Is it time to break up with US tech? – The Latest

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09When you have a US president that is quite so capricious, generally we haven't thought about the tech consequences, but really they are some of the most consequential. You rely often on either Google or Microsoft to produce things. Perhaps that could be weaponised at an individual or at a state level. Across Europe, governments are becoming aware of something they used to take for granted. Most of the technology they rely on comes from US companies, with Donald Trump tearing up the old world order. Is that a problem? From The Guardian's Today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Michael Safi.

0:49Joining me is Chris Stokel-Walker, a tech journalist. Chris, thanks so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure to chat to you. Chris, on Thursday, the French government made an announcement that it would no longer be using apps like Zoom or Microsoft Teams for video conferencing software. Instead, it was going to shift to a locally made alternative. Now, the particular video conferencing software used by the French government doesn't ordinarily make global news, but this week it did. Why is that? Because effectively, they have abandoned US tools. They've decided they're not going to bother doing that anymore.

1:20They want to promote homegrown tech because they are deeply uncomfortable with what is happening in the United States and a growing sense, I think, of an over-dependence on US tech. So big changes are afoot. So I understand why they might be uncomfortable about the things happening in the US, but why stop using Zoom? What's the connection? Basically, they are concerned that this could be pull the plug at any moment. And so actually what they want to do is try and onshore their tech stack. Now, it just so happens that there is a French-based tool that manages to do that. And so they decided that that makes more sense for them to use that rather than to rely on the standard old stuff that we see most of us using day in, day out.

2:01And just how dependent are they on this US tech stack on products like Gmail, on services like Amazon? an awful lot. And if you can add on to that names like Microsoft for Outlook and their emails, you rely often on either Google or Microsoft to produce things like Word documents and spreadsheets and presentations, all of these things that are vital to the running of governments and democracies. It's fascinating. I've looked at this in the past and actually even down to the cloud infrastructure where 1 % of European cloud infrastructure is actually based within Europe from a European country. And so actually what we're seeing here, I think, is just an awareness that we have over the last 20 years or so got comfortable with the idea of utilising American tech because at the time American tech was overseen by an American president who we could trust.

2:57Things, I think, have maybe changed in the last 12 months or so. But are we being paranoid here? Are there precedents for people falling foul of the US and losing access to things like Gmail, to things like Amazon? Well, there is always, I suppose, an element of being overly concerned about this, but there have been some precedents that give us a little bit of cause for concern. So relatively recently, we saw Microsoft cutting off access to the international, the ICC's chief prosecutor. And that was because the US government imposed sanctions on him because Donald Trump didn't like him. So alongside seeing his bank accounts disappearing, he also wasn't able to access his emails.

3:39Really? So because of those sanctions, the ICC's chief prosecutor couldn't function day to day? Yeah, and this was the problem. When you are overseeing the International Criminal Court, you need to have access to your emails. Now, Microsoft, for their part, said that this wasn't them suspending services to the ICC. This was just them suspending services to that one individual because they had fallen foul of sanctions. But I think what it did was it clarified in many people's minds that link between whatever the U.S. president and the U.S. government as a result of that says. American companies do have to adhere to that.

4:17And when you have a U.S. president that is quite so capricious and frankly makes enemies of people and holds grudges, there is a concern that perhaps that could be weaponized at an individual or at a state level. It feels to me part of this growing awareness across technology, but actually across all of our lives, that we've taken the U.S. presence for granted a long time and taken for granted that the U.S. is, if not benevolent, at least neutral. And now under Donald Trump, I'm not sure that's so clear anymore. No, it's all of the international norms being rewritten as we speak. And generally, we haven't thought about the tech consequences, but really they are some of the most consequential.

5:00Because actually, if you don't have access to the Internet, if you don't have access to some of these services, the way that we live our lives now means that you're effectively without water or heat or anything else that's important like that. So how easy will this be to do to eventually migrate our governments and actually our own lives away from this dependence on American technology? It's incredibly difficult. And that's one of the issues that Europe is wrestling with at the minute. So if we look at the history of Europe, we're not very good at setting up companies. There's a lot of infrastructure, a lot of bureaucracy that people have to go through.

5:36We have seen shifts to try and solve that. Most recently at Davos, we saw the arrival and implementation of EU Inc., which is designed to slash red tape and make it more comfortable for people to start up companies here with the hope that they will end up actually producing some of those champions that can challenge the big tech companies that we're so reliant on. But this is not like a one or two year project, right? No, this is 10, 20, 30 years down the line and hundreds of billions of euros of investments. And really, it requires a massive sea change. But I think there is increasing appetite.

