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Digital sovereignty: No, Europe is not a colony of Big Tech
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Anyone who portrays Europe as a victim of digital colonialism negates historical injustice and overlooks the way out of Europe's self-inflicted immaturity. Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer is not the only one who is losing his temper in this debate. A contradiction.
https://www.brot-fuer-die-welt.de/ueber-uns/personalen/sven-hilbig/">SvenHilbigis a consultant for trade policy and digitalization at Bread for the World.https://netzpolitik.org/2026/neuer-bundesdatenschutzrechner-weder-b...Roof jokeis a journalist at netzpolitik.org. Their shared bookhttps://www.chbeck.de/dachwitz-hilbig-digitaler-immobilienismus/product/37...“Digital colonialism: How tech companies and major powers divide the world among themselves”published in 2025 by C.H. Beck and was nominated for the German Non-Fiction Prize.
Is Europe a colony of tech companies from the USA and China? This claim can be heard again and again in the debate about digital sovereigntyhttps://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/eu-verfahren-gegen-elon-musk-wir- Werden-...ünen EU politician Alexandra Geeseabout thehttps://gi.de/themen/teil/deutschland-als-digitale-kolonie">Societyfor computer scienceto the conservativehttps://kulturstaatsminister.de/weimer-ein-fest-der-freiheit-des-denkens...Wolfram Weimer. A year ago, at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Weimer said about AI companies that feed their models with European cultural assets without permission: “I call it digital colonialism, which we can no longer tolerate.”
And it's true: Europe's dependence is great. When it comes to browsers and operating systems, many people only have the choice between two providers. Google dominates web searches with a market share of around 80 percent. When it comes to social media, there's nothing behind Meta and TikTok for a long time. Amazon, Microsoft and Google share three quarters of the global cloud business. Public administration runs almost exclusively on Microsoft; The federal government pays at least one billion in license fees every year.
When it comes to AI, a handful of Chinese and especially US companies dominate the market, with the EU once again sitting on the bench. And yet talk of Europe as a digital colony is misleading for two main reasons.
How Europe benefits from digital colonialism
First, this claim negates how much we ourselves benefit from colonial power and exploitation relationships in the digital sphere. In the race for strategically important tech raw materials, Europe is not very squeamish. Metals such as lithium, copper or gold are needed for chip production as well as forhttps://corporateeurope.org/en/2023/11/blood-green-deal">Space traveland armaments projects. There are hardly any extractable deposits in Europe, which is why environmental damage and human rights violations elsewhere are accepted when purchasing them.
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2023/11/blood-green-deal">Cobaltis an important component of rechargeable batteries in smartphones, electric cars and battery storage in data centers. Three quarters of global production comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. 150 years ago, the Belgian King Leopold II left the region hunting for ivory and rubberhttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongogr%C3%A4uel">bestialexploit. Today, Chinese, North American and European mining companies extract important tech raw materials such as cobalt there. That it will occur during its dismantlinghttps://www.ilo.org/resource/news/tiny-mighty-voices-against-child-labou...,https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx3n7nq1d9o">tfatal accidentsandhttps://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/09/drc-cobalt-and-copper-min...comes is well documented. Nevertheless, the country has been since 2023https://international-partnerships.ec.europa.eu/countries/democratic-rep...Raw materials partner of the EU.
The hunger for raw materials is not only driven by the AI and armaments boom, but also by private consumption. Between 2018 and 2023 alone, the number of digital devices increasedhttps://unctad.org/publication/digital-economy-report-2024">according toa UN reportin Western Europe per person almost doubled from 5.6 to 9.4. Some of the resulting electronic waste ends up on landhttps://www.greenpeace.de/engagieren/nachhafter-leben/abfall-abwegen">...Garbage dumps in countries like Ghana, where young men, women and children take on recycling without protective equipmenthttps://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/children-and-di...Inhale vapors.
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Surveillance state made in Europe
Europe also benefits from digital colonialism in other areas. Digital services such as AI applications and social media would hardly function without the manual work of millions of ghost workers. These people prepare data for use in AI models, train algorithms with their feedback or clean social media of violent content.
