By Toby Sterling
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -The Netherlands’ parliament on Tuesday approved a series of motions calling on the government to reduce dependence on U.S. software companies, including by creating a cloud services platform under Dutch control.
While such initiatives have foundered in the past due to a lack of viable European alternatives, lawmakers said changing relations with the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump have given the issue fresh urgency.
“The question we as Europeans must ask ourselves is: do we feel comfortable with people like Trump, (Meta CEO Mark) Zuckerberg and (X owner Elon) Musk ruling over our data?” said Marieke Koekkoek of the pro-European Volt party, who authored one of the eight motions, in an email to Reuters.
In addition to launching a sovereign cloud services platform, the motions called on the government to re-examine a decision to use Amazon’s web services for the Netherlands’ internet domain hosting, and to develop alternatives to U.S. software and preferential treatment for European firms in public tenders.
In a reaction, Amazon said its cloud is “sovereign” as customers “have full control over where they locate their data, how it is encrypted and who can access it,” a spokesperson said on Wednesday.
Amazon has invested more than 180 billion euros in the EU since 2010 and employs more than 1,000 workers in research and development and corporate offices in Amsterdam and The Hague, the spokesperson said.
The Dutch vote came a day after dozens of European tech firms called on the European Commission to create a sovereign fund to invest in European technology, including cloud infrastructure, and a “Buy European” mandate.
A spokesperson for the Economic Affairs ministry declined comment.
Bert Hubert, a Dutch technology expert who has advocated for reducing dependency on the U.S., said: “This is only the first step in potentially doing something.”
But he said one important outcome would be forcing agencies to publicly report on risks related to their reliance on U.S. cloud firms.
“With the advent of Trump 2.0, it has become clear that this is not something you can harmlessly sign off on,” he said.
(Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by David Goodman, Bernadette Baum, Hugh Lawson and Tomasz Janowski)
