Financial Times, 2 January 2026
Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned.
Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure.
“We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”
The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.
This dependence was not an “enormous security problem” for the EU, said De Bruycker, who has led the CCB since it was founded a decade ago. But Europe was missing out on crucial new technologies, which are being spearheaded in the US and elsewhere, he said. These include cloud computing and artificial intelligence — both vital for defending European countries against cyber attacks.
Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.
He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.
It could be similar to when European countries jointly set up the planemaker Airbus, he said: “Everybody was supporting the Airbus initiatives decades ago. We need the same initiative on [an] EU level in the cyber domain.”
Companies such as OVHcloud in France and Germany’s Schwarz Digital already provide crucial digital infrastructure, according to IT experts.
EU countries have been fretting about their dependency on US tech companies such as Amazon, with calls growing to increase Europe’s “technological sovereignty”.
De Bruycker said those discussions were often “religious” and lacked focus, however. “I think on an EU level we should clearly identify what sovereignty means to us in the digital domain,” he said. “Instead of putting that focus on how can we stop the US ‘hyperscalers’, maybe we put our energy in . . . building up something by ourselves.”
Belgium, as a host of the EU institutions and Nato, has been in the crosshairs of increased hybrid attacks allegedly staged by Russia, with increased cyber assaults and drone incursions into its airspace since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Last year Belgium suffered five waves of DDoS attacks lasting days, in which compromised devices overwhelm websites of businesses and government agencies to temporarily take them down. De Bruycker said the attacks typically targeted up to 20 different organisations per day, with “Russian hacktivists” generally behind them.
Although it was unclear whether the Kremlin was directly sponsoring them, the attacks generally followed as a response to anti-Russian statements by politicians.
“Sometimes . . . it’s not even a Belgian official, it’s an EU official who has said something in Brussels, and they start to attack,” he said.
Although such attacks have increased, De Bruycker does not see them as particularly harmful and says they are mostly aimed at disruption. “It’s temporary, it’s not stealing any information. It’s really disturbing the normal functioning of the website or the portal.”
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US hyperscalers were crucial in helping salvage data from Russian attacks, he said.
He also expressed confidence in continued co-operation with American companies to crack down on bad actors, despite US tech companies having aligned themselves closely with the Trump administration, which has repeatedly signalled it would step away from supporting Europe’s security.
Europe is the center of open source. The experts are here, the problem is the legislation preventing them from taking the internet back. Allow nerds to reverse engineer the shit out of US products and you will be rid of their shitty lock-in services in just a few years.
Lemmy doesn't take over the Reddit space. The lock-in comes from network effects that cannot be overcome easily. Legislation is just an additional hurdle, as is funding. There is not a bunch of magical nerds waiting for the law to change so that they can bring liberty to Europe for free.
That is mainly a legal problem.
EG you could have a combined Reddit/Lemmy client that fetches messages from both. You create a Lemmy community that complements a Reddit community. The client fetches posts/comments from both and combines them in your interface.
That's illegal even in the US (case law). In the EU it's hyper-illegal because you go up against copyright, database rights, and GDPR.
The EU has actually picked up on the importance of interoperability and mandates it in the DSA, but I have no idea how that is supposed to work, given all the other regulations.
Cory Doctorow has been screaming about this anti circumvention law stuff for years now but the powers that be dont seem to want a solution.
I was about to mention Cory Doctorow. He has been a force for years. For everyone new to him: His talk at 39c3 some days ago was awesome!
Yes. The problem is that those are very American solutions. In Europe these ideas are just unacceptable. European values, fundamental values, and all that.
What?
The client can't just fetch them from both but has to publish them on both.
Reddit offers a paid API so it should already be possible.
The price is an issue but I doubt that a competitor can be established like that. It would essentially be another Reddit client.
You don't need an API. The law says that you need permission.
Another technological possibility is to scrape a subreddit to migrate the discussions to EG Lemmy. That might actually be legal in the US but certainly not in Europe.
There are other Reddit clients so the permission exists.
Maybe take a look at that link I posted above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventures,_Inc.
I did. They copied Facebook without permissions. The alternative Reddit clients have them so it is not the same.
That's not quite what the judgment was about. Anyway, I don't understand what point you are trying to make.
There are legal clients for Reddit from third parties. Building another client cannot be prevented from Reddit.
