The Internet industries of America may just have inadvertently had their hats handed to them by the military industrial complex. Now it’s up to Europe to provide an alternative to the surveillance state.

Almost all of the major Internet industry giants are based in the United States. The reasons for this are historical and economical. The tradition of strong entrepreneurship practiced in the US since their inception, mixed with their purchasing power and history of acquiring any sufficiently profitable venture or fascinating technology from abroad, has put the US into a prime position to be the global leader in provision of Internet services.

That may just have ended. While US dominance over the roughly $11 trillion/year global Internet services market is still unchallenged, the damage that the revelations made about NSA’s vast global surveillance scheme may stymie their growth and perhaps even turn them into a localized recession in coming months and years.

The reason for this is Europe. While some Europeans are becoming increasingly comfortable with the notion of living in a surveillance state, most people on the European mainland still grow up hearing stories of totalitarian dictatorships, wars, genocides, and the Holocaust, and have a natural inclination to detest the notion of secret police. As more is learned of the US’s secret spying games - aided in part, it seems, by their English counterparts – outrage boils thickly in countries like France and Germany, where despite highly open and inclusive societies in some senses, the notions of privacy as practiced in the United States have often been thought of as quaint. While modern discourse on privacy is dominated by the philosophical foundations of the 4th Amendment, a slightly different, somewhat more subtle understanding of privacy reigns in European discourse, with an annoyingly elusive definition.

Over coming months and years, the US government’s betrayal of the people of the world will spur a new industry in Europe, not aimed necessarily at pure technological innovation, but rather simply creating secure, privacy-respecting alternatives to the software services provided by the US based companies that can no longer be trusted. We will see Czech and Hungarian startups bringing out new search engines and Croatian and Polish companies developing secure e-mail services. We’ll undoubtedly see surveillance-resistant chat software coming out of Austria and global map databases being developed in Estonia. Or something like that.

This is not to say that Europe is ready to take on such a massive task. ...