A single European bank haggling with Amazon or Microsoft has almost no leverage. A few hundred of them haggling together might. That, stripped to its essence, is the recommendation Dutch regulators handed their government on Friday, in a report warning that Europe’s reliance on American technology is deepening rather than easing.
The proposals came from a group of Dutch watchdogs that includes De Nederlandsche Bank, the country’s central bank, and its data protection authority.
Their central suggestion is blunt: banks and finance firms should combine their buying power so they are not picked off one by one in negotiations with US tech giants, according to Bloomberg, which reported the document.
The warning underneath it is that digital dependencies on overseas companies “continue to grow” among the institutions the regulators supervise, despite years of European rhetoric about strategic autonomy. That gap between the policy ambition and the day-to-day procurement reality runs through the whole report.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!The concern is not confined to cloud storage. The watchdogs group cloud and artificial intelligence together as critical services where Europe has quietly handed control to a handful of foreign firms, the same anxiety driving Brussels’ tech sovereignty package and its curbs on US providers handling sensitive data.
