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European demand growing for locally-based tech services

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Companies and users cite worries about privacy, politics

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European companies, governments champion "digital

sovereignty"

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US tech companies still dwarf alternative providers

By Thomas Escritt

BERLIN, June 21 (Reuters) - At a market stall in Berlin

run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge

their phones of the influence of U.S. tech firms. Since Donald

Trump's inauguration, the queue for their services has grown.

Interest in European-based digital services has jumped in

recent months, data from digital market intelligence company

Similarweb shows. More people are looking for e-mail, messaging

and even search providers outside the United States.

The first months of Trump's second presidency have shaken

some Europeans' confidence in their long-time ally, after he

signalled his country would step back from its role in Europe's

security and then launched a trade war.

"It's about the concentration of power in U.S. firms," said

Topio's founder Michael Wirths, as his colleague installed on a

customer's phone a version of the Android operating system

without hooks into the Google ecosystem.

Wirths said the type of people coming to the stall had

changed: "Before, it was people who knew a lot about data

privacy. Now it's people who are politically aware and feel

exposed."

Tesla chief Elon Musk, who also owns social media

company X, was a leading adviser to the U.S. president before

the two fell out, while the bosses of Amazon ( AMZN ), Meta

and Google-owner Alphabet took prominent

spots at Trump's inauguration in January.

Days before Trump took office, outgoing president Joe Biden

had warned of an oligarchic "tech industrial complex"

threatening democracy.

Berlin-based search engine Ecosia says it has benefited from

some customers' desire to avoid U.S. counterparts like

Microsoft's ( MSFT ) Bing or Google, which dominates web

searches and is also the world's biggest email provider.

"The worse it gets, the better it is for us," founder

Christian Kroll said of Ecosia, whose sales pitch is that it

spends its profits on environmental projects.

Similarweb data shows the number of queries directed to

Ecosia from the European Union has risen 27% year-on-year and

the company says it has 1% of the German search engine market.

But its 122 million visits from the 27 EU countries in

February were dwarfed by 10.3 billion visits to Google, whose

parent Alphabet made revenues of about $100 billion from Europe,

the Middle East and Africa in 2024 - nearly a third of its $350

billion global turnover.

Non-profit Ecosia earned 3.2 million euros ($3.65 million)

in April, of which 770,000 euros was spent on planting 1.1

million trees.

Google declined to comment for this story.

Reuters could not determine whether major U.S. tech

companies have lost any market share to local rivals in Europe.

DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY

The search for alternative providers accompanies a debate in

Europe about "digital sovereignty" - the idea that reliance on

companies from an increasingly isolationist United States is a

threat to Europe's economy and security.

"Ordinary people, the kind of people who would never have

thought it was important they were using an American service are

saying, 'hang on!'," said UK-based internet regulation expert

Maria Farrell. "My hairdresser was asking me what she should

switch to."

Use in Europe of Swiss-based ProtonMail rose 11.7%

year-on-year to March compared to a year ago, according to

Similarweb, while use of Alphabet's Gmail, which has some 70% of

the global email market, slipped 1.9%.

ProtonMail, which offers both free and paid-for services,

said it had seen an increase in users from Europe since Trump's

re-election, though it declined to give a number.

"My household is definitely disengaging," said British

software engineer Ken Tindell, citing weak U.S. data privacy

protections as one factor.

Trump's vice president JD Vance shocked European leaders in

February by accusing them - at a conference usually known for

displays of transatlantic unity - of censoring free speech and

failing to control immigration.

In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened visa bans

for people who "censor" speech by Americans, including on social

media, and suggested the policy could target foreign officials

regulating U.S. tech companies.

U.S. social media companies like Facebook and Instagram

parent Meta have said the European Union's Digital Services Act

amounts to censorship of their platforms.

EU officials say the Act will make the online environment

safer by compelling tech giants to tackle illegal content,

including hate speech and child sexual abuse material.

Greg Nojeim, director of the Security and Surveillance

Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said

Europeans' concerns about the U.S. government accessing their

data, whether stored on devices or in the cloud, were justified.

Not only does U.S. law permit the government to search

devices of anyone entering the country, it can compel disclosure

of data that Europeans outside the U.S. store or transmit

through U.S. communications service providers, Nojeim said.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

Germany's new government is itself making efforts to reduce

exposure to U.S. tech, committing in its coalition agreement to

make more use of open-source data formats and locally-based

cloud infrastructure.

Regional governments have gone further - in conservative-run

Schleswig-Holstein, on the Danish border, all IT used by the

public administration must run on open-source software.

Berlin has also paid for Ukraine to access a

satellite-internet network operated by France's Eutelsat

instead of Musk's Starlink.

But with modern life driven by technology, "completely

divorcing U.S. tech in a very fundamental way is, I would say,

possibly not possible," said Bill Budington of U.S. digital

rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Everything from push notifications to the content delivery

networks powering many websites and how internet traffic is

routed relies largely on U.S. companies and infrastructure,

Budington noted.

Both Ecosia and French-based search engine Qwant depend in

part on search results provided by Google and Microsoft's ( MSFT ) Bing,

while Ecosia runs on cloud platforms, some hosted by the very

same tech giants it promises an escape from.

Nevertheless, a group on messaging board Reddit called

BuyFromEU has 211,000 members.

"Just cancelled my Dropbox and will switch to Proton Drive,"

read one post.

Mastodon, a decentralised social media service developed by

German programmer Eugen Rochko, enjoyed a rush of new users two

years ago when Musk bought Twitter, later renamed X. But it

remains a niche service.

Signal, a messaging app run by a U.S. nonprofit foundation,

has also seen a surge in installations from Europe. Similarweb's

data showed a 7% month-on-month increase in Signal usage in

March, while use of Meta's WhatsApp was static.

Meta declined to comment for this story. Signal did not

respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

But this kind of conscious self-organising is unlikely on

its own to make a dent in Silicon Valley's European dominance,

digital rights activist Robin Berjon told Reuters.

"The market is too captured," he said. "Regulation is needed

as well."

(Additional reporting by Riham Alkousaa in Berlin, Charlie

Devereux in Madrid, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam and AJ Vicens in

Detroit; Editing by Catherine Evans)