But with Danish media in deepening financial difficulty and shedding jobs as Google’s owner, Alphabet, rides a boom in revenues and profits that has driven its market value to $4 trillion, it’s an unequal battle.
“They can afford to wait us out,” said Troels Jørgensen, the digital director for Politiken, speaking from the 140-year-old paper’s namesake building in the heart of Copenhagen.
The media’s collective boycott is the most visible front in a wider rebellion. Across the Nordic nation of 6 million — from the classrooms where “Google soldiers” are being trained on Chromebooks to the back-end servers of the welfare state — a backlash against the encroachment of U.S. technology is boiling over. In a country that once prided itself on being a digital front-runner, the mood has shifted from enthusiasm to defiance.
“We were very happy with the U.S. — we know the language, we watch all the U.S. movies,” said Pernille Tranberg, director of the think tank Data Ethics. “Even before Trump that was changing.”
Denmark has unwittingly become the world’s laboratory for the concept of “tech sovereignty.”
As one of the most digitized societies on earth, Denmark’s attempt to decouple from Silicon Valley offers a foretaste of the struggles that await the rest of the European Union. The outcome of this experiment will answer a critical question for the continent: Can a small nation effectively regulate the world's most powerful companies, or will the price of resistance — lost revenue, outdated tech, and digital isolation — force them to bend the knee?