EU Parliament Dumps Google for French Qwant
It’s a big step in the EU’s broader breakaway from US tech bros, effective immediately. But will it work in the long term?
Giving reporters, and possibly staff, barely 24 hours’ notice, a European Parliament (EP) spokesperson announced on June 3 by email: “From 4 June 2026, Qwant will become the default search engine on the European Parliament’s Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers.”
Qwant is a French internet search engine that promises not to stockpile users’ search history or sell their personal data, marketing itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google Search. It was developed in Nice and launched in 2013 somewhat naively to compete with the US behemoth, albeit by heavily relying on content from Microsoft Bing.
Since then, having moved its headquarters to Paris, Qwant’s focus and its technical infrastructure have shifted to become resolutely European, leading to its adoption as the default search engine within a number of French government departments and agencies, including the National Assembly itself from 2019.
The decision affects the in-house computers of the European Parliament’s 720 elected members as well as thousands of assistants and administrative staff. Making Qwant the default on EP computers was implemented automatically as “part of a larger framework of actions aimed at reducing EP reliance on non-EU digital tools and promoting European-based, privacy-focused services,” the EP spokesperson explained. Searches conducted through the address bar in Firefox and Edge browsers will automatically be routed through Qwant.
Users can still revert to other products in multiple languages, of course – albeit in the knowledge that data passing through European versions of US search engines will still be accessible to the US authorities. And this has become a sticking point, according to Belgian Green MEP Sarah Matthieu: “A European label on an American product … solves nothing.”
Breaking the Chains
Efforts to liberate Europe from US-dominated digital colonization have been in the works for some time: the degree of domination became impossible to ignore.
Synergy Research Group determined last year that some 70 per cent of the European market for cloud infrastructure was dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google alone. European providers such as SAP and Deutsche Telekom made up a total of just 15 per cent of the European market.
For its part, the European Parliament kicked things off in January with a resolution to “break free from US tech dependency.” This followed discussion of a parliamentary report that noted EU countries currently rely on non-EU countries for over 80 per cent of digital products, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property. A host of additional reports revealed the depths of this imbalance.
European Commission policy briefs followed, defining the concepts of ‘data sovereignty’ (i.e. giving full control to stakeholders involved in the delivery of public services over their shared data) and ‘digital sovereignty and autonomy’ (i.e. choosing digital infrastructures, products and services that safeguard European security, strategic assets and interests). In May, the Commission awarded an €180m six-year tender to four European companies (Post Telecom, STACKIT, Scaleway and Proximus) to provide Europe-based cloud services for EU institutions.
Why Now?
Could it have been the rapid evaporation of trust in the US (and by extrapolation in its technology) that brought about this sea-change?
Talk of “tech independence” had already been picking up after President Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Mertz met for a bilateral summit in Berlin last November on European Digital Sovereignty. Joint statements promised a reduction in non-EU technological dependence, a strengthening of local infrastructures, and the protection of “strategic assets.”
Governments always promise they will boost home-grown industries for the benefit of their own citizens. But this time, to this journalist who covers the tech scene, it felt different; a change of mood since Donald Trump’s second term. The sudden political and economic cold-shouldering of other countries, the rise of swashbuckling ‘tech-bro’ culture, and the unlucky coincidence that these same unregulated billionaires accidentally stumbled upon the new Industrial Revolution – AI – and now eschew legal constraints.
A stunning example of this occurred when Space X and Tesla owner Elon Musk was summoned by the Paris public prosecutor’s office for a voluntary interview in April as part of a major investigation into cyber-criminality on Musk’s X social media platform and its Grok AI assistant.
Musk did not refuse or reschedule: he simply didn’t bother to turn up. The day after the meeting was set to take place, he posted infantile and homophobic insults about the prosecutor’s team on X.
Even when other tech operations such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta have been hauled into European courts or even fined for breaching competition or data protection rules, the processes end up interminably tied up in appeals.
Now the risky and disruptive international military conflicts launched by the current US administration have left friendly nations in the EU worrying that their existential reliance on tech infrastructure across the Atlantic leaves them looking very fragile indeed.
Out With the Old, In with The French
There is some evidence that French technology could bridge the digital gap. France already boasts its own home-grown AI platform: MistralAI, whose CEO and co-founder, Arthur Mensch, told a parliamentary commission in Paris in May that Europeans risked a form of “digital colonialism” by the US, leaving the EU a mere “vassal state.” He also railed against European Commission pen-pushers writing regulations that tech pioneers in the US don’t have to deal with, but he was on-board with the principle of tech independence. “Sovereignty is not isolationism,” he reasoned. “It is a lever.”
Digital sovereignty – “Souveraineté numérique” – became official French government policy on 8 April. This involves, for example, replacing Microsoft Windows with the Linux open-source operating system on government computers. No deadline has been set although the French Gendarmerie can prove that it can be done; they have been operating on Linux since 2008. Likewise, the French national health system (the Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie) is already switching messaging, video conferencing and file transfer functions to in-house equivalents such as Tchap, Visio and FranceTransfert.
Even more ambitious is the French prime minister’s demand that each government ministry should devise a plan – by this fall – to alter their digital procurement for everything from workstations, networks and databases to AI and antivirus software, specifically to “reduce dependence on non-European sources.” A French interministerial directorate for digital affairs – the Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM) – will hold its first digital industry meeting this month [June] to bring businesses on-board with the whole European sovereignty policy.
They may need less convincing that one might expect. France has a rich history in the IT and telecommunication fields – who here remembers using a Minitel? – and it punches above its weight when it comes to fully home-grown and localized (i.e. French-language) apps and software-as-a-service platforms.
Too Little Too Late?
The goal of the EP’s ruling to oust Google Search in favor of Qwant was to wean Europe from US tech while not angering the Americans… a tough goal, and tougher to reach, and maybe left too late.
European Commission experts accept that it will take at least a decade to achieve anything remotely close to tech independence in the EU. That seems a long time now that tech sovereignty in the Trump era is becoming a security issue. Zach Meyers, director of research at think tank CERRE, laid the source of the problem at the White House door, telling Mathieu Pollet of Politico there is no “other real source of the problem than Trump, the unpredictability, the threats, the willingness to weaponize” [Europe’s dependence on American firms]. Once an ally, the US is becoming a liability.
France will choose a new president in 11 months’ time. What if in November US voters fail to elect pro-European Congresspeople and instead lean towards MAGA US in Trump’s final two years in office?
The game is certainly on to lay the foundation stones of European tech independence. But time is on nobody’s side.
qwant.com... isn't the .com TLD managed by Verisign (formerly by US DoD), so they have total control over the domain registration including judicial norms? I would at least have expected qwant.fr.
So here is the thing. Weaning technically unsavvy managers off what they already have, even if the new thing is demonstrably better, is incredibly difficult. If the new thing is an in-house development, that’s even more difficult, because nobody wants to maintain it. Hats off to the Gendarmes for going Linux and making it stick though.