{"id":699217,"date":"2026-01-16T05:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T05:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/699217\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T05:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T05:34:11","slug":"the-uk-is-wedded-to-us-tech-time-for-a-divorce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/699217\/","title":{"rendered":"The UK is wedded to US tech. Time for a divorce"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018To be an enemy of America can be dangerous,\u201d Henry Kissinger once observed\ufeff, \u201cbut to be a friend is fatal.\u201d As \ufeffOfcom begins its formal inquiry<\/a> \ufeffinto Elon Musk\u2019s X \u2013 \u201cto determine whether it has complied with its duties to protect UK users from \ufeffcontent that \ufeffis illegal in the UK\u201d \u2013 that sardonic quote will doubtless be uppermost in many Whitehall minds. For if \ufeffthe regulator \ufeff\ufeffrules that X has indeed \u201cfailed\u201d in its duty, the enraged response from Washington will be something to behold. It will vividly demonstrate how the world has changed\ufeff; that, to coin a slogan\ufeff, \ufeffthe technological is now political\ufeff\ufeff. And also that the corporate interests of a few American tech companies are now inextricably interwoven with the national interests of the\ufeff US.<\/p>\n

What \ufeffmay that new reality mean for you and me? To explore that question, the Cambridge computer scientist Quentin Stafford-Fraser (who, among other things, \ufeffis the co-inventor of the webcam\ufeff) recently came up with an interesting thought\ufeff experiment on his blog<\/a>\ufeff.<\/p>\n

Given that Donald Trump aspires to be the next Vladimir Putin (at least in the \ufeffwestern hemisphere), let\u2019s suppose he does \ufeffseize Greenland. What happens then?<\/p>\n

Stafford-Fraser explores a number of possibilities. One is that Keir Starmer roundly condemns the US\ufeff action. Trump responds by deciding to switch off \ufeffUK access to Amazon\ufeff Web Services (AWS) \ufeffor Microsoft\ufeff\ufeff Azure or Google\ufeff Cloud or Apple\u2019s iCloud\ufeff, or he doubles our IT costs by imposing 100% tariffs\ufeff, or just imposes bottlenecks to slow down our \ufeffaccess to US-based web services.<\/p>\n

Another is Starmer announces that UK users must promptly move their data out of any data\ufeffcentres controlled by US companies. A third is: \u201cYour biggest clients decide that they will only purchase products or services from companies who are not at risk from repercussions of \u2018the tense geopolitical climate\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so on. The bottom line for all these scenarios is the same: if your access to US-controlled cloud services was suddenly interrupted, seriously curtailed or became prohibitively slow or expensive\ufeff, would your business, organisation, hospital, school or institution still be able to function?<\/p>\n

At this point, Rory Cellan-Jones, the former BBC technology correspondent and now a pioneering podcaster and campaigner on Parkinson\u2019s,<\/a> joined \ufeffthe discussion on his blog<\/a>. What interests him is how reliant the digital revolution that is happening in UK healthcare is on US technology. For example, the big UK hospitals are moving to electronic healthcare records and the dominant software supplier for this is Epic\ufeff, described by \ufeffCellan-Jones as \u201ca huge, quite quirky American company whose EPR [electronic patient record] systems receive lots of praise but not for their openness. Sign up to Epic and it wants everything in your hospital to work on its software, not someone else\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

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And then there\u2019s Microsoft, whose Teams video conferencing seems ubiquitous in the NHS, and AWS, which is becoming a \ufeffkey provider of cloud services in the NHS\ufeff, and Palantir, the secretive data-analysis company founded by Peter \ufeffThiel, which has a \u00a3330m NHS contract to run a platform bringing sensitive patient health data together.<\/p>\n

Outside \ufefforganisational and business life, it\u2019s the same picture. All our smartphones operate by hooking up to the cloud. Social media, maps, train timetables, photograph\ufeffs, Amazon, Google, ChatGPT and other AIs, email, WhatsApp, Signal, streaming media, \ufeffsatnav, podcasts, Spotify, TikT\ufeffok; all are based on persistent connections to data\ufeffcentres operated by US companies and in most cases not based anywhere near the users.<\/p>\n

Over several decades, we Europeans constructed a way of living that is totally dependent on technologies run by corporations \ufeffthat describe themselves as \u201cglobal\u201d but are all, in fact, American. It\u2019s as if, having abolished feudalism, we reintroduced it in the cloud; we diligently tilled our data, while Silicon Valley collected the rent. And for a long time, although we might have had occasional qualms, it seemed like a manageable deal. After all, the US was an ally \ufeffthat \u2013 as Winston Churchill\ufeff allegedly said \u2013 could always be relied on to do the right thing, after it had exhausted all the alternatives.<\/p>\n

Until now. The Ofcom investigation into X isn\u2019t just a regulatory issue; it could also be a test case to see if we can hold tech platforms accountable when doing so will enrage the regime in\u00a0Washington. The answer will reveal whether we\u2019re still sovereign nations capable of protecting our citizens, or whether we\u2019ve essentially\u00a0become digital client states where US corporate interests trump our own laws. Kissinger\u2019s quip about friendship being fatal wasn\u2019t meant as a technology policy prediction. But as we acknowledge how comprehensively we\u2019ve embedded US tech into our critical infrastructure, it\u2019s clear that we should have been paying more attention to the implications of where we were headed.<\/p>\n

Unwinding this dependency \ufeffwill be very difficult. But it has to be done. If we don\u2019t pull it off, then we\u2019ll be left with only one consolation: belletrist Geoffrey Madan\u2019s observation that\ufeff \u201cthe dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset\u201d.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m reading<\/p>\n

My Third Winter of War<\/a>, a memorable dispatch from Kyiv by the\u00a0Ukrainian economist Kateryna Kibarova, is a reminder of what Ukrainian civilians are living through.<\/p>\n

Photograph by Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018To be an enemy of America can be dangerous,\u201d Henry Kissinger once observed\ufeff, \u201cbut to be a friend…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,229,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":["post-699217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","category-united-kingdom","tag-britain","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-northern-ireland","tag-science-technology","tag-scotland","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-wales"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115903153133259617","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}