Adding comments from other social networks would be the only difference that is needed for the initially suggested mixing of social networks. I don't think that Reddit has the right to prevent that.
So a new network that also shows Reddit comments is possible.
If you need Reddit's permission to connect to Reddit, then Reddit can grant or deny permission under the condition that you only use approved clients.
It very much has that right in the EU. First, there's copyright. The US has Fair Use, the EU doesn't. The EU has a database right, a kind of intellectual property which does not exist in the US. There's also contract law, ie what it says in the TOS. In the US, you can't use contract law to override Fair Use. Then there's the GDPR, which is always a tough call. It might be legal enough for most purposes.
The Reddit migration to Lemmy happened because they introduced a paid API for clients. How could Reddit prevent another paying client?
Not sure I'm following this. Why would Reddit not want paying clients?
Because a client could establish their own social network, bootstrapped with Reddit comments.
Makes sense. But then, why make the deal?
Are they allowed to deny customers?
Of course. Like you and me, they are more or less free to do as they please.
Then it first needs to be established that they have a monopoly.
In principle, the law makes it possible to coerce a monopolist to contract. Alternatively, contract clauses which create or abuse a monopoly may be void.
Scraping doesn’t solve the network effect issue. Having a ghost town where all the ghosts are mimicking a real town doesn’t give you a real town. You actually need people to come over and join the community.
True. It only makes migration easier, but that's still something.
Does it make migration easier? I don’t think it does. I think it makes migration harder.
If I switch to Lemmy and join my favourite migrated community (all posts and comments scraped and reposted from my favourite subreddit) and then I try to reply to those messages on Lemmy, nobody is there to reply to me! It’s a ghost town where I’m the only one who’s not a ghost! That sucks, so I leave.
I was thinking about a scenario where the moderators, or some part of the community, decide to migrate. I should have clarified that.
Getting a large enough part of the community to agree to migrate is the hard part. That’s what network effects mean. If you’re assuming that in your scenario then you’re not addressing the core problem.
Yes, but I would like to see a visual editor. Now a bold is shown as a double asterisk. A link is a mixture of square and round brackets. You can click on Preview, but to edit it, you have to leave it again.
Have you checked the various frontends? If none has it you could start something like a kickstarter campaign to finance it.
The lack of visual editor arises with the web version on lemmy.world and with the Mlem app. I have not checked anything else. (And I don't see it as my role to start a kickstarter campaign).
The nerds prefer markup. If you want it and you can't code, why not use the skills that you have to get it?
I hope that is sarcastic remark. 🙄
Are you a lemmy developer?
No, my background is in user experience. Hence my comment on the interface design.
So which user experience can be created for people who are not developers that helps the features the users value to be implemented?
A visual editor to begin with. There are a lot of posts complaining about the user experience. They have to be analysed in order to create a list of priority interventions. If there is a budget a user experience study with users and potential users would be a good idea.
The budget is not there. Which user experience could create it? I don't mean improving the lemmy software itself but the ecosystem around it.
You could start with going through all the comments on various forums (not just Lemmy) where people have written about user experience (UX) problems and place those issues in a quadrant (easy or difficult to implement vs major or minor impact on the UX). The immediate priority is of course those that are easy to implement with major impact on the UX, meanwhile also picking up some of those with lesser impact on the UX. In a second step you select two-three issues that are major but more difficult to implement. I noted today an article in The Guardian on how Reddit is strongly growing in the UK. So there is a sense of urgency.
You don't seem to understand the open source developer user experience. If it is not a job, developers implement what they need.
If others want other features they either have to pay for it or motivate the developers who do it for free.
So the lemmy environment needs somebody who creates a user experience that facilitates others to do that.
Since Lemmy is a volunteer community-driven initiative, I would start with creating a community called "Lemmy user experience" (or Lemmy UX, Lemmy User Interface or Lemmy UI, it doesn't matter) and start collecting community suggestions. Possibly also encouraging others who have written about that topic on Lemmy or other forums to contribute. That way you start creating evidence for developers that help them prioritise their efforts.
That could help but the developer user experience is that they prioritize their needs. Gimp is what developers want while Photoshop is what designers want.
There is a rift.
So it is a hopeless case?
There is always hope. Maybe a user experience designer comes up with something.