Politico.eu: “Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet. As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that years of over-reliance on a handful of U.S. tech giants have given Washington a winning hand. The fatal vulnerability is Europe’s near-total dependency on U.S. cloud providers. Cloud computing is the lifeblood of the internet, powering everything from the emails we send and videos we stream to industrial data processing and government communications. Just three American behemoths — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — hold more than two-thirds of the regional market, putting Europe’s online existence in the hands of firms cozying up to the U.S. president to fend off looming regulations and fines. Sovereignty hawks in Europe have long voiced concerns that cloud reliance means U.S. agencies can snoop on sensitive data of Europeans stored on American-owned servers in any location, thanks to U.S. laws. Now, in a political cycle that has seen the U.S. president flip laws on a dime and the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor lose access to his Microsoft email after being sanctioned by Washington (following arrest warrants for top Israeli officials), there are genuine fears the U.S. could weaponize its tech dominance for leverage abroad. “Trump really hates Europe. He thinks the whole purpose of the EU is to ‘screw‘ America,” said Zach Meyers, director of research at the CERRE think tank in Brussels. “The idea that he might order a kill switch or do something else that would severely damage economic interests isn’t quite as implausible as it might have sounded six months ago.”