Time for European sovereignty

Developments over the past few months reveal an alarming pattern: The USA can no longer be relied upon as a technology and media partner. Publishers must urgently seek out European alternatives to maintain their independence.

The current warning signs are mounting:

🔹The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is threatening to revoke broadcasters’ licences over alleged fake news regarding the war in Iran.

🔹OpenAI board members are pouring millions into Trump’s SuperPAC.

🔹OpenAI is not only using publisher content as a free training ground for AI, but is now also directly competing for publishers’ advertising budgets via Criteo.

🔹Cloudflare is opening the floodgates to LLM crawlers with a new interface, enabling the mass extraction of data from websites.

These incidents fit seamlessly into the behaviour shown of US giants such as Google, who have unilaterally broken the long-standing “content in exchange for traffic” deal. Tech corporations are exploiting publishers as free suppliers, passing off their content as their own AI-generated responses, and thereby actively threatening our livelihood. To make matters worse, we are now faced with a US administration that, when in doubt, will not hesitate to technically shut down unfavourable media—and whose far-reaching technical influence can directly impact European media as well.

It’s time to break free from this technological stranglehold!

At Upscore, we are deeply committed to this independence: Since 2016, we have been developing European solutions for digital publishers from our base in Hamburg. Data sovereignty is our top priority—entirely cookie-free, hosted in Germany, and a genuine alternative to the data-hungry US giants.

Let’s actively shape the transformation and take control of our technological infrastructure

Christian Hasselbring is responsible for business development at Upscore.