{"id":86355,"date":"2026-02-12T17:37:22","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T20:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tech.einnews.com\/article\/891856828"},"modified":"2026-02-12T17:37:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T20:37:22","slug":"europe-seeks-digital-sovereignty-as-trump-hands-power-to-ruling-class-of-tech-lords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/europe-seeks-digital-sovereignty-as-trump-hands-power-to-ruling-class-of-tech-lords\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe seeks ‘digital sovereignty’ as Trump hands power to ‘ruling class of tech lords’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President Donald Trump\u2019s imperialist gestures toward Greenland<\/a> and quite-real conquest of Venezuela<\/a> are alarming America\u2019s European allies about the security of some of their most valuable assets \u2014 namely, their financial independence and national data.<\/p>\n

European leaders are moving quickly to attain both \u201cmonetary sovereignty\u201d and \u201cdigital sovereignty\u201d from the United States, according to The New York Times<\/a>. This plan includes reducing their reliance on American tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft for cloud computing. Additionally the European nations will start to wean themselves off financial services titans like Mastercard and Visa. French President Emmanuel Macron perhaps summed up the view most succinctly at a Belgium summit earlier this week.<\/p>\n

European leaders must seize \u201cthe Greenland moment\u201d to disentangle themselves from US tech and financial institutions, Macron told the assembled world leaders. He and other world leaders were also alarmed by Trump\u2019s retaliation after the International Criminal Court (ICC) began investigating whether Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Trump<\/a> imposed sanctions on the judges and prosecutors that cut off their access to financial and digital services, including credit cards, and led to the chief prosecutor\u2019s Microsoft email being turned off.<\/p>\n

Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, told The Financial Times that Trump\u2019s actions with Israel demonstrate that Europe does not have control over their own financial and digital security as long as they rely on America.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat gives you one very specific example of how we are not effectively sovereign in our own garden,\u201d Lagarde said.<\/p>\n

European nations are also worried about their finances because Trump has embraced stablecoins and cryptocurrencies they fear will destabilize the euro. In a similar vein, Trump has threatened European nations with tariffs if they try to regulate or tax American tech firms, even when their actions raise concerns about their competence and ability to keep sensitive data secure. On both occasions, the common thread is Trump handing so much power to the tech industry that Europeans feel unsafe both financially and in terms of their basic security.<\/p>\n

Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, recently explained to Amy Goodman from Democracy Now<\/a> speculated that Trump\u2019s ultimate agenda is to enrich himself and his allies while turning much of the control over the world\u2019s financial and technology policies to Big Tech.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the Steve Bannon strategy of making the rest of us, the rest of the world, you know, sink into a black hole of uncertainty, while he\u2019s getting on with the business of enriching himself, a ruling class of tech lords around him, and solidifying his power and keeping his divided MAGA movement somehow pacified,\u201d Varoufakis said.<\/p>\n

Then again, as CNN\u2019s Steve Cotorno reported earlier this month<\/a>, even some of Trump\u2019s own MAGA movement is bristling under the policies imposed by tech billionaires.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s reflective overall of what we are seeing from the populist right within Trump’s movement,\u201d Cotorno said. \u201cPeople like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have been very vocally against how much power Trump is giving to these tech companies, and it’s reflective of changing views overall by the general population.”<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/strong> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… their reliance on American tech<\/span> giants like Amazon, Google … to disentangle themselves from US tech<\/span> and financial institutions, Macron … \u00e2\u0080\u0099s financial and technology<\/span> policies to Big Tech<\/span>. \u00e2\u0080\u009cWe have … under the policies imposed by tech<\/span> billionaires. \u00e2\u0080\u009cIt' …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}