Can Trump disconnect us from the Internet?

Turn off the Internet. Trump already threatened to leave the world without it in his first term. He wanted to hit the Islamic State. He did not fulfill his threat, but the question remains. What power does the occupant of the White House have over the world wide web? The Network of networks does not have an on and off switch, but the United States has a determining power over it. It is the headquarters of the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), a global database, capital for the security of the Network. It is a directory used worldwide to detect and repair software vulnerabilities in the face of foreseeable computer attacks.

The tool that monitors Internet vulnerabilities against cyberattacks depends on the United States. Trump almost shut it down in April

Well, this central element for Internet security was on the verge of ceasing operations in April due to the cuts applied by Elon Musk during his brief tenure in the Department of Governmental Efficiency (Doge), under the government of Donald Trump. In the end, it turns out that one of the great vulnerabilities of the system is not in the digital world but in the physical one, where its operability depends on the US Executive paying its bills. Under pressure from operators, the US cybersecurity agency, CISA, finally released the 20 million dollars needed at the last second, ensuring operations until March 2026. The episode, however, has highlighted the dominance of the United States over the Internet, a global dependence that the unpredictable Trump could wield as blackmail in his next geopolitical card game. Given the Europeans’ dependence on North American technologies – Amazon, Microsoft, and Google dominate 60 percent of the global cloud; social networks, video call systems…–, many companies could close their businesses and millions of people would lose access to their social networks. And this is only the most obvious. Applications like Gmail or mobile contact apps are usually synchronized with the clouds of Apple, Android, Microsoft… That is, no cloud, no contacts. Windows or macOS users could have problems with security updates. With Trump, after all, everything seems possible, points out Candace Rondeaux, analyst at the American think tank New America. “Is Trump instrumentalizing the technology industry to his advantage? It is evident that he will try.”

Meanwhile, the watchword in Europe is clear: the United States can no longer be digitally trusted. Ursula von der Leyen herself, president of the Commission, has ordered her team to “create the requirements for technological sovereignty and resilience.” Part of that independence is the creation of a European portal equivalent to the CVE. If all goes according to plan, starting in the fall of 2026, European manufacturers will be required to send their weaknesses directly to this portal.

“In Europe we have the software, the infrastructure and the know-how to build alternatives ­–says Jan Penfrat, an expert from Edri, an organization defending digital rights–, but replacing an American Google with a European one wouldn’t change anything. We need to build a system that is not guided by the interests of companies or authorities.” It would be paradoxical that Trump, precisely, would end up accelerating the impetus for such an alternative.