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Inside Denmark’s struggle to break up with Silicon Valley
From a media blockade to “nationalizing” government software, Denmark has become a laboratory for resisting U.S. Big Tech. But is the price of sovereignty too high?

January 13, 2026 1:01 pm CET
By Jacob Parry
COPENHAGEN — For Denmark’s media, it’s the last stand.

As news publications across Europe signed licensing deals with U.S. tech giants like Meta and Google to keep traffic flowing, the Danish press has emerged as an outlier among its European peers.

Instead of cutting individual deals, the country’s publishers formed a common front, demanding a higher price for the use of their content in online products from search to AI chatbots.

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.”

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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small nation effectively regulate the world's most powerful companies, or will the price of resistance — lost revenue, outdated tech, and digital isolation — force them to bend the knee?

Here is how the battle lines are drawn.

Divide and conquer
The resistance began with a specific fear: that Big Tech would pick off publishers one by one, destroying the local ecosystem before the ink on any contract could dry.

In response, the Danish media unionized.

Getting state broadcasters and private media into the same trench was a diplomatic and legal high-wire act. | Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The Danish Press Collective Management Organization (DPCMO), formed in 2021, now represents what CEO Karen Rønde calls a “99 percent mandate” of the entire industry. It is a fragile but sweeping coalition that spans scrappy digital startups and niche magazines to the public service broadcaster.

“We were very aware that Denmark is a small country,” Rønde said. “If we should have a chance, we need to stay united.”

Getting state broadcasters and private media into the same trench was a diplomatic and legal high-wire act. “There was some distrust between old media and new media,” she said of the coalition between publishers that used to fight each other for every subscriber and ad krone.

But the alternative was worse: “We feared that Google would come and split the industry,” said Rønde, describing what she called the search giant’s “divide and conquer” playbook.

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The stakes are existential. This is no longer just a business dispute over copyright fees; it is a battle for the information layer of the state. “The interest here is not just about fair remuneration,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s about democracy. It’s about a free press.”

A spokesperson for Google pointed to an interim deal signed with the DPCMO in 2023 that allowed publishers to start receiving payment for article snippets used in search while leaving more contentious issues like AI training and text mining to a long-term deal. The parties have remained locked in negotiations ever since.

Black box negotiations
Despite the united front, the talks have hit a wall. For the Danish representatives, entering the negotiation room has been a lesson in powerlessness.

One Danish publisher, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations with several tech giants, said that those willing to talk were polite but immovable, and that they hid behind opaque data and foreign headquarters.

Rønde described the “Kafkaesque” experience of negotiating with local representatives who appear to have no actual authority.

Some American firms have snubbed the Danes entirely, said the publisher, pointing to the frosty reaction they had received from the cohort of American AI superstar firms have emerged in the past 18 months.

The DPCMO is suing OpenAI for breach of copyright after the firm walked away from negotiations, in what Rønde described as a decision to snub the Danish market. As for the discussions with Google, two sides remain “very far” from each other on price, a gap widened by a fundamental philosophical disagreement, according to the Danish publishing alliance.

In 2024, Google ran a set of tests of user interest in news content in Denmark and several other countries, concluding that removing such content had “no measurable impact” on search ad revenue.

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Those findings — along with the testing itself—have come under harsh criticism from Danish lawmakers.

The DPCMO is suing OpenAI for breach of copyright after the firm walked away from negotiations. | Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Meanwhile, publishers feel they are locked out of the algorithmic logic that determines their fate. “Their data is a black box,” Rønde said. “We don’t understand the methodology. When we ask questions, they do not actually answer them.”

Google maintains that its assessment of the economic value of news in Search was shared transparently and validated by Coalfire, a digital auditing firm.

In a bid to break the deadlock, the DPCMO proposed bringing in third parties to arbitrate the value of the content, suggesting Charles River Associates, a consultancy, or the European Commission itself. Google declined.

The cost of resistance
The publishers say that their industry is bleeding out while they wait for a deal that may never come. That’s backed up by figures from the Reuters Institute’s 2025 digital publishing report, which forecasts that Danish newspaper revenues will fall to around €409 million by 2028 from €594 million in 2023.

“It is a very challenging time,” Rønde said. “In almost every month there are layoffs in Denmark. One of the reasons is because of this unfair competition.”

The situation has created a classic prisoner’s dilemma: A constant fear looms that a cash-strapped publisher will break ranks for a quick payout, shattering the collective bargaining power of the group. “I’m not naïve,” Rønde said. “If OpenAI tomorrow offers a big check to one of the media outlets in Denmark, I would assume they would be tempted.”

'Google soldiers'
Beyond newsrooms, the dependency runs even deeper in the public sector, particularly in education, where U.S. tech firms have effectively captured the infrastructure of the next generation.

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Tranberg of Data Ethics, a nonprofit, paints a bleak picture of the Danish school system. “In schools, it is mainly Microsoft and Google,” she said. “We’re bringing up Google soldiers and Microsoft soldiers.”

Resistance in this sector is sporadic and often crushed by the sheer convenience of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Tranberg highlighted a privacy case where a father fought Google’s presence in schools and won a legal victory. However, the victory was short-lived. “Then the political landscape agreed that Google was OK in schools,” she said, effectively overruling the privacy concerns because the infrastructure was too entrenched to remove.

Google argues that its tools are built with strong safety features that serve as learning aids rather than distractions, and that its “Gemini for Education” service provides enterprise-grade data protection where data is never used to train AI models.

The influence is often invisible but massive. “We had no idea how big the lobby efforts are,” said Tranberg, who co-authored a report in 2024 for a parliamentary committee on the influence that Big Tech firms wield in Denmark.

The report found that the soft power of American firms extends into the machinery of government itself, for example with Microsoft representatives sitting in working groups under the Ministry of Education.

Google argues that its tools are built with strong safety features that serve as learning aids rather than distractions. | Wallace Woon/EPA
In response to questions regarding Microsoft’s presence in government councils, Minister for Higher Education and Science Christina Egelund defended the appointments, stating that members are recruited for their professional qualifications and IT expertise rather than to represent specific corporate interests.

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The sovereign alternative
Denmark isn’t just resisting U.S. tech; it is one of the few nations actively building its own sovereign alternatives for critical infrastructure. Leading the charge is Netcompany, a Danish firm that has managed to displace global giants to run the backbone of the country’s welfare state.

André Rogaczewski, the CEO of Netcompany, describes the success as a proof of concept for European autonomy. “We have been replacing the global players,” he said, citing competition from Accenture and Capgemini. Today, “half of our government systems” are being run by his company.

The crown jewel of this sovereignty is the Digital Post. Denmark has effectively replaced physical mail entirely with a sovereign digital system. “We don’t have physical mailboxes,” Rogaczewski explained. “Every letter going from any bank, any insurance company ... is coming through our system.”

He contrasts this with Germany, where citizens, businesses and bureaucrats are still spending euros to send physical letters, creating a drag on the entire economy.

For Rogaczewski, this isn’t just about privacy or national pride — it’s about economic survival. He argues Europe is placing a “60 percent tariff” on itself through administrative inefficiency.

“Is it optimizing society? No,” he said. “You’re still doing the same thing you did two years ago.”

In Rogaczewski’s view, sovereign digitization is not just a defensive measure against Silicon Valley; it is the only way to maintain the welfare state in the 21st century.