Financial Times, 2 January 2026
Some quotes below:
Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned.
Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure.
“We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”
The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.
[…]
Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.
He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.
It could be similar to when European countries jointly set up the planemaker Airbus, he said: “Everybody was supporting the Airbus initiatives decades ago. We need the same initiative on [an] EU level in the cyber domain.”
There’s your problem, Europe. You’re looking in the wrong place. The Internet isn’t in the clouds, it’s down here on earth.
Like it or not (I certainly don’t), we’ve gone full circle to the old server-client relationship instead of the peer-to-peer model we had for a while. Almost everything is in the browser now, which means we need EU infrastructure. That takes time, money and effort to set up, even before you start dealing with user inertia.
Rising costs for “cloud” infrastructure were beginning to tip the balance back towards favouring owning your own web servers I think — AWS is stupidly expensive now. But once the bubble bursts I guess all the new excess datacentre capacity that’s already being rapidly built will put a stop to that. Governments adding to that problem seems unnecessary.