Nearly three-quarters of businesses surveyed in the UK, France, and Germany fear Washington could abruptly cut their access to the US tech platforms on which they depend. The finding comes from a survey of 1,500 businesses in the three countries conducted by Proton, the Swiss company behind Proton Mail, which was founded by scientists who met at CERN. Businesses have long relied on companies such as Microsoft and Google for email and productivity software. Moving those tools into the cloud has also given providers a central switch with which to withdraw access. Geopolitical tensions between European countries and the Trump administration have brought concerns about such a possibility to the fore, especially after the US government issued an export control directive preventing any non-US citizen from accessing some Anthropic AI models. A previous study by Proton claimed that over 74 percent of all publicly listed European companies depend on US-based tech services, and a report last year from Synergy Research found that the European cloud infrastructure market is sewn up by the big American operators, with local firms making up just 15 percent of it. Proton says nearly three in four respondents (73.9 percent) were concerned that the US government could cut off their access to American technology providers. Just one in 20 expressed no concern at all. More than half (54.5 percent) of respondents said they could continue operating for no more than a single business day before shutting down if they lost access to cloud and digital services entirely. Among large businesses, 28.7 percent estimated that a day offline would cost more than €100,000 ($115,000), while 45 percent put the damage above €50,000 ($57,000). These concerns have been widely discussed, such as at the Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels earlier this year, where (surprise, surprise) open source was held up as the solution to the problem. But as The Register also reported back in May, the problem goes deeper than many suspect. Identity and Access Management (IAM) is entirely dominated by US vendors, for example, meaning that "the layer of infrastructure responsible for authenticating every user and authorizing every access decision is, in most cases, operated by a vendor incorporated in the United States and subject to American law." Proton nevertheless found an appetite for escape: 67.8 percent of respondents said they would switch providers if government action cut off their access. Few appear ready to make that switch in a hurry. Only 44 percent have a documented business continuity plan that they test regularly, leaving the majority without a proven fallback. Among those preparing for disruption, email and cloud file storage were the top priorities for fallback services, Proton said. Proton has more than an academic interest in the findings: it sells a business continuity platform covering email, conferencing, and productivity tools. But it maintains that disruption is not hypothetical for European businesses. Every respondent reported at least one disruption during the previous 12 months, ranging from outages and cyberattacks to losing access to a service. "The kill switch is no longer an abstract geopolitical concern but a business continuity crisis," commented Proton chief operating officer Raphaël Auphan. "The study captures a clear shift in how European businesses perceive operational risk. Geopolitical risk applied to digital dependence is no longer a boardroom abstraction. It is joining the same threat register as criminal attacks, with the same sense of urgency and the same expectation that it could materialize without warning." ®
