BRUSSELS — National capitals have a sobering message for Brussels: Europe runs on American technology, and that won’t change for years.

After January brought a warning from EU officials that decades of reliance on U.S. firms could be used as a tool of coercion by the White House, POLITICO surveyed the 27 EU governments to ask how they are handling their relationship with American tech.

The answers revealed a patchwork of efforts to face the new geopolitical reality and a shared outlook that Europe has no quick fix. While Brussels is alive to the continent’s digital reliance, the responses from governments paint a sobering picture as to how quickly Europe can address the strategic vulnerability and regain leverage against Washington.

Several countries are taking the threat from Washington more seriously, with Finland revealing it recently gamed out the scenario of a U.S. tech “kill switch” to help it prepare.

Yet four capitals noted the enormous scale of the task to build a non-American digital ecosystem capable of supporting governments and essential services, and Latvia and Lithuania pointed to the threat from Russia as one reason that dependence on the U.S. is essential.

“A full technological ‘decoupling’ from the United States is neither a realistic objective nor one that would serve Europe’s broader strategic interests,” said Lithuania’s economy minister, Edvinas Grikšas.

The “depth of existing integration combined with shared security priorities … makes such a scenario impractical in the foreseeable future,” he said.

POLITICO contacted the digital ministries of all 27 countries starting Jan. 22 to ask about government preparations, including whether they had mapped their dependencies on U.S. tech and whether they had a crisis plan for any disruption or restriction in services.

The eight countries that responded by the publication deadline were Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ireland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Scale of the challenge

U.S. tech giants dominate Europe’s digital infrastructure: Amazon, Microsoft and Google control over two-thirds of the cloud market — the backbone of the internet— while most businesses and governments use American software.

An analysis by privacy-focused tech firm Proton based on email domain names concluded that 74 percent of publicly listed European companies depend on U.S. tech services. Ireland, Finland and Sweden top the list of the most dependent EU countries.

“During the last year, everybody has really realized how important it is that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to some very critical technologies,” the EU’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen said last month in an interview with POLITICO. “In these times … dependencies, they can be weaponized against us.”

But while European competitors exist, U.S. early entrants have benefited from scale, integration and market lock-in effects that have made it difficult for rivals — meaning the solutions coming out of Silicon Valley have often been the default choice.

“In the short to medium term, a full replacement of foreign digital services is neither realistic nor necessary,” a spokesperson for Germany’s digital minister said, even as they acknowledged a “clear picture of critical dependencies.”

Some countries and regions within Europe are determined to move away from American services. France has banned officials from using U.S. video tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, shifting activity to French platform Visio. The city of Amsterdam last week set a 2035 deadline, while the German state of Schleswig-Holstein claimed it completed a phase-out last year.

According to Jarkko Levasma, government chief information officer at the Finnish Ministry of Finance, “most of the options available are realistically possible on [the] medium to long term.”

Helsinki “has recently assessed” the possibility of a U.S. tech shutdown to make sure it’s prepared, Levasma added. Although “highly exceptional,” they concluded the impact “would be wide-ranging” — including “on the U.S. economy itself.”

The problem of Russia

In the Baltic countries, American support is seen as particularly vital. “U.S. digital technologies and cybersecurity capabilities play an important role in strengthening national resilience” against threats from Russia, Lithuanian minister Grikšas said.

Latvia — one of the EU’s frontline states bordering Russia — warned that sidelining U.S. tech would be an act of self-sabotage. “There’s only a couple of companies in the European Union that are at the level of U.S. companies,” Economy Minister Viktors Valainis said in an interview.

American help is critical to fend off Russian hybrid warfare, he emphasized, describing as “wrong” the way “some countries in Europe and somehow the Commission are trying to compete with the U.S.”

“Our threats are Russian and Belarusian — the threats are coming from those countries,” he said. “U.S. today, tomorrow, and after tomorrow will be the only and first partner for our security, and that’s not only for Latvia but for Europe.”

In Estonia, the barrage of cyberattacks from Russia has helped it prepare for “literally whatever situation,” Digital Minister Liisa-Ly Pakosta said. Estonia has forged a level of digital resilience that is widely praised.

When it comes to where to go from here, “We are not looking for U.S. company dependencies but we are looking for any critical dependencies,” she said, noting that Estonia considers the threat of submarine internet cables being cut to be far more real than a U.S. tech shutdown.

Betting on ‘open’

When it comes to finding alternatives to American majors, some of the tools that are gaining traction in Europe are open-source — meaning anyone can see, use and adapt the software, unlike proprietary tools whose code is confidential.

“Like France, the Dutch government is researching autonomous communication tools for chats and video conferencing,” said outgoing State Secretary Eddie van Marum.

Van Marum cited the trials of the French-developed platform Visio and a German alternative from Nextcloud, both of which are open-source. The German government is trying the openDesk platform, a solution the Hague-based International Criminal Court also turned to after ditching Microsoft over fears that U.S. sanctions could freeze its work.

“Access to source code reduces dependence on third-country providers, reduces vendor lock-in, keeps value and investment within Europe,” said center-right Finnish member of the European Parliament Aura Salla. “We need to cut our dependencies with hyperscalers as soon as possible.”

The EU executive will unveil a package of legislation designed to address tech sovereignty in the spring, including a dedicated open-source strategy — providing the first real signal of how the bloc plans to tackle the U.S. tech chokehold.

For now, Brussels is “lacking the political will [and] the attention in the agenda” to make progress on the topic, said Italian social democrat Brando Benifei, chairman of the Parliament’s U.S.-EU delegation.

“There’s a lot of blabbering about this,” he said.

Anouk Schlung and Pieter Haeck contributed to this report.