European institutions ditch Microsoft Office as Trump sanctions expose infrastructure vulnerability
International Criminal Court email blockade accelerates shift to open source alternatives, with four EU countries launching shared infrastructure consortium
In February 2025, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor woke to find he could no longer access his email. Karim Khan hadn't forgotten his password. Microsoft had cut him off.
The reason was an executive order from Washington. President Trump had sanctioned Khan over arrest warrants issued for Israeli officials, and threatened anyone providing the prosecutor with "material or technological support." Microsoft, an American company subject to American law, complied. An international court meant to operate beyond any nation's control discovered that a foreign government could silence its communications with the stroke of a pen.
The incident, which left the ICC "virtually paralysed" according to the Associated Press, transformed years of European hand-wringing about "digital sovereignty" into something concrete: institutions built to be independent weren't. Not when their email, documents, and collaboration tools ran on American infrastructure, subject to American sanctions, operated by American companies.
Microsoft disputes this characterisation. Company president Brad Smith insists services were never suspended and the firm remained in contact with the ICC throughout. Yet Khan now uses Proton Mail, a Swiss provider, and the ICC is replacing Microsoft Office entirely with Open Desk, a European open source alternative. The decision, confirmed to German newspaper Handelsblatt in late October, might have passed as routine procurement news. Instead, it marks the moment European institutions recognised their vulnerability—and began doing something about it.
When email became a weapon
Khan's email disconnection was just the beginning. All 900 ICC staff were banned from entering the United States. The Trump administration threatened fines and imprisonment for anyone providing Khan with "financial, material, or technological support." Khan's British bank accounts froze. Two US-based human rights groups stopped working with the ICC entirely.
Staff at organisations that gather evidence for ICC investigations moved money out of American banks before it could be seized. The court's Sudan investigations, including arrest warrants for former president Omar al-Bashir on genocide charges, stalled. ICC officials wondered aloud whether the organisation could survive.
The episode crystallised what European governments had avoided acknowledging: operational independence is fiction when your infrastructure answers to foreign jurisdiction. The ICC sits in The Hague, investigates international crimes under the Rome Statute, and claims judicial independence from all nations. Yet Washington issued an order, and the court's communications went dark.
Denmark's digital affairs minister Caroline Stage Olsen put it plainly: "We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely. Too much public digital infrastructure is tied up with very few foreign suppliers. This makes us vulnerable."
From pilots to wholesale replacement
What's happening now isn't experimentation. It's divorce.
By September 2025, Germany's Schleswig-Holstein had moved 30,000 government employees—civil servants, police, judges—entirely off Microsoft. No more Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, or Windows. Digital Minister Dirk Schrödter's announcement was blunt: "Mission accomplished. We want to break free from dependence on big tech companies."
Linux replaced Windows. LibreOffice replaced Office. Open-Xchange replaced Outlook and Teams. The entire software environment was rebuilt around open source alternatives, with data hosted inside German borders. This wasn't a pilot running alongside existing systems. Microsoft was gone.
Denmark followed with greater ambition: half its government employees by August 2025, everyone by autumn. Copenhagen and Aarhus, the country's two largest cities, announced identical plans. Austria's military migrated all 16,000 computers. France installed LibreOffice on 500,000 workstations across 11 ministries.
Italy's Defence Ministry had moved in 2015. Spain's Valencia region in 2012. But these were outliers. The timeline acceleration tells the real story: most large-scale migrations are happening right now, in 2024 and 2025. Years of discussion suddenly became action.
Austria's approach reveals something important. Rather than simply using free software, the Austrian military contributed five years' worth of development time to LibreOffice—funding improvements, building features, training programmers. The model isn't "escape from Microsoft." It's "build our own capacity."
Building European digital commons
The ICC chose Open Desk, which didn't exist two years ago. Built by ZenDiS—a publicly-owned German company founded in December 2022—it represents a different model entirely.
Open Desk isn't new software. It's existing open source tools woven together: Nextcloud for files, Collabora Online for documents, OpenProject for project management, Jitsi for video, Element for messaging. Rather than compete with Microsoft by replicating everything Office does, Open Desk assembled proven components with open interfaces. Version 1.0 launched October 2024. By year's end 2025, it's targeting 160,000 licences across German government.
But Open Desk solves only half the problem. The traditional objection to open source in government runs like this: when things break, who fixes them? When requirements change, who builds new features? Commercial software has vendors. Open source has... volunteers?
The answer arrived 29 October 2025, when the European Commission approved the Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium. France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy are founding members, with Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Poland observing. The formal launch happens 11 December in The Hague.
DC-EDIC provides what open source typically lacks: dedicated governance, legal personality, and pooled funding for maintaining European digital infrastructure. Not buying software together. Building and maintaining it together.
