Today, June 4th, the French Qwant search engine will replace Google as the default search engine on all parliament computers.
During Donald Trump's second presidential term, a concrete concern has arisen in Europe about how dependent Europe is on US technology companies. Firstly, US intelligence legislation allows all data - including data stored in Europe concerning Europeans - to end up in US hands if the data is managed by American companies.
A second clear concern is that due to the political situation in the United States, it can no longer be entirely certain that American services would continue to operate in the future.
However, there are European alternatives for almost all services, if one only dares to try them.
The Parliament wants to set a clear example with its actions that a switch to European solutions is possible. The most important reason, Politico's according to information obtained, is precisely the concern for privacy - that is, whether MEPs' data leaks to the US administration when using American search engines, such as Google or even DuckDuckGo.
You can explore the Qwant search engine at Qwant.com.
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 4 Jun 2026 8:58
