Hey there 👋
I’ve been wanting to write this piece for a long time.
Every few weeks, another major development would happen somewhere in Europe and I’d end up delaying the article again just to gather more material. But at some point, the pattern became too large to ignore and I got tired of waiting.
None of what you are about to read in this piece happened overnight. The transition has been gradual, but over the last few years, a very noticeable change has started taking shape inside European public infrastructure.
Denmark is moving government staff toward Linux and LibreOffice. Schleswig-Holstein has been replacing large parts of its Microsoft infrastructure across regional government systems. Similarly, France has also accelerated sovereign open-source adoption at a scale very few people were paying attention to until recently.
For years, products from Microsoft were treated almost like default infrastructure inside governments and became deeply embedded into public administration across Europe.
But that premise is now being questioned because governments are increasingly starting to view software dependence as a strategic problem, due to which the question ”Should critical government infrastructure depend almost entirely on foreign corporations?” has become unavoidable.
This article breaks down what’s actually happening across Europe, why it’s happening now, and what it could mean for the future of digital infrastructure.
Before we begin, a quick note. This is the first deep-dive article we are publishing after moving SK NEXUS to a paid model. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading the transition post where Saqib Tahir explained why we made that decision and what it means for the future of this publication.
Your support allows us to spend more time researching pieces like this, especially topics that require weeks of following developments.
Anyway, let’s get started.
The Broader European Strategy
Before we move on, it’s important to keep in mind that what’s happening across Europe is easy to reduce to “Europe versus Microsoft,” but that misses the bigger picture entirely.
Microsoft is simply the most visible symbol of a much broader transition already happening across Europe.
The movement isn’t limited to replacing Windows with Linux or Office with LibreOffice. Governments are also looking at de-googling initiatives, sovereign cloud infrastructure, local data hosting, open-source software adoption, and reducing dependence on foreign technology vendors more generally.
What’s changing is the way software infrastructure itself is being viewed.
For decades, governments treated software mostly as a procurement problem. You bought products, signed contracts, outsourced maintenance, and moved on.
But it’s not like that anymore - European policymakers are increasingly beginning to treat digital infrastructure the same way they treat energy infrastructure, or defense systems. And quite frankly, the concern isn’t difficult to understand.
If a geopolitical conflict, or legal disagreement suddenly affects access to critical software infrastructure, what happens next? More importantly, what happens to - Government communication systems? Citizen records? Public administration? Healthcare infrastructure?
Those questions become very serious when governments realize how much of their infrastructure depends on external vendors operating under foreign jurisdictions and that is the whole reason this transition matters.
Europe’s Sovereignty Push
Digital sovereignty has gradually become one of the central ideas shaping Europe’s technology strategy.
Put it this way, governments want control over the systems they depend on. That includes software infrastructure, cloud platforms, citizen data, communication systems, and the long-term direction of public-sector technology.
A large portion of global cloud infrastructure is currently dominated by American companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. European governments rely heavily on these systems for public services, data storage, communication, and so much more.
You can see how dependent not just Europe, but the entire internet has become on a relatively small number of infrastructure providers. In 2025 alone, multiple major outages involving Cloudflare disrupted huge portions of the web, affecting thousands of services simultaneously and leaving large parts of the internet barely functional for hours.
And once governments realize how much critical infrastructure depends on external providers, concerns around control start becoming much more serious, because at the end of the day dependence is also legal and geopolitical.
One major example is the U.S. CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to request data from U.S.-based companies even when that data is stored outside the United States. For European governments already focused on privacy and regulatory independence, that creates an uncomfortable reality.
Europe’s GDPR framework addresses privacy protections, but regulation alone does not remove the fundamental dependence if the infrastructure itself remains controlled elsewhere.
And that’s really the main point of the sovereignty discussion. European governments are not trying to isolate themselves from American technology entirely for the sake of nationalism. They just want to ensure that critical public infrastructure is not entirely dependent on decisions made in Silicon Valley, or corporate headquarters outside European jurisdiction.
How Governments Became Dependent
Understanding why this transition is so difficult requires understanding how governments became this dependent in the first place.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Microsoft became the obvious choice for government IT infrastructure across large parts of Europe, because if everyone used the same software stack - it would be easier to cooperate, support would be easy to standardize and on top of that training costs would stay manageable.
At the time, all this made perfect sense, but in reality this was the biggest mistake that the governments made.
Microsoft’s ecosystem is designed to work best within itself. Office formats like .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx became the default format for documents across governments and institutions. Exchange became the standard for enterprise email infrastructure and entire administrative workflows were built around these products.
So, basically governments were replacing decades of workflows, retraining employees, migrating legacy systems, and making sure everything remains compatible with external organizations that still depend on Microsoft products themselves.
