As a German in public service (university), I can attest to the fact that a lot of digital sovereignty is happening from grass-roots as well, not just from the EU commission level.

In my opinion Europa as a whole has both the talent, skills and means to shrug off US big tech if we'd really wanted to - and the world would benefit a great deal from it IF we manage to go full FOSS instead of exchanging one slave master with another. Some positive examples exist, but some bad ones as well (ugh... lookig at you Nextcloud).

Some background: There are heavy society-level implications running all the way back to the WWII aftermath. While it is true that Germany has been the biggest beneficiary of US hegemony *BY FAR*, we are seriuously PISSED to see facism in the US, especially considering the Russian aggression on Ukraine, which heavily questions US safeguarding via NATO. There is some irony that while the US has a hilariously bad track-record when it comes to nation-building at large, with Germany it WORKED (largely due to reasons within Germany itself, but I digress). So consider the irony that the ONE country you managed to make actually democratic actually defends those values and for many IT folks and engineers it's very clear that FOSS is an integral part of liberty at large. Where I'm getting with this: Even if you look throughout Europe, data privacy precautions as well as state secularity requirements are RECORD HIGH (and have been for decades). We were happy to adopt each and every US innovation just because it was US, but as it ends (and it ends NOW), expect no half-baked solutions.