23/06/2025

BIZ & FINANCE MONDAY | JUNE 23, 2025

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Europeans seek ‘digital sovereignty’

I would say, possibly not possible”, said Bill Budington of US 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 US 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 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 US 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. 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. “Regulation is needed as well.” – Reuters Recession in Russia ‘must not be allowed to happen’: Putin President Vladimir Putin last week urged officials not to let Russia fall into recession “under any circumstances”, as some in his own government warned of a hit to economic growth. Economists have warned for months of a slowdown in the Russian economy, with the country posting its slowest quarterly expansion in two years for the first quarter of 2025. “Some specialists and experts are pointing to the risks of stagnation and even a recession,” Putin told attendees at Russia’s flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg. “This must not be allowed to happen under any circumstances.” The economy grew in 2023 and 2024 despite the West’s sweeping sanctions, with massive state spending on the military powering a robust expansion. But analysts have long warned that heavy public investment in the defence industry is no longer enough to keep Russia’s economy growing and does not reflect a real increase in productivity. At the forum, Putin denied the economy was being driven solely by the defence and energy industries. “Yes, of course, the defence industry played its part in this regard, but so did the financial and IT industries,” he said. – AFP SAINT PETERSBURG:

Americans, including on social media, and suggested the policy could target foreign officials regulating US tech companies. US 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 Centre for Democracy & Technology, said Europeans’ concerns about the US government accessing their data, whether stored on devices or in the cloud, were justified. Not only does US law permit the government to search devices of anyone entering the country, it can compel disclosure of data that Europeans outside the US store or transmit through US communications service providers, Nojeim said. Germany’s new government is itself making efforts to reduce exposure to US 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.

Reuters could not determine whether major US tech companies have lost any market share to local rivals in Europe. 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 US data privacy protections as one factor. US 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.

o American technology companies still dwarf alternative providers

BERLIN: At a market stall in Berlin run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge their phones of the influence of American tech firms. Since President 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 US 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 US president before the two fell out, while the ROME: Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni hosted European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen in Rome last week for a summit aimed at boosting African economies in a bid to curb illegal migration to the bloc. Meloni, whose far-right Brothers of Italy party has prioritised cutting irregular immigration, has launched a €5.5 billion (RM27 billion) plan targeting 14 countries including Ethiopia, Ivory Coast and Senegal to support industries from energy to health care. The aim is to help African countries “combat upstream the causes that drive too many young people to pay criminal organisations to undertake a dangerous crossing” to Europe, she said. Meloni has been pushing to align the plan with the EU’s Global Gateway programme, which aims in part to counter China’s growing influence on the continent. “We all know that Africa needs its talents, its skills, its entrepreneurs and its labour force”, von der Leyen said at a joint press conference. The EU-Italy commitments announced last week focus for the most part on the Lobito Corridor – a strategic railway project in Africa – and the Blue-Raman intercontinental communications system, and are worth a total of €1.2 billion, according to a statement. African Union chair Mahmoud Ali Youssouf welcomed the investments,

bosses of Amazon, 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 US counterparts like Microsoft’s 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 US$100 billion (RM425 billion) from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2024 – nearly a third of its US$350 billion global turnover.

Non-profit Ecosia earned € 3.2 million (RM15.5 million) in April, of which € 770,000 was spent on planting 1.1 million trees. Italian PM trumpets plan to boost African economies In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened visa bans for people who “censor” speech by But with modern life driven by technology, “completely divorcing US tech in a very fundamental way is,

Meloni and der Leyen (left) welcoming Akinwumi Adesina, president of African Development Bank, to the summit in Rome. – AFPPIC

that these investments could reduce the number of migrants by creating jobs and growth. “The funding that Italy can provide is not at the right scale,“ said Giovanni Carbone, head of the University of Milan’s Africa programme. – AFP

to seek new supplies of oil and gas. African Union chief Moussa Faki Mahamat has warned that the continent “cannot rely solely on promises that are often broken”. And experts say that Italy has “promised too much” by implying

saying the corridor in particular would “boost intra-African trade”. Meloni’s plan also aims to strengthen trade relations between Italy and African nations in the energy sector, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced Rome