Two European search engines are taking on Big Tech—and they are going straight to the top. Germany’s Ecosia and France’s Qwant have jointly written to all 27 EU leaders, offering to build sovereign search infrastructure for the continent. Their message is blunt: without it, Europe does not control the gateway to its own digital economy.
Web search is a backbone of the digital economy. Yet a handful of big tech gatekeepers dominate it. Around 96 per cent of European search queries go through just two US companies: Google and Microsoft’s Bing. Russia’s Yandex trails in a very distant third.
Activists have warned that the search engine market’s imbalance endangers democracy. It also limits Europe’s innovative and economic potential, as free and transparent access to information slips from public control. Political leaders, however, have also taken note.
At the Digital Sovereignty Summit in Berlin on 18 November 2025, European leaders pledged to reduce the continent’s critical digital dependencies. Hosts German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron both backed building sovereign infrastructure where possible.
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Calling leaders’ bluff
Qwant and Ecosia have joined forces to create the European Search Perspective (EUSP) and sent open letters to 27 EU leaders with a challenge and an offer. They want sovereign search infrastructure. This would include a national search index hosted under European jurisdiction, a national ranking algorithm, and infrastructure supporting both public search services and AI search grounding.
EUSP will do the work in exchange for a fee. Alternatively, it will do it for free—if the respective government switches its default search engine to Ecosia or Qwant across its national public administration. In practice, this would mean building a “full search API (full web index and ranking algorithm), a document index API (all documents behind these links vectorised for rapid access), and a Language Learning Model API (summarised answers from top results).”
The cost to cover all of Europe would be around €50m, with prices varying from country to country depending on size and scope.
Urgency to act
EUSP Director Wolfgang Oels says search infrastructure should be treated as strategic public infrastructure, comparable to energy grids or telco networks. And he believes failure to do so could be catastrophic. “If access to dominant search indexing infrastructure were restricted—whether due to sanctions, regulatory conflict, export controls or commercial decisions—governments could lose critical analytical capabilities and economies could face complete collapse within days,” he said.
Without a sovereign search index, Europe does not control the gateway to its own digital economy. —Wolfgang Oels, EUSP Director
“Donald Trump has clearly stated that the disintegration of the EU is his goal. The US is influencing our politics and sabotaging our political system. We need to get our act together. Without a sovereign search index, Europe does not control the gateway to its own digital economy. Make no mistake, we are under attack,” he concluded.
