Opinion: Europe Must Embrace Blockchain to Avoid "Cybercolonization"

The unfortunate reality is that U.S. tech companies control and exploit large amounts of European data, in turn monopolizing our digital economy.

London, Paris, Berlin, and Zug are popular tech destinations, yet they often get overshadowed or pushed out of the market because of the dominant U.S. players.

As AI specialist Cedric Villani aptly put it, that large foreign companies threaten Europe with "Cybercolonization."

Europe cannot be lax and blindly open its market to foreign platforms who are only creating monopolies.

Even the "Local" companies we think we have working in AI are often very dependent on U.S. tech.

Through the GDPR, Europe and France have already been the first to regulate data privacy, protecting both individual rights and digital sovereignty from foreign tech giants.

Blockchain-which in fact has developed faster in Europe than in Silicon Valley-can take this a step further, and can transform Europe in to the next Crypto Valley.

Rather than having an intermediary between people buying and offering digital goods and services, blockchain allows peer-to-peer marketplaces.

It can be tempting to want to make Europe attractive to some of the biggest names in tech and AI, but we must recognize what we are sacrificing by doing so.

One way to avoid such cybercolonization is to embrace decentralized technologies.