About ten years ago, replacing US technology within the national, provincial and municipal governments of the EU was the talk of the town. 

All layers of government were to embrace open source and free solutions such as OpenOffice: a mature, safe alternative for its ubiquitous Microsoft counterpart.

Then covid happened and all that disappeared in the midst of frantic efforts to keep our countries running from our homes. 

But now, in the clear and present danger of a marauding and unpredictable US administration, there’s a new effort to disentangle ourselves from our reliance on US tech.

The EU has introduced a five-step categorisation for the level of disentanglement: the SEAL scale. 0 is totally entangled, 5 is totally sovereign. Many EU and member state government RFPs now require vendors to score SEAL 3+ to qualify. 

If you’re a software vendor want to apply for an EU tender, you’ll need to be critical of the dependencies within your application.

We’re a small software company based in Amsterdam. We build custom web applications that solve unique problems. It’s been a while since we applied for a government contract but were we to try again, here’s a list of dependencies that we should use instead of their US counterparts.

📊 Analytics:

Matomo (France): Open-source, privacy-first analytics with full data control, no invasive monitoring, and GDPR compliance. 

⬆️ Upside: Complete data ownership, no reliance on US ad ecosystems. 

⬇️ Downside: Requires more manual setup than Google Analytics

🤖 Artificial Intelligence:

Mistral AI (France): Hosted in the EU, GDPR-aligned, and no US/Chinese data access risks. Perfect for your SEAL scale goals and client trust. Our clients asked for it, it’s now become our standard!

⬆️ Upside: Fast, cost-effective for your scale, and avoids US cloud dependency.

⬇️ Downside: Smaller context window than GPT-4 (but improving rapidly). In fact, for some applications, we’ve moved to mistral-small without noticeable impact.

💽 Database:

PostgreSQL (EU-hosted options): The world’s most advanced open-source relational database, widely used and supported by EU-based hosting providers. At Django Web Studio, our database of choice.

⬆️ Upside: Highly extensible, strong community, and GDPR-compliant when hosted in the EU. 

⬇️ Downside: Requires technical expertise for setup and maintenance. But we’re experts. 

⚖️ Hosting:

Scaleway (France): Developer-friendly cloud hosting with a focus on simplicity and scalability. 

⬆️ Upside: Innovative features like bare metal instances. Perfect for our ambitions to self-host AI models.

⬇️ Downside: Smaller market share, but we don’t care.

🗺️ Mapping:

OpenStreetMap (Global, EU-heavy contribution): Community-driven, open-source mapping platform. We use it. Really, just as good.

⬆️ Upside: No commercial bias, highly customisable. 

⬇️ Downside: Requires more effort to integrate and maintain than Google Maps.

🍦 Server OS:

Ubuntu (Canonical, UK/EU): The most popular Linux distribution for servers, with long-term support and strong EU adoption. Our OS of choice. 

⬆️ Upside: Open source (of course), extensive documentation, large community, and GDPR-friendly when hosted in the EU. Which we do. 

⬇️ Downside: Owned by a UK company. So not an EU company anymore. But they’ll be back soon!

📺 Video Conferencing: 

Whereby (Norway): Fully GDPR-compliant, with all data processed and stored in the EU. No US surveillance risk, aligning with your SEAL scale goals. 

⬆️ Upside: Free tier available; paid plans are cost-effective for small teams. End-to-End Encryption. Strong focus on ease of use and reliability. Within our company, being fully remote, we use Whereby for all our internal calls. 

⬇️ Downside: Fewer advanced features (like breakout rooms) compared to Zoom, but covers 90% of typical use cases.

There’s many more I didn’t include. An example:  ProtonMail for Business, Swiss, so not strictly EU. Has end-to-end encryption, ensuring no US meddling in Proton-to-proton messaging. At some point, we’ll be moving away from Google. We’ll probably have to.

The digital sovereignty of the EU is no longer a luxury we can’t afford.

US tech comes with a kill switch. As Ukraine knows all too well, when US defensive weapons are delivered but the intelligence data is cut off, rendering them all but useless;

When the US companies that deliver your organisation’s vital digital systems are beholden to the whims of the US administration, even if data is stored locally;

When US vendors (talking about you, MS) consider themselves monopolists, can raise their prices and lower their service level at will, you pay or get cut off, as happened recently in the Australia;

When the US president at Davos trash-talks EU values;

There can be no doubt about it, we’ve lost a friend. 

This is no longer about appeasing EU norms to gain tenders. It really is time that we start realising the scope of the change in world order and start standing on our own two feet.

The EU’s SEAL categories are a clear metric. Within a web application, they could be easily assessed by doing a simple scan, even from the outside. Maybe we should start a certification system, and issue labels. So you can say, we’re SEAL certified! 

Header image generated by Mistral AI.