A renewed warning from Dutch technologist Bert Hubert says Europe is making itself too dependent on American cloud providers by moving public-sector systems and data into U.S.-based infrastructure.

In a long post on berthub.eu, Hubert argues that transferring the running of European societies and governments to American clouds is no longer merely inconvenient or expensive. In his view, it has become strategically dangerous. He says the legal reasoning often used to justify those transfers has been undercut, and that European institutions are fooling themselves if they believe data stays safe simply because it sits in an EU data center or is protected by contractual language.

Hubert's critique is broad but rooted in a few concrete examples. He points to the Dutch government's own explanations for sending data to Google-related systems and says that some of the justifications, such as claims that Google cannot see certain IP addresses, are not credible. He also argues that organizations often dress up dependency as compliance by leaning on privacy-impact assessments, transfer-impact assessments, special keys, and other procedural safeguards that do not change the underlying political risk.

The central concern is continuity. Hubert argues that public systems and private businesses become vulnerable when their operations depend on the goodwill of another country and the policy choices of another government. In his framing, the danger is not only surveillance or privacy loss, but the possibility that business and government processes could be halted remotely, with data retrieval or service restoration becoming uncertain.

The post also treats convenience as the main reason this dependence continues. Hubert says European institutions are accustomed to U.S. products such as Teams, Office, and Outlook, and that this familiarity has become an excuse for outsourcing core functions. He argues that this is a poor tradeoff when the alternative is building or buying more independent systems, even if they require more effort to adopt.

The piece does not read like a neutral policy note. It is an argument, written with urgency and little patience for compromise. But it is also clearly about a live debate: how much of Europe's digital public sector can safely rely on American providers, and whether a politically changed U.S. should alter procurement and cloud strategy.

Hubert closes by urging governments to stop surrendering their societies to the United States and to spend enough on alternatives to make them viable. Whether readers agree or not, the post captures a growing anxiety in Europe that cloud convenience may be masking a long-term dependency problem.