.

Why policy and open source are not enough on their own.

This is the part the market still understates. Breaking free from Big Tech does not mean building a closed digital island. It means having real leverage in the layers of software that shape daily work. Standards help. Open source helps. Policy helps. But if there are no companies able to turn those foundations into products people actually adopt, the dependency stays in place.

The evidence above points in the same direction. Europe has proven it can create open standards, build credible tools, and run serious public deployments. What it has not yet done at enough scale is turn those ingredients into default commercial choices across the wider productivity stack. That gap is not about principle. It is about distribution, interoperability, trust, and staying power.

That is why we think every region needs serious commercial challengers in the categories that matter most, especially productivity, communication, cloud, and AI. Not symbolic alternatives. Not projects that survive only as policy signals. Products strong enough to earn trust, support demanding customers, and keep improving for a decade or more.

That is also why office software matters so much. It sits at the junction of documents, communication, collaboration, and now AI. If Europe wants more control over the next layer of work, it needs products designed for that reality from the start. Sovereignty needs working software, and working software needs builders who plan to be around for decades.