# The Digital Decolonisation of Europe # A Weapon of Mass Creative Destruction for the Digital Decolonisation of Europe ## Why Europe should reconsider Anti-Circumvention Laws to Reclaim Its Sovereignty On December 28th, 2025, at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, digital rights activist Cory Doctorow delivered a speech that should command the attention of every European Patriot. In it, he identified the quiet existence of an economic weapon of mass creative destruction — one that has been lying dormant in the European Union for years. Properly wielded, it could strike at the heart of Silicon Valley’s dominance while opening a genuine path toward European digital sovereignty and massive wealth creation. Ironically, Trumpist economic policy has already pulled the safety pin for us. In his address, “[A Post-American, Enshittification-Resistant Internet](https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet)” Doctorow argued for the complete abolition of so-called anti-circumvention laws — the legal shackles that bind much of our digital infrastructure to American corporate control. At first glance, this proposal may sound technical or even mundane. That apparent modesty is precisely its power. ## I. What are anti-circumvention laws actually? But before we get ahead ourselves: What are these legal shackles actually?  Anti-circumvention laws are often misunderstood as a narrow technical appendix to copyright law. In reality, they are something far more radical: they criminalise control over property after sale. At their core, these laws prohibit bypassing “technical protection measures” — digital locks embedded in software or hardware—even when no copyright infringement or any other illegal action occurs. It gives companies a way to make it illegal  to access, modify, repair, or interoperate with a device you lawfully own, by adding a digital lock. In the United States, this regime is embodied in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In the European Union, it was imported almost verbatim via Article 6 of the 2001 Copyright Directive. The effects are profound: - You may own the hardware, but you do not control it. - You may possess the device, but you cannot decide how it functions. - You may lawfully purchase a product, yet be criminalised for understanding or modifying it. - You may not commercially modify, repair, or resell altered hardware or software. For example: you may legally buy an iPhone, but if you replace iOS with a custom Android or Linux distribution and sell the modified device, you are committing a crime in many jurisdictions. You own the phone, but not the freedom to decide what it does. Anti-circumvention law thus creates a regime of perpetual vendor control — a legal structure in which manufacturers retain power over products indefinitely after sale. Although framed as copyright protection, the real function of these laws is the defence of specific business models — above all, those of American platform monopolies. As Doctorow puts it, they criminalise “contempt of business model.” The damage goes far beyond the criminalisation of individual tinkering. Entire third party business models — repair, modification, interoperability, improvement — are suffocated at birth. Innovation is chilled, competition suppressed, and dependency entrenched. Consumers cannot meaningfully repair their devices, secure their privacy, or adapt technology to their needs. For Europe, this represents a stark departure from our own legal traditions. It is arguably incompatible with the principle of exhaustion or first-sale doctrine embedded in many European legal systems (for example, Germany’s Erschöpfungsgrundsatz). In a sane legal order, once a product is sold, the manufacturer’s control ends. This is also, why in recent years European lawmakers tried in many ways to curb the irrationalities emerging from Article 6, e.g. by re-legalising sideloading with the Digital Markets Act; for which the EU is getting attacked fiercely by Silicon Valley and the US Government. Yet still: Why should a European citizen be legally compelled to obey software restrictions imposed by a vendor after purchase? Why should Apple decide which software may run on a phone someone already owns? And why should the law punish those who bypass such control when no other crime is committed? There has never been a convincing justification for criminalising the mere act of circumventing a technical protection measure in itself. ## II. The Broken Deal: How Trump’s Tariffs Voided the Contract If anti-circumvention laws are so hostile to consumer rights and innovation, why do we have them at all? The answer is decades of Silicon Valley lobbying backed by American state power. Through trade agreements, diplomatic pressure, and regulatory harmonisation, the United States coerced much of the world into adopting these digital handcuffs. The implicit bargain was simple: Surrender your digital sovereignty. Allow our corporations to lock down your devices and ecosystems. In exchange, you receive access to the American market and protection under the American security umbrella. Europe accepted digital subordination in return for tariff-free trade. That deal is now dead. As Doctorow observes, the Trump administration is systematically dismantling the global trade agreements that once justified these concessions. The United States is no longer a reliable partner; it is an openly mercantilist power. Tariffs are imposed on allies regardless of compliance or loyalty. If Washington is prepared to burn down the house of free trade anyway, why should Europe continue enforcing laws that exist primarily to protect American tech monopolies? Why should we maintain statutes that damage our own economy, restrict our citizens’ freedoms, and serve foreign corporate interests? The United States has demonstrated that it is no longer a neutral platform for global commerce, but a weaponised hegemon prepared to disable the infrastructure of any state that defies it. The contract has been unilaterally breached. Europe is under no moral — or strategic — obligation to honour it. ## III. Dependency as a security risk. By enforcing these laws, the EU is acting as the pro bono enforcer for Silicon Valley. We protect the right of American corporations to transform any software and hardware, from tractors, phones, ventilators, to servers, into legal no-go zones — spaces where European repair, innovation, and sovereignty are criminalised.  This dependency is not merely a matter of economics; it is a loaded gun pointed at the heart of our national security.  We have already seen how access to digital infrastructure can be weaponised. Not only are American Secret Services conducting mass surveillance of citizens world wide. We have already witnessed the bricking of essential services as a geopolitical weapon. When the [International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for an ally of the United States, namely Netanyahu, they suddenly lost access to their Microsoft Outlook accounts and email archives, because Microsoft locked them](https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-email-block-a-wake-up-call-for-digital-sovereignty-10387383.html) out — a clear warning shot that our institutions run on American servers at Washington's pleasure.  