Between 154 and 435 million people arehttps://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/ebc4a7e2-85c6-4...World Bank estimatesworking behind the scenes in the digital world, predominantly in countries such as India, Kenya and the Philippines. As a rule, these people are athttps://netzpolitik.org/2026/hidden-kosten-von-ki-sie-wissen-welche-...under bad conditionsbusy - poorly paid and left alone to deal with the psychological consequences of their work. While European users benefit from secure applications, they also earnhttps://www.business-humanrights.org/en/companies/t%C3%A9l%C3%A9performa...Asian outsourcing companiesmaking good money from exploitation.
At the same time, European manufacturers of surveillance products sell their tools of repression to crisis areas and help dictators around the world oppress their populations. Lastly, one ensuredhttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_Files">State Trojancalled Predatorfor sensation, which is distributed by the Israeli-European Intellexa Alliance and was used, among other things, to monitor opposition figures in Madagascar and Vietnam. Since the 2000s, German companies have been exporting digital eavesdropping technology, spyware and video surveillance to countries such ashttps://www.heise.de/news/Ueberwachungstechnik-Deutsche-Firmen-beliefern...Egypt,https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Ueberwachungstechnik-fuer-Syrien-1518...,https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2013-02/gamma-trovicor-bahrain-b...and thehttps://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/vorab/a-632950.html">Iran.
Anyone who speaks of Europe only as a victim of digital colonialism ignores our involvement in a global power and economic order that is still influenced by colonialism and at the same time relativizes the historical injustice that has come from Europe over the past six hundred years.
Europe can do more than we think
Secondly, talking about Europe as a digital colony obscures the enormous opportunities we have to shape digitalization according to our values. First of all, this applies above all to the legal framework, whose effect should not be underestimated. It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley, in an alliance with the White House, is attacking regulations such as the Digital Services Act: When it comes to digital regulation, the EU is already a major power. Because it is not only an ideal role model, but also sets standards worldwide, the so-calledhttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%BCssel-effekt">“Brussels effect”become a household word.
But even beyond regulation, Europe has everything it needs to become digitally independent - from cutting-edge research and venture capital to pioneers and competitive companies in the field of open source technologies. Thehttps://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/de/policies/open-source-strategy">...counts in this areaMore than three million contributors and 500 for-profit companies across Europe. It wasn't just the International Criminal Court that recently heard from Microsofthttps://www1.wdr.de/nrw/ruhrgebiet/strafgerichtshof-software-bochum-micr...Solution from Germanyconverted.
Instead of seeing ourselves as victims of digital colonialism, we should therefore work together with countries in the Global South to achieve technological independence. After all, the demand for “digital sovereignty” can be heard from European countries as well as from states in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Given similar conceptual ideas and visions, the Federal Government and the EU Commission should therefore strive for partnerships in digital and economic relations between Europe and democratic countries in the Global South.
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New alliances
If we do not want to build our sovereignty on the backs of the Global South, we cannot avoid a fundamental realignment of European raw materials policy. The colonial model of extractivism must finally come to an end: countries in which raw materials are mined must also benefit from it. The construction of refineries to further process cobalt and lithium or battery factories could be a joint project between European and local industry from which everyone involved benefits.
After the EU herhttps://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/eu-beschliesst-lieferke...hollowed out beyond recognitiona new approach is also needed to effectively hold corporations accountable for environmental damage and human rights violations.
Also in infrastructure projects like thathttps://botpopuli.net/soft-power-histrionics-surveying-the-eus-global-ga...Global GatewayEurope must rethink: Instead of presenting African countries with a fait accompli when building railway lines and submarine cables, the EU should work with them to consider what serves the interests of all those involved. In addition, the development of a common open source industry with open digital ecosystems as an alternative to the dominant services of the digital superpowers could become the cornerstone of partnership-based sovereignty.
Anyone who is not receptive to the economic ethics argument may be persuaded by the geostrategic one. The international order is changing rapidly: US President Trump is increasingly turning away from the EU and is sometimes even hostile to the Union. While old certainties and partnerships are breaking away, the proposed path opens up prospects for new alliances. In the multipolar world, Europe needs new partners more than ever.
The prerequisite for this would be that we consistently do thishttps://www.swr.de/kultur/gesellschaft/koloniale-erinnerung-initiative-s...Dealing with the injustice of European imperialism. We should also recognize how much his legacy shapes global power relations to this day. A first step would be to stop working with skewed historical comparisons.
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Become part of this unique community and support our public interest-oriented, advertising- and tracking-free journalismhttps://netzpolitik.org/spenden/?via=rss">nowwith a donation.
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