Part 8 of 8. Part 7 compared the pattern to other industries.
What this post covers
- What Europe has actually built.
- What is realistic today, and what is not.
- 3 questions to work out where you stand.
- An honest word about this website.
The trend has turned
For a lot of years, European digital independence was mostly a conversation.
Since 2025 that has changed. There are working products now, and outfits using them every day.
This is the most useful trend in the whole series, because it is the one you can act on.
Office and collaboration software
openDesk is a set of open source tools for everyday office work. Documents, email, calendars, files, chat and video meetings.
It is looked after by ZenDiS, the German centre for digital sovereignty.
It is built from tools that already existed: Nextcloud for files, Collabora for documents, Open-Xchange for email and calendars, Element for chat, Jitsi for video.
It is in real use. The German armed forces signed a multi-year agreement. The Robert Koch Institute, a German public health body, runs it for several thousand people. The International Criminal Court picked it in 2025.
There are commercial options now too.
office.eu launched in The Hague in March 2026. It is a European-owned hosted alternative to the big American office suites.
Euro-Office followed in June 2026. It is a shared document editor built jointly by several European companies, including IONOS, Nextcloud, XWiki, OpenProject, Open-Xchange and office.eu.
Working together like that matters. It means each company is not building the same editor over again on its own.
Governments actually moving
Some governments have already moved, which gives the rest of us real experience to learn from.
The Danish Ministry of Digitalisation moved from Microsoft 365 to LibreOffice from July 2025. LibreOffice is a free office suite.
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving tens of thousands of staff computers to open source.
France and Germany are building shared tools together as well, rather than each paying for its own.
It is only fair to say this is not always plain sailing.
Munich moved its city council to Linux over several years, then moved back to Windows in 2017. The Register reported on the cost at the time.
The main lesson from Munich was not a technical one. The software mostly worked. What did not last was the political backing, across changes of administration, on a project running more than a decade.
So these things need steady support over many years. That is a real requirement, and worth planning for honestly.
Payments
Payments follow the same trend, and plenty of people do not realise how concentrated they are.
Analysis of European Central Bank figures suggests Visa and Mastercard handled around 47% of card payment value in the euro area in 2025. In several countries the share is a good deal higher.
Several European countries do have their own card systems. Trouble is they do not work across borders, so the one that works everywhere is the American one.
Wero is the European answer. It is run by the European Payments Initiative.
It started with payments between people in Belgium, France and Germany. It now has tens of millions of registered users. Luxembourg joined in 2026, and the Netherlands is moving its existing iDEAL system onto it. The European Payments Council publishes progress.
Paying in shops and online is the next stage. That is the stage that decides whether Wero becomes a real alternative.
The digital euro sits behind it, on a longer timescale of around 2029.
New rules
The European Commission published its Cloud and AI Development Act proposal on 2026-06-03.
It is the first serious go at turning cloud sovereignty from a voluntary label into a legal requirement.
It grades cloud providers in tiers, on where the infrastructure sits, how independently it can be run, and who owns it. Public sector buyers would need providers to meet at least the lowest tier.
It is a proposal. It is not law yet, and it may change on the way through.
What is realistic, and what is not
A hopeful list can easily go wrong here, so let us be plain.
Realistic today. Office documents, email, calendars, files, chat and video. Working European and open source options exist, and outfits are running them in production right now.
Getting there. Payments, and some cloud services. The parts exist. The coverage is still filling in.
Not yet. Large-scale cloud infrastructure. European capacity is a long way short of demand.
Not this decade. The chips themselves. Europe has real strengths, including ASML in the Netherlands and Infineon and NXP in chip design. None of that replaces a data centre graphics processor today.
The Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German foundation, has reckoned that building a full European stack would take around 10 years and about €300 billion.
So full independence is not on the table, and anybody offering it is overselling what they have.
As such, full independence was never the useful goal.
3 questions to work out where you stand
Here is a simple way to look at your own systems. It works for any supplier, in any country.
Ask these 3 questions about every service you depend on.
1. What stops working if this service stops?
Be specific. Name the systems and the people affected. “It is important” is not something you can plan with.
2. How many weeks of work would it take to move?
That number sets your position at every renewal for as long as you keep the supplier.
If you cannot estimate it, that is already worth knowing.
3. Could your organisation actually run the alternative?
Not whether an alternative exists. Whether your team, at the size it really is, could run it.
LibreOffice is a genuine answer for a ministry with a training budget. It is a harder answer for a small company with no IT staff.
Rank your services on those 3 answers. The list is usually short, and often not the one people expect.
For plenty of outfits, email and staff accounts come out above cloud computing. Moving them is rarely tested, and would take a long while.
Then ask the same 3 questions about any European alternative you are weighing up.
A single European supplier you cannot leave is not much better than a single American one you cannot leave.
The real advantage of open formats and open source is not the price. It is that they make question 2 answerable, and question 3 possible.
An honest word about this website
It would not be fair to write all this without turning it on myself.
This site is built with Hugo and served by Cloudflare, an American company. Every point in this series applies to it.
I picked Cloudflare because it works well and costs me nowt. If the account stopped tomorrow I would change some DNS settings and publish somewhere else.
So the exposure is real and the consequence is small. That is a fair trade, and I made it on purpose.
The rest of my own kit is mixed as well. Proxmox, which I write about often, is Austrian. It runs on processors designed in the United States, on firmware I cannot inspect.
There is no setup that gets to zero. That was never the goal.
The short version
Technology went from something you bought to something you rent.
Renting is often better, which is exactly why it happened.
Every cost of renting grows the harder it is for you to leave.
Since 2025 real alternatives have landed for everyday office work, and are landing for payments.
So the practical goal is not dodging any particular country. It is cutting down the number of services you could not leave inside 3 months.
Start with the ones you have never tested. That is usually where the surprise is waiting.
First published: 2026-08-25. Last updated: 2026-08-25.