Merkel, Hollande to discuss European communication network avoiding U.S.
(Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday she would talk to French President Francois Hollande about building up a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States.
Context & Ripple Effects
The proposal lands eight weeks after Spiegel reported the NSA was running a secret spy hub in Berlin, a revelation that put Chancellor Merkel's own government at the center of the surveillance story rather than merely its critic. Against that backdrop, her announcement that she will raise the idea of a European communication network with President Hollande reads as Germany converting an intelligence scandal into an infrastructure agenda.
The pickup was unusually broad for a bilateral statement — BBC, The Verge, Gigaom, DW and Data Center Knowledge all carried the Reuters wire within a day — signaling how much appetite existed across tech and policy media for a concrete European response to NSA routing. Note the substance remains a discussion item between two leaders, not a funded program: no operator, budget, or technical design has been named.
First-order effects
- German and French leaders put European telecom operators on notice that cross-border data transit through the United States is now a policy problem to be engineered around, making any future procurement or standards work a Franco-German political project.
- Email and cloud providers whose traffic currently transits U.S. routes face immediate reputational scrutiny from European government and enterprise customers asking where their data physically travels.
Second-order effects
- If Berlin and Paris move from talk to specification, European carriers and equipment vendors gain a state-backed mandate for domestic routing and encryption capacity, while U.S.-headquartered service providers must either localize European traffic handling or cede government accounts.
- The framing invites other governments burned by the NSA disclosures to demand equivalent exemptions, turning network topology into a bargaining chip in transatlantic trade and security talks.
Third-order effects
- A Europe that builds its own transit layer would institutionalize 'digital sovereignty' as a category of public infrastructure — networks justified not by commerce but by distrust of allied intelligence services — a template other blocs could copy.
- Sustained follow-through would push regulation toward mandatory data-residency and routing rules, forcing global internet architecture to fragment along jurisdictional lines rather than pure engineering efficiency.
The trend: Surveillance disclosures from the Snowden era are pushing European governments from protest toward building sovereign communication infrastructure that routes around the United States by design.