Almost Two-Thirds of Europeans Back Replacing US Tech, Poll Finds

Mark Scott is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press.

Almost two-thirds of Europeans polled believe that replacing American tech services with European alternatives is a good idea, but those surveyed are divided if that shift is realistic, according to YouGov research shared with Tech Policy Press.

The analysis comes as European Union leaders push ahead with increasingly assertive digital sovereignty plans to reduce the 27-country bloc’s dependence on the United States for everything from cloud computing to social networks. That includes proposals from the French and Dutch governments to replace US services like those from Microsoft and Amazon with European alternatives.

Tensions between Washington and Brussels on digital policy topics remain high. The White House continues to assert—without evidence— that Europe’s online safety rules unfairly throttle Americans’ First Amendment rights, and claim that the bloc’s revamped digital competition rules unjustly target some of Silicon Valley's biggest names.

“I will stand up to countries that attack our incredible American tech companies,” Donald Trump posted on social media last August without explicitly mentioning the EU.

“Digital taxes, digital services legislation, and digital markets regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology,” he added.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch that oversees many of these Continent-spanning rules, denied those allegations. Brussels has ongoing online safety and competition cases into both US and Chinese tech firms. National leaders, particularly France’s Emmanuel Macron, are growing more vocal in calls for Europe to go its own way on technology, including in the development of homegrown artificial intelligence.

"It is the sovereign right of the EU and its member states to regulate economic activities on our territory, which are consistent with our democratic values," Paula Pinho, a European Commission spokesperson, told reporters in response to Trump’s comments.

This growing antipathy between the long-standing transatlantic partners is starting to trickle down to European citizens.

Just over 60 percent of people surveyed across France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland believed it was a good idea to replace US services related to data storage, video conferencing, email services and banking payments with European competitors, based on YouGov’s European Political Monthly Survey.

Those findings were based on a representative sampling of more than 1,000 people polled in each of Europe’s most populous countries between March 6 and 16.

The figures were almost universal across all categories: 62 percent of those surveyed across the five European countries said they favored or had considered replacing US data storage and payment services, while 59 percent of respondents said they would back a change from American video-conferencing companies like Zoom.

In contrast, only 13 percent of people who participated in YouGov’s poll thought it was a bad idea to move away from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. A further 25 percent of respondents said they did not know.

Only in Poland — where the percentage of people who said replacing US tech with European alternatives was a good idea hovered around 50 percent, across all digital services — was there uncertainty about doubling down on a “Made in Europe” strategy.

In the Eastern European country, the level of respondents who had yet to make up their mind on whether shifting away from US tech was a good idea was 38 percent, a significantly higher figure compared to other EU countries, based on YouGov’s polling.

Europeans’ collective belief in decoupling from US tech services, however, was not matched with their expectations that such a digital divorce was practical.

Across all five EU countries, the YouGov poll found that 41 percent of respondents said it was unrealistic to replace US tech services with European competitors. That contrasted with 40 percent of those polled who said it was realistic, while a further 19 percent of the individuals said they did not know.

The highest level of pessimism was in Germany, despite the country co-hosting a conference on digital sovereignty late last year with France. In the EU’s largest economy, 51 percent of people — the highest figure across all EU countries — said it was unrealistic to shift away from US tech. That contrasted with just 12 percent of Germans who said it was a bad idea to replace American digital services with European alternatives, based on YouGov’s polling.In contrast, the French were the most bullish on doubling down on European tech. Across that country, 45 percent of survey respondents said it was realistic to change from US and EU digital services, while only 32 percent said it was unrealistic. An additional 22 percent of those polled said they did not know.

Yet even in France, there remained a significant difference between people’s willingness to use European digital services and the reality of what they could like.

In January, Paris announced plans to replace the likes of Zoom and Microsoft Teams with a French alternative for government video conferencing by 2027 — in part to regain control over critical digital infrastructure. But 89 percent of YouGov’s French respondents had heard either little or nothing about the plans despite the French government extensively promoting the upcoming shift.

In total, only 11 percent of French respondents said they had heard anything about their own country’s landmark plans to pare back local reliance on US tech firms.