Merkel urges Europe to take control of its data from US tech giants

Angela Merkel has urged Europe to seize control of its data from Silicon Valley tech giants, in an intervention that highlights the EU’s growing willingness to challenge the US dominance of the digital economy. In a report about Merkel’s speech, at an employers’ conference in Berlin, the Financial Times says that this shows the extent to which the information economy is emerging as a battleground in the EU-US trading relationship.

The Financial Times reports that the German chancellor said the EU should claim “digital sovereignty” by developing its own platform to manage data and reduce its reliance on the US-based cloud services run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. “So many companies have just outsourced all their data to US companies,” Ms Merkel told German business leaders.

The Financial Times quotes Merkel saying that she’s not ” saying that’s bad in and of itself — I just mean that the value-added products that come out of that, with the help of artificial intelligence, will create dependencies that I’m not sure are a good thing.”

via Financial Times