The Trump administration's sanctions against a Canadian judge have become Europe's wake-up call. After Kimberly Prost was blacklisted for her role in ICC war crimes investigations, her life went digital dark - no credit cards, no Amazon, no access to US financial systems. Now European governments are racing to reduce their dependence on American tech infrastructure, with France already replacing Microsoft Teams and Zoom with homegrown alternatives. It's a geopolitical rupture that could reshape the global tech landscape.
A Canadian judge's nightmare is becoming Europe's rallying cry. When the Trump administration slapped sanctions on International Criminal Court judge Kimberly Prost last year, she didn't just lose access to US markets - she lost her digital life. Credit cards stopped working. Her Amazon account vanished. Bank transfers became impossible. All because she served on an appeals chamber that authorized ICC investigations into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan.
Prost described the sanctions as "paralyzing" in an interview with The Irish Times. Her name now sits alongside terrorists, North Korean hackers, and Iranian spies on America's sanctions list. For European governments watching this unfold, the message landed hard: if Washington can flip a switch and cut off a respected jurist from the digital economy, what's stopping them from doing it to entire nations?
The answer came fast. France just announced it's ditching Microsoft Teams and Zoom for Visio, a domestically built video conferencing platform. "This is about reclaiming our digital sovereignty," civil service minister David Amiel said Tuesday, marking one of the most aggressive moves yet by a major European power to break free from Silicon Valley's grip.
But France isn't alone. Belgium's cybersecurity chief Miguel De Bruycker admitted in a Financial Times interview that Europe has "lost the internet" to the United States. He called it "currently impossible" to store data entirely within European borders because US companies control so much of the underlying infrastructure. His plea: the European Union needs to build its own tech stack, fast.
