Living Rent-Free in the U.S. Digital Infrastructure Is a Digital Death Sentence for Europe - Author: Jude S. Ngu'Ewodo

 A strategy piece by Jude S. Ngu'Ewodo - Jude is also author of "Climate Crisis Unmasked: Unraveling the web of Betrayal and Greed." The book is available at Amazon and Apple and others  -

I wish the leaders of Europe had the chance to meet my grandmother.

And if they did, they wouldn’t have listened anyway.

She passed away more than five decades ago, at the blessed age of 102. She never went to school. Never read a book. Didn’t know what the Internet was. But she was wise in a way that outlasts software updates and outsmarts ten thousand policy memos.

One of her golden rules was simple:

“Never eat other people’s food.”

By that, she didn’t mean skip the potluck. She meant something deeper. If someone else grows it, cooks it, plates it, and lets you eat it for free—you don’t own it. You’re not just a guest. You’re dependent.

That’s the story of Europe and its digital infrastructure.

It’s a curious thing—how a continent that once ruled the world with ships and steel now finds itself squatting, rent-free, inside someone else's digital house. That house, of course, belongs to America.

And for Europe, it’s not just a matter of dignity. It’s a matter of survival.

The architects of Europe’s digital dependency are neither villains nor visionaries. They’re bureaucrats—mostly well-meaning, often mediocre, occasionally clueless. While the world was quietly rewiring itself for a digital age, the stewards of the European project were still obsessed with milk subsidies, beef quotas, and arguing over the bend of bananas. While Washington armed the cloud and Beijing fortified its firewalls, Brussels passed rules about cookies.

This is the paradox: the continent that gave us Leibniz, Turing, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee now finds itself at the mercy of Amazon Web Services, Google , Microsoft Azure, ChatGPT, Cisco, US Undersea cables & Data Centres .... Its AI dreams run on NVIDIA chips, its citizens’ secrets live on Meta’s servers, and its entire modern economy is scaffolded atop infrastructure it neither built, nor controls, nor fully understands.

But here’s the twist.

Europe didn’t just end up here. It chose this path. Chose it with ignorance, with comfort, with the peculiar fatalism of rich societies that forget history and outsource urgency.

Act I: How to Become a Digital Vassal in One Generation

Some very smart Europeans have been sounding the alarm. Myself, Academics in Berlin, cryptographers in Prague, policymakers in Paris. They’ve been saying the same thing for years: our digital autonomy doesn’t exist.

But most people didn’t listen. Because most people assumed the Internet—the real infrastructure of the modern age—was neutral, global, even liberating. That belief was exported with Silicon Valley optimism and sold in plastic wrap across Europe.

Any effort by China or Russia to build a sovereign digital network was dismissed in the Western press as censorship, full stop. And to be fair, there’s some truth there. But it’s only a partial truth, and partial truths have a nasty habit of being weaponized.

Because somewhere between the headlines about Chinese firewalls and Russian hackers, we forgot to ask: What if they’re not just trying to keep people in? What if they’re trying to keep others out?

America, after all, built the Internet. It routes the traffic. It runs the platforms. It dominates the AI models, the chips, the satellites, the cloud. If tomorrow morning someone in Washington decided that the cables going into Europe should stop humming—what exactly is Europe going to do about it?

The answer: not much. Nothing. "Nichts." "Rien."

Act II: Digital Dependency in a Trade War World

Now zoom out. Picture a world not just at peace, but at odds. A world of deglobalization, semiconductor embargoes, tariff tantrums, and shadow wars on fiber optic cables.

In that world—and we’re already in it—control of digital infrastructure becomes a lever. One of the biggest.

And Europe? Well, Europe is holding a fork in a gunfight.

It has no hyperscale cloud of its own. No real sovereign data layer. No native social platforms at scale. Its AI leaders are either underfunded, overregulated, or already in Palo Alto. And still, many of its leaders don’t quite grasp the stakes. Many of them were lawyers, farmers, even poets. Brilliant at bureaucracy. Not so brilliant at digital geopolitics.

Ask them about subsidies for Alpine cheese, and they’ll give you a twenty-page dossier. Ask them about post-quantum encryption, and they’ll ask if it can be served with wine.

Epilogue: How Much Longer Can We Pretend?

There’s a saying now—half joke, half prophecy—circulating in policy circles:

“Europe is a museum by day, and a client state by night.”

This isn’t about anti-American sentiment. America built astonishing tools. But sovereignty is sovereignty. And Europe, in the 21st century, has none of it—not digitally.

Living rent-free in someone else’s infrastructure isn’t freedom. It’s exposure.

It’s also a digital death sentence, if the lights ever flicker.

For those who want to dig deeper, read this quietly urgent piece in Politico titled: Trump can pull the plug on the internet, and Europe can't do anything about it , here

Because once you realize how the system actually works, it’s hard to unsee it.

And once you see it—you can’t help but wonder: Who really owns your world?

P.S. The Chart illustrates the situation in Europe only i.e Europe Digital Infra Market Share