With the Trump administration’s ascension, America started throwing its weight around. It’s actively intimidating political rivals by cutting off their e-mail access and squeezing commercial rivals by export-controlling Anthropic’s acclaimed Mythos and Fable AI models for foreign nationals.
But what happens when a foreign nation-state limits access to your supply chain, products or software? How does it impact your day-to-day business? And are you vulnerable as a small and medium-sized business?
Customers are not always kings
To answer those questions, we need to look at how big American tech companies can treat their customers. They make ubiquitous software products like payment processors or office suites, which are fundamental to smaller businesses. Ever seen an organisation which didn’t use an Excel spreadsheet to run an essential process?
Google provided a viral example earlier this year. An anonymous British Reddit user asked for legal help regarding getting their access back to the Google family account. After the user’s teenage son abused Gemini’s camera feature, Google decided to ban all the accounts attached to the family account.
The company didn’t provide any communication on getting it back. The Reddit user stored EVERYTHING on Google: besides personal information, their full business administration was on Google Drive. The user was at their wits’ end. Their financial year was about to end with no prospect of accessing financial documents.
Let’s take this financial perspective further. One of the biggest online payment processors, Stripe, is notorious for closing accounts of small online businesses. The internet is littered with dozens of examples. One day you receive your main cash flows, the other day you lose them. The reasons for banning are opaque; Stripe never tells you the why, and you appeal against a robot.
Globalised for the worse
These customer stories are a very bleak sign on how things can be when geopolitics come into play. For instance, a rogue American government that cuts off the email of the ICC can just as easily deny the European Union access to services like Office 365 or Google Workspace, which together own the majority of the office suite market.
Every small- and medium-sized company has such a subscription in place. And everyone expects that their Excel and Gmail will be there tomorrow as well. But this assumption is now being seriously tested. Which company has a plan in place when their Excel which runs the whole business isn’t there tomorrow? Or when Stripe is ordered to stop serving EU customers anymore?
An open future
But there’s a movement to a better future. In Europe, governments and companies are more and more looking towards open or European-hosted software services. A German state is moving away from its total dependency on Microsoft. The French government is saying adieu to Windows and actively migrating to Linux.
Outside the operating systems and office suites, many more software domains are yet to be Europeanised or open-sourced. That’s why at Wolk, we’re building Databaas. Databaas is a data & AI platform built on top of open-source data tooling. Among others, it uses Apache Airflow for data pipelines and Apache Iceberg for data lake management. This enables an openness not seen in a platform like Databricks: you can bring your Airflow DAGs, and leave Databaas with your Python code intact. There’s no vendor lock-in.
The road to software independence is long and paved with good intentions. But as the German state minister for Digitisation put it: “you don’t learn to ride a bike just by watching.” European organisations need to actively divert investment in American tech products and into European ones. That takes political and economic courage: the courage to risk short-term productivity losses for long-term independence. It’s time to stop watching and start pedalling.