Meanwhile, the US CLOUD Act allows American authorities to compel US companies to hand over data stored on European soil, rendering our privacy protections effectively null and void. Which did not stop our transatlanticist elites to still double down on American dependency until recently - as in the [beginning of 2025, the German Armed Forces gave the contract to built their cloud infrastructure to Google.](https://www.heise.de/news/Bundeswehr-setzt-auf-Google-Cloud-10397414.html) As America openly wages economic war, and even threatens with military violence to annex European territory in Greenland, this dependency on American Tech infrastructure is a catastrophe. We must urgently transition to a sovereign "Eurostack" of open, locally hosted infrastructure. However, the tragedy is that we are in many ways legally prevented from leaving.  Anti-circumvention laws criminalise the creation of the necessary migration tools — the scrapers and interoperability layers — needed to regain the control over our own hard- and software from American remote control; allowing us to run the software we want and modify it and also its hardware in the ways we need. As Cory Doctorow aptly warns, building a sovereign European cloud without repealing these laws is "like building housing for East Germans in West Berlin" without tearing down the wall first; we are building a destination we are legally forbidden from reaching. Right now, most of our digital infrastructure is in American hands - and we put legal locks around it, that prevent us from transitioning the infrastructure into our hands. ## IV. The Great Wealth Transfer: Tithing to the Tech Lords Breaking the legal locks of anti-circumvention laws would not only reestablish consumer rights and allow us to regain digital sovereignty - it would also prevent a massive draining of talents and capital from our continent. The economic cost of obedience is staggering. By maintaining these laws, we facilitate the extraction of billions of euros from our economy. For example: Apple uses these laws to ban alternative app stores, allowing them to extract a 30% tax on every App Purchase made on an iPhone. This is a direct levy on European developers and consumers, siphoned off to California. Imagine: A German buys an iPhone and then he buys an App to install on that iPhone he owns from an Austrian Developer - why should Apple receive 30% of that transaction?  John Deere uses digital locks to prevent farmers from repairing their own tractors. A European farmer is forced to pay exorbitant fees to authorized dealers just to type an unlock code into a console. This transfers wealth from our rural heartlands to American shareholders. This is not innovation. It is rent extraction enforced by criminal law. ## V. The Opportunity:  Europe a Disenshittification Nation Europe’s response to American hostility should not be retaliatory tariffs that punish our own citizens. The real pressure point lies elsewhere: the high-margin business models of American tech giants. The EU could credibly threaten—or unilaterally repeal—Article 6 of the Copyright Directive and abolish anti-circumvention laws. The impact would be immense. History shows that the most successful tech hubs often grew from legal grey zones where innovation trumped restrictive anti-circumvention laws. Shenzhen became the global hardware capital through Gongkai — a culture of open sharing and remixing electronics without regard for Western IP. Similarly, Poland's gaming giant CD Projekt Red emerged from the unregulated markets of the 1990s. Repealing these laws would create the "primordial soup" for a European tech renaissance, allowing a new wave of innovators to seize the means of computation. Startups could legally sell modifications and jailbreaks to US tech to make it safer, more private, and more user-friendly. This would allow the creation of a value chain, from apps and add-ons and mods to finally own productions, paving the way out of dependency. A value chain would emerge—from mods and add-ons to fully sovereign production. A Necessary Clarification: This is neither a call to legalise piracy nor cracking. Distributing pirated films remains punishable under copyright law. Hacking into foreign systems remains punishable under cybercrime statutes. The idea is simply to abolish the specific penalty for the use, the creation and the selling of bypasses to technical locks on devices you already own, provided no other laws are broken. It should be legal to hack our own systems to take back our digital sovereignty! By doing so, we would invite the world's engineers to Europe to build a "Post-American Internet": Economic Sovereignty: European firms could legally reverse-engineer the restrictions on our PCs and phones put there by Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, creating hardware dongles and software that allow users to bypass the App Stores and ecosystems. We could keep those billions within the European economy. Global Repair Hub: We could become the sanctuary for jailbreaking agricultural and medical equipment, selling the tools to fix John Deere tractors to farmers around the world — including to American farmers betrayed by their own government. Strategic Autonomy: We could build a "Eurostack"—a sovereign, open-source digital infrastructure that is auditable, free from backdoors, and immune to Washington's kill-switches or espionage. ## VI. Conclusion The United States has made its choice. It has abandoned the trust required to sustain its digital hegemony. The only thing keeping American tech monopolies in place are laws our own governments enforce on their behalf. Europe must now choose. We can remain a digital colony, enforcing the rules of a master who no longer even pretends to respect us. Or we can break the digital shackles. Cory Doctorow is right: the door is open a crack. The keys are already in our hands. The question is whether we have the courage to turn them. Join Ave Europa. For a Europe that fears no master. [https://ave-europa.eu](https://ave-europa.eu) --- This is a personal opinion piece and does not necessarily reflect official Ave Europa policy. While we at Ave Europa may not share Mr. Doctorow's political origins, I personally, as a former Libertarian (2018, 2019 .... it was a phase, we all have been teenagers once), cannot, but find myself in quite a lot of agreement with his central thesis. He correctly identifies that the door to a sovereign, post-American digital future may have been unlocked —  and that we should grab this opportunity, to liberate Europe, to give liberty, rights, wealth and digital sovereignty to our European citizens. This essay is inspired by his insights and advocates that we seize this rare historical opportunity. The crumbling American Empire has inadvertently given us the keys to our own chains; we must simply have the will to turn them. **