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The response to my previous post, “Europe has everything it needs, so why are we being digitally colonized?”, has been swift and, unfortunately, predictable. When I wrote about Google’s $5.5 billion investment as a Trojan horse—a sign of Germany’s failure to build its own digital backbone and its resulting dependence on US giants—I feared the official response would be too little, too late.
Raed the former post here
The latest headlines confirm those fears. We are not just slow; we are now at a pivotal moment where our governing bodies are choosing reaction over creation, proving that the “digital colonization” I described is proceeding exactly according to plan.
The Summit of Naïveté
The fact that serious political commentary, like the article titled “In Berlin steigt der Gipfel der Naivität” (The Summit of Naivety is rising in Berlin | https://www.focus.de/politik/briefing/in-berlin-steigt-der-gipfel-der-naivitaet_b6d76ffc-45e3-429b-8967-60d59423272d.html | You can translatethe article with your browser’s translating feature), is making headlines is damning. It underscores the profound disconnect between the urgency of the digital transformation and the pace of political action.
We are watching a crisis unfold in slow motion. The German and European approach to tech is characterized by a crippling inertia—a reluctance to invest, to risk, and to design our own sovereign structures. This vacuum is not going unfilled; it is being efficiently and legally occupied by foreign entities.
The Regulatory Trap: Rules Won’t Build Servers
The most recent confirmation of this bureaucratic lethargy is the news that the EU is finally “taking the cloud market into its sights.”
The response to being digitally dependent is not to build our own data centers, our own operating systems, or our own foundational cloud infrastructure. No. The political instinct is to create more rules and laws.
It is a policy of attempting to regulate away the problem we were too slow and lazy to solve through innovation. Our strategy is consistently this:
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Allow foreign companies to achieve global dominance due to our lack of speed and vision.
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Once they are indispensable, attempt to reassert control by imposing layer upon layer of rigid regulations—an add-on to the countless bureaucratic hurdles already active.
This approach is an illusion of sovereignty. It is the political class negotiating the terms of our colonization, not building the ramparts of our independence.
The Fatal Flaw of the European Digital Strategy
The leaders of the digital empires—the US and China—do not build their power on regulatory white papers; they build it on infrastructure, speed, and capital. They innovate first and ask permission later.
Meanwhile, Europe, with its incredible talent pool and financial resources, continues to believe it can legislate its way to the top. This is the fatal flaw:
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We confuse compliance with competitiveness. Our focus is on how to make Amazon, Google, and Microsoft compliant with the GDPR, the DSA, and a dozen new cloud-specific rules, rather than focusing on how to make a European alternative better, faster, and more trusted.
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We prioritize control over creation. Every new regulation makes it marginally harder for the colonizer, but it makes it exponentially harder for the European start-up or the small tech provider to compete. It adds complexity, cost, and delay, favoring the established giants who have the legal departments to navigate the complexity.
The truth is stark: Rules do not build cloud architecture. They do not foster the AI development needed for the next decade. They do not reverse a $5.5 billion strategic investment. Only bold, proactive, structural investment in genuinely sovereign European solutions can do that.
It’s Time to Choose: Architects or Regulators?
We are at a crossroads. We can continue down the path of regulatory reaction, forever playing catch-up, forever dependent on the platforms we try to constrain. Or, we can finally embrace the hard work of being architects of our own digital destiny.
The solution is not more paper. It is more servers, more engineers, and a political mandate that prioritizes European innovation over bureaucratic control. Until we shift our focus from policing the platforms of others to building our own, “Digital Colonization” will remain our economic and social reality.