6:10We're seeing both in terms of the political point of view, things really changing, and also a concerted private sector point of view. So there is an initiative called the Eurostack Initiative, which is designed to try and build up increasing qualities in cloud infrastructure so we don't have to rely on the likes of Google or Microsoft or Amazon to host our websites and our services. We've been talking here about the kinds of technologies that have defined the last 25 years. What about the technology coming down the pike? And I'm thinking mainly of artificial intelligence. Are we as dependent, as vulnerable to US influence when it comes to AI?

6:46If not even more so than before, actually. And that's one of the big problems is if you look at Europe and you look at AI champions, we only really have one, and that is a French-based company, Bistral. They are pretty big. They are a unicorn, so that means that they have a massive valuation. But truthfully, they don't really figure into the equation when you consider the AI race. If you ask the average person to name AI companies, I imagine they would name OpenAI and ChatGPT. They would probably name Google and the Gemini chatbot that's used a lot. They might name Anthropic and Claude, but Mistral probably doesn't factor into the equation.

7:21I think that's the big concern. AI here is vital. And if it's not allowed to be used in Europe or developed in Europe, huge problems ahead. So we're talking here about governments, about corporations. What about the rest of us? If you and I want to start to disentangle ourselves from American tech, how do we go about doing that? How possible is it? Not really. And that is, again, the big issue. You can try and consciously uncouple, but it requires an awful lot of money and an awful lot of effort and, frankly, probably more than most people can countenance. So there are some European smartphones that are being developed and you can use them.

7:57But the reality is that they are a little bit clunky. They're massively expensive. People like the convenience of either the Apple ecosystem or the Android ecosystem, which is controlled by Google. And untying yourself from that, I don't think, is in the appetite of many people. I mean, for most of us, we've never even considered the possibility that we may need to one day disentangle ourselves from this whole ecosystem. But have we been naive? Have there been voices out there warning that there's a vulnerability growing here? Yeah, not necessarily in terms of the geopolitical concerns, but more in terms of just relying on US big tech companies.

8:34Many people have said that they have an overreach in terms of the power that they have over our lives and have been fighting against that. Often, actually, they've been dismissed as cranks or cooks. But it turns out that really, when the going gets tough, we have to realise they were probably correct. Is this something that you think about? I'm wondering how much I, talking to you on a MacBook using Gmail, need to think about these things. Yeah, we need to think about it an awful lot, but I'm a hypocrite as well. I have a Samsung smartphone built in South Korea, sold in the UK, but runs an operating system that is made in America and owned by Google.

9:11I rely on Gmail for my email. I rely on AI tools like OpenAI, like Google's, like Cords. These are all big problems that we have. And actually, I think that you can't undo it. And that's the worrying thing. In the time we can build up these European alternatives, hopefully Donald Trump will be long gone. And actually, you know, at that point, maybe we think, well, was this worth all of the time and effort and money? Or it could go the other way. And whoever follows him could be continuing his line. Well, this is the big issue that we have. Obviously, we know about the Project 2028 that is in place and the fears that actually Donald Trump might just be a precursor to something more significant.

9:50I think that there is an appetite in the US perhaps to try and change the course a little bit, though. So fingers crossed that we return to some sense of normality. But really, we're through the looking glass now. Donald Trump has gone through all of our societal norms, our beliefs and our trust in the US. It's very difficult to win that back. And it just ripples through so many parts of our lives, even the tech in our pockets and on our screens. Yeah. And this is the thing. You cannot escape this. It used to be the case that the online world was distinctly different from the offline world. And so we didn't really worry all that much about falling into the hands of US tech companies.

10:29We thought that this was something separate and we could continue our lives regardless. But some of the major outages that we've seen through pure accidents in recent months have really, I think, got us thinking a little bit more deeply and going, actually, if these could be turned off maliciously or deliberately, then that does have a big impact. Yeah, it's a new world. Chris, thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you. That's it for today. Thank you to Chris Stokel-Walker, a technology journalist, whose work you can find at theguardian.com. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Latest, the new evening edition of Today in Focus.

11:03The show will be back with you, as usual, on Monday morning and the latest that evening. In the meantime, maybe over the weekend, have a listen to this morning's episode of Today in Focus, all about how ordinary people in Minneapolis are literally risking their lives to protect their neighbours from immigration enforcement agents. It's a really incredible episode. This episode was presented by me, Michael Suffy. The producers were Bryony Moore and Nicola Alexandru. The lead producer of the latest is Zoe Hitch.

11:36This is The Guardian.