Thomas Jarzombek, a German Parliamentary State Secretary, framed it clearly: "Together, we are strengthening Europe's digital sovereignty, promoting open technologies, and building a common digital infrastructure based on European values." Italy's Serafino Sorrenti added: "It's a clear message: Europe can build, maintain and govern critical digital infrastructure on its own terms."
The model differs from "find a European vendor." Software developed through DC-EDIC defaults to free and open source licences. The consortium provides legal and technical support, funding access, and policy guidance. By 2027: a one-stop shop, an expertise hub, a Digital Commons Forum and Award, an annual State of the Digital Commons report.
This answers the maintenance question with institutional commitment rather than commercial contracts. ZenDiS and Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency will implement the first projects. Other countries can join under fair terms. The infrastructure becomes genuinely shared, genuinely European, genuinely maintained.
The cost of dependence
Digital sovereignty provides political cover. Money provides motivation.
EU governments spend over €200 million yearly on Microsoft licensing. Include NATO, UN organisations, and national governments: nearly €400 million. Microsoft has been raising prices steadily. Teams Phone: up 25 per cent to $10 monthly. Power BI Pro: up 40 per cent to $14. The company's "price harmonisation" hit Europe with double-digit increases in 2023-2024, aligning European pricing with American rates.
Schleswig-Holstein expects tens of millions in savings from its migration. Toulouse saved €1.8 million over three years moving to LibreOffice. Open source eliminates perpetual licensing fees and forced upgrade cycles. The savings compound.
Yet European institutions tolerated rising costs for decades. What changed wasn't the expense—it was the political permission to do something about it. Security concerns gave finance departments the justification they'd lacked. Nobody wants to be the official who disrupted government operations to save money. But "protecting institutional independence"? That sells.
Legal pressure is mounting simultaneously. UK competition lawyer Maria Luisa Stasi launched collective action in December 2024, claiming British businesses are owed £2 billion in compensation for Microsoft's cloud licensing practices. The Competition Appeal Tribunal set a December 2025 hearing. Google filed a European Commission complaint in September 2024, accusing Microsoft of "leveraging its software monopoly" to lock customers into Azure.
The Interoperable Europe Act, effective 2024, now legally requires EU public bodies to prioritise open source and ensure cross-border interoperability. Previously voluntary migrations became regulatory requirements. The legal framework shifted from permitting these moves to demanding them.
The difficulty of divorce
This isn't simple. Microsoft embedded itself in government workflows over 20 to 30 years. Entire generations of civil servants learned to work within that ecosystem. File formats, email habits, collaboration patterns—all evolved around Windows and Office.
Dirk Schrödter acknowledged the reality: "We've learned that such transitions are never simple. We are true pioneers. Looking around the world, there are very few projects of this scale. Without employee cooperation, this migration would not have been possible."
The challenges are concrete. Staff must relearn interfaces, keyboard shortcuts, and workflows. Muscle memory built over decades needs retraining. Productivity drops during transition before recovering. Training requirements are substantial.
Interoperability problems persist. LibreOffice handles Microsoft formats reasonably, but complex spreadsheets with extensive macros or documents with elaborate formatting sometimes break. Organisations that regularly exchange files with external partners still using Microsoft must maintain reliable document exchange.
Transition costs—money and disruption—are real. European institutions increasingly view these as one-time investments in long-term independence rather than avoidable expenses. The alternative, from their perspective, is perpetual vulnerability to vendor pricing and geopolitical pressure.
Microsoft responded with "European Cloud Principles" announced in April 2025, emphasising data sovereignty and European alignment. Brad Smith stated the company remained "convinced that nothing impedes our ability to continue providing services to the ICC in the future."
Too late. A European Parliament question from May 2025 asked pointedly how the Commission assessed "the risks to other European and international entities, public and private, of falling victim to this example where a US company withdraws essential digital services if they go against the Trump administration."
The question remains unanswered. But European institutions are answering through action.
The ICC's switch to Open Desk, Schleswig-Holstein's completed migration, Denmark's accelerating programme, the DC-EDIC's December launch—all point to the same conclusion: Europe has decided that institutional independence requires infrastructure independence.
Whether this represents temporary reaction or permanent reorientation depends on implementation success. If Open Desk proves reliable and genuinely capable, more institutions follow. If migrations hit serious technical problems or prove unexpectedly expensive, momentum stalls.
But the ICC's experience reveals something broader. Institutions designed to operate independently of national interests—international courts, human rights organisations, cross-border regulatory bodies—are discovering their technological foundations contradict their institutional mandates. When email becomes a weapon in geopolitical disputes, sovereignty stops being abstract.
The DC-EDIC launches formally in The Hague on 11 December 2025. That date tests whether Europe can translate political commitment into sustained technical capability. For the International Criminal Court, preparing its transition to Open Desk, the test is simpler.
Can it send email without asking Washington's permission?