Several European governments are already adopting measures against US platforms. Belgium has joined France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg: it is the list of European Union states that are already working on their own messaging apps to depend less on American firms such as Meta, owner of WhatsApp.
This is how the newspaper explains it Politicowhich highlights how these countries want to prevent their officials and senior officials from using encrypted messaging applications that are in the hands of foreign powers. All this, due to the growing fear that exists in the Old Continent of depending on Washington. This is not the first time that the European Union has found itself at a similar crossroads.
In recent years, community institutions followed the lead of countries like France by prohibiting the installation of platforms such as the Chinese TikTok on the official mobile phones of their public employees. It was not intended to prevent officials entertain themselves with short videos of the social network during their work hours: the fear was that TikTok was collecting critical data and extracting it to Beijing.
But the EU’s target has not been solely China. In February of this same year, a group of MEPs managed to get the European Parliament to deactivate the Microsoft artificial intelligence applications of the devices of its officials. “We constantly monitor cybersecurity threats and quickly adopt measures to prevent them,” acknowledged the press office of the European Parliament.
In Spain there are still no analogous measures
That several European governments are adopting a measure of this magnitude is not trivial. TikTok is no longer alone in the target: platforms that until recently were reliable in the eyes of Brussels are no longer so. Some senior officials recognize that the last year under the Trump Administration has generated that urgency. In fact, there are quite explicit comments about it.
“Our communication is often done through platforms over which we have no control. (…) In a world where technology is increasingly used as a tool of power that poses a risk“. Who says it is Willemijn Aerdts, Minister of Digital Affairs of the Netherlands, in statements to Politico. “This is a question of sovereignty,” reaffirms Brandon de Waele, director of the public agency that develops the new internal messaging platform for Belgium.
These movements also occur after the scandal known as Signalgate: an American journalist published Pentagon military plans because they included him by mistake in a group chat. The blame fell on a White House security adviser, Mike Waltz, who
Also due to the falls in recent months of providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), which have revealed the vulnerability of critical digital infrastructures when they are concentrated in so few hands.
At the moment, the Spanish Government has not announced similar initiatives, although President Pedro Sánchez maintains one of the most critical voices in the Old Continent against the “digital oligarchs”. That is why Spain announced months ago that it would criminally prosecute the platforms for all the social harm they could commit.
