What if the United States Turned Off Your Digital Tap?

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If this scenario sounds alarmist today, it rests on a clear trend: the current U.S. administration is increasingly hostile toward Europe, while Europe remains heavily dependent on American digital infrastructure. What used to seem unlikely now looks like a plausible risk over the next 5–10 years. The time to act is now… before you’re caught off guard.

The recent publication of the National Security Strategy 2025 by the Trump administration confirms this trajectory: the United States clearly states its intention to use every lever, including technological and economic ones, to defend its strategic interests, with an openly “America First” approach that no longer hides its unilateral dimension.

In a context where rising U.S. political figures, such as JD Vance or Marjorie Taylor Greene, embody a more nationalist, more isolationist movement, and one that is more explicitly critical of Europe, the adoption of unilateral measures, including restrictions targeting foreign actors or sectors, seems more credible than ever.

Beyond the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act: executive orders & emergency laws

The Cloud Act (2018) and the Patriot Act (2001) are well known today: they allow U.S. authorities to access data held by U.S. companies, even if that data is physically hosted abroad. These laws authorize surveillance and data-access requests within an established legal framework.

But the problem isn’t limited to these classic surveillance or data-request laws - what also threatens the digital infrastructure used by European actors are legal emergency mechanisms.

For example, in February 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14203, relying in particular on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), to impose sanctions against members and collaborators of the International Criminal Court (ICC) - with no prior judicial procedure, simply by executive decision.

Concretely, this means that overnight, a sanctioned person can lose access to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or any other U.S. cloud service - with no immediate remedy, no trial, purely by executive decision. The case of French magistrate Nicolas Guillou, sanctioned by the United States, illustrates this reality: imagine your company - your professional emails, files, collaboration tools… inaccessible overnight. This “emergency power” mechanism shows how discretionary decisions can block assets, restrict access, or freeze property of foreign actors - U.S.-based or not.

In other words: the U.S. state has a legal arsenal that allows it, in times of “threat” or “crisis”, to act fast - with immediate effects - against targets perceived as sensitive: economic, judicial, or technological. This goes well beyond the scope of traditional surveillance laws.

For a European company dependent on a U.S. provider, even if the servers are in Europe, it’s the provider’s legal nationality - not the physical location - that can determine access or shutdown.

This kind of emergency law or extraterritorial reach turns “hosting in Europe” into a pseudo-shield: when the provider is subject to U.S. law, it remains potentially vulnerable to decisions made in Washington - even if your data is physically stored in Frankfurt, Dublin, or Paris.

What happens if there’s a cutoff?

Many companies in Europe rely on clouds, SaaS services, APIs, critical infrastructure provided by U.S. players - IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, storage, AI APIs, etc. If those services are shut down or restricted, your infrastructure can become unusable within hours.

If your product relies on an AI API, or any other critical external service, an external decision can stop you dead - without notice.

This highlights a key point: technological dependence, especially when centralized around one or a handful of U.S. providers, becomes a strategic vulnerability - not only technical, but also economic and operational.

This risk may feel unlikely today, but in a period of renewed international tensions, it will only grow.

Reducing risk progressively, with a pragmatic approach

So how do you protect yourself against this risk? Let’s avoid fear-mongering or all‑or‑nothing thinking, and adopt a progressive, controlled strategy.

Some measures are worth taking:

1. Inventory dependencies: cloud, SaaS, APIs, storage, hosting, vendors, location of services and data.
2. Assess criticality: sensitive data? intellectual property? personal data? core business?
3. Prioritize: prioritize the most sensitive elements for potential migration to local or European solutions.
4. Modular, multi‑vendor architecture: if there’s dependence on a U.S. player, design code and infrastructure so you can switch from one provider to another.
5. Continuous iteration: with each new release, service, or customer, ask whether the dependency is “critical or not”, and gradually break out of the dependency loop.

This step‑by‑step approach reduces vulnerability without sacrificing innovation or performance.

How Ask This Guy (ATG) fits into this vision

At Ask This Guy, we’ve made a clear choice in favor of digital sovereignty:

• All our infrastructure is hosted with European providers, on European soil.
• For AI / LLM, our architecture is agnostic: today we support seven different providers, including four European ones. You have the choice: either a 100% European approach, or a “Europe + US” approach, depending on your risk tolerance, needs, and strategy. You can switch from one to the other in seconds.
• The code we produce for our clients - everything specific to their project - is shared and remains fully under the client’s control: you stay in charge, and you can change strategy, hosting, or provider at any time.
• This flexibility is part of our credo: sovereignty isn’t a dogma, it’s a strategic criterion. By adopting this posture from day one, we build our clients’ technical and economic resilience.

Is your AI provider taking this approach? Which LLM and which cloud provider are they using?

Conclusion: digital sovereignty is a bet on 2030

Today, the appeal of cloud giants, APIs, and “ready-to-use” services for launching a product quickly is powerful. But that convenience comes with a cost - often invisible, often ignored: the loss of strategic control over what could tomorrow be considered one of your most precious assets: your data, your IP, your sovereignty.

This isn’t an abstract risk. It’s a structural vulnerability - legal, technical, economic. And the longer you wait, the harder and more expensive it becomes to get out of it.

At Ask This Guy, we believe digital resilience - built on conscious and transparent choices - must become a competitiveness criterion. If you’re building a new service, a startup, or an AI product today, ask yourself:

“What is the critical asset I can’t afford to lose?” - and build around it an architecture aligned with what you mean by “sovereignty”.