BRUSSELS, June 1 (Reuters) – Thirteen European cloud providers joined forces with a group of EU lawmakers and NGOs on Monday to back the European Commission’s drive to cut the region’s dependence on U.S. technologies and support local businesses.
• The Commission is set to announce measures on Wednesday aimed at ensuring European companies, rather than U.S. rivals, provide cloud streaming services for sensitive public tenders, while also boosting the production of made-in-Europe chips.
• The push is driven partly by tensions with the United States and China, as well as by a broader effort to catch up with both rivals in key technologies.
• “Technological sovereignty means that Europe has the capacity to freely design, understand, choose from different home-grown sources, build, operate and effectively regulate the digital systems on which its society and economy rely,” the groups said in a joint open letter seen by Reuters.
• Signatories include French cloud vendor OVHcloud, Germany’s Nextcloud, social networks Mastodon and Monnett Social, Swiss privacy software company Proton, browser company Ecosia and Dutch quantum chip maker QuantWare.
• Lawmakers from the Greens group at the European Parliament and six civil groups including Defend Democracy and Save Social also signed the letter.
• “Our message is simple: Build European, buy European, protect European,” said lawmaker Alexandra Geese.
(Reporting by Foo Yun CheeEditing by Ros Russell)
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