One blocked email was enough. When Microsoft, complying with Donald Trump's February 2025 executive order, blocked the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, from his email, an abstract European worry suddenly had a face. Khan switched to Switzerland's Proton Mail, and European governments realised that the US CLOUD Act - the law that lets Washington access data held by American companies, wherever it physically sits - isn't a theory. It's an off switch.

France responded most radically. In April, the interministerial digital agency DINUM issued a directive requiring every ministry to submit, by autumn 2026, a plan to exit non-European digital dependencies across eight categories: from workstations and operating systems, through collaboration tools, antivirus software, AI and databases, to virtualisation, cloud infrastructure and network equipment. The agency itself was the pilot - its own staff were the first to move from Windows to Linux.

The number is huge: 2.5 million workstations moving from Windows to Linux, alongside a shift from Teams, Zoom and Webex to the homegrown Visio platform by 2027. "We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, prices and risks we don't control," said Public Service Minister David Amiel. No diplomatic sugar-coating.

83 percent across the Atlantic

According to Cigref, the French association of IT directors, a full 83 percent of European spending on cloud and software, around 264 billion euros, still goes to American companies. The European Commission unveiled a tech sovereignty package in the spring, and in April awarded a six-year framework contract worth up to 180 million euros to European cloud providers. "Technological power has become geopolitical," says EU Commissioner Henna Virkkunen.

The savings aren't small either. After switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice in 2012, Toulouse saved around a million euros in the first three years. Italy's Defence Ministry expects to save 29 million euros across its 150,000 computers. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein will save more than 15 million euros on licences this year, and its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schrödter, compared dependence on Microsoft to Europe's dependence on Russian gas. France's Gendarmerie, meanwhile, has run its own Linux distribution since 2008, on 103,164 workstations.

Microsoft is no longer staying quiet. The company says it will legally challenge any order to cut off cloud services to European government customers and will set up a European board of directors made up exclusively of European citizens. Analysts, though, point back to the core issue: the CLOUD Act is in force, Microsoft is an American company, and an absolute guarantee that European data will never be handed over to US authorities simply doesn't exist.

There is criticism from the other side too: that France is putting sovereignty ahead of everyday productivity without any published cost-benefit analysis, and that the Gendarmerie had nearly two decades to do the same thing while the ministries now have a few months. But the direction is clear. Denmark, Italy, Austria and more than 800,000 government workstations across Europe are heading the same way. While Western Europe counts every byte leaving across the Atlantic, the question remains whether anyone in the Balkans even knows where our state data is stored - and who can switch it off.