The European Parliament switches to Qwant: real sovereignty or a layer on top of Microsoft Bing?

From 4 June 2026, the European Parliament officially replaces Google Search with the French engine Qwant as the default tool on its internal workstations. The switch covers every query typed into the address bar of Firefox and Microsoft Edge, for the 720 MEPs and the thousands of assistants and administrative staff of the institution. Presented as a milestone for tech sovereignty, the gesture is politically consistent. And, on paper, it speaks to me a great deal: I spend my days hosting business applications in France, out of reach of the Cloud Act.

Except that, if you scratch the surface, the story is more twisted. Qwant is regularly described, including in technical reports, as a mere “layer” on top of Microsoft Bing. In other words: Google's data collection would be replaced by Microsoft's. Here is what the record really says, and the lesson I draw from it for your own infrastructure choices.

What actually happens on 4 June 2026 #

This is not a cosmetic update. When an MEP or an assistant types a query into their browser's address bar, it is now Qwant, an engine based in Europe, that answers, and no longer Google. The official justification comes down to two words: sovereignty and confidentiality of communications. The idea is to stop the searches of an institution that makes laws, sometimes on sensitive subjects, from passing through American infrastructure.

And the switch does not come alone. It is part of an openly sovereignty-minded timetable in Brussels: the launch of a European office suite (“Euro-Office”) on 9 June 2026, the termination of the Microsoft framework contract by the State of Bavaria during 2026, the examination of the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) regulation and the prospect of a Chips Act 2.0. I described this underlying movement in my article on the Tech Sovereignty Package: read the article

Why it is a real sovereignty issue, not a matter of comfort #

The heart of the problem is the extraterritorial reach of American law. Two instruments are in question: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the CLOUD Act of 2018. They allow American authorities to require a company domiciled in the United States to hand over electronic data, including when that data is stored on servers located in Europe. This is exactly the argument I keep hammering home to my clients: an American hosting provider remains subject to the Cloud Act even if the data centre is in Frankfurt or Paris.

And an MEP's search queries are not trivial. They reveal areas of interest, legislative work in progress, sometimes confidential files. As long as Google Search is the default engine, these signals effectively fall within the scope of those laws. Choosing a European engine is an attempt to protect that informational integrity. The intention is right.

The catch: Qwant is largely a layer on top of Bing #

Since its launch in 2013, Qwant has run into a wall: building and maintaining its own index of the worldwide web requires resources almost equivalent to those of Google or Microsoft. Two audits by the DINUM (the French interministerial IT directorate) carried out in July and September 2019 showed that Qwant did have an index of its own, but one unable to handle users' queries relevantly on its own. In practice, Qwant long behaved like a meta-search engine, relying almost entirely on Microsoft Bing's APIs for its web and image results.

On top of this technical dependency comes an advertising marriage: to generate revenue, Qwant joined the Microsoft Bing Ads network as early as 2016. In concrete terms, for each search, Qwant sends Bing pseudonymised data: truncated IP address (IP/24), the browser's User-Agent, and the query keywords. This is presented as secure, but these transfers were at first made without users' explicit consent, which dented its image as a “privacy champion”.

The Qwant v Microsoft dispute (2025): dependency in broad daylight #

That dependency ended up being costly. After Microsoft decided on a spectacular rise in search API prices in 2023, Qwant, in financial difficulty, filed a complaint on the merits with the French competition authority, together with a request for urgent interim measures against Microsoft. The French engine accused Redmond of abusing a dominant position and of asymmetric economic dependency, including:

• Service degradation: Bing result quality deliberately reduced to the detriment of European engines
• Exclusivity and tied selling: advertising exclusivity clauses, and access to organic results tied to Microsoft's monetisation products
• Obstacles to AI: contractual barriers preventing Qwant from using syndicated results to train its own language models

On 27 November 2025, the competition authority rejected the complaint and the interim measures in their entirety. The grounds are instructive about the structure of the market: it found that Microsoft did not hold an unavoidable dominant position in syndication (Google retaining an overwhelming dominance that puts pressure on Bing), and that economic dependency was not established: other providers exist (Google, Brave, Mojeek) and Qwant has its own indexing capacity, strengthened by a recent European alliance. Translation: not dependent enough to be protected, not independent enough to do without it overnight.

The real good news: the Staan index #

This is where the case becomes interesting for anyone who believes, as I do, that sovereignty is decided in the infrastructure and not in a browser setting. At the end of 2024, Qwant and the German engine Ecosia set up a 50/50 joint venture, European Search Perspective (EUSP), based in Paris. Its mission: to deploy Staan, a sovereign web search index, independent of Google and Microsoft, hosted exclusively within the European Union. Here is how a query travels today in this hybrid configuration:

        European Parliament (MEPs + assistants)
                        │
        default queries via Firefox / Edge
                        ▼
                   QWANT engine
                        │
               routing of search queries
             ┌──────────┴──────────┐
             ▼                     ▼
   “STAAN” index (EU)       Microsoft BING (US)
   ~50% of FR queries       complex queries,
   ~30% of DE queries       secondary languages,
   (2026)                   specific images

In 2026, independence is progressing but remains uneven: about 50% of the results displayed by Qwant in France come directly from Staan, against nearly 30% for Ecosia in Germany. For everything else (complex searches, minority European languages, certain images), Qwant and Ecosia continue to rely on Bing. EUSP's founders put the cost of completing a comprehensive, multilingual pan-European index at around €50 million, and argue that administrations should adopt these engines by default on a large scale: the advertising revenue captured would then fund the index's viability. This is where the European Parliament's switch makes full sense: it is less an end point than a source of fuel.

Google, Qwant, Bing: who exposes what #

If you put the three engines side by side, this is what really changes from the point of view of an administration concerned about its data:

• Extraterritorial exposure (FISA 702 / CLOUD Act): total for Google and Bing (US companies), low for Qwant since hosting is in the EU, even if the metadata sent to Bing Ads remains a grey area
• Advertising tracking and third-party cookies: intensive profiling at Google, targeting via Microsoft services for Bing, and no long-term behavioural tracking at Qwant
• Index governance: Alphabet (US) for Google, Microsoft (US) for Bing, shared EUSP control with a gradual transition to Staan (EU) for Qwant
• AI by default: systematic generative summaries at Google, built-in Copilot/GPT at Bing, optional integration and a classic interface at Qwant

Friction for users (and why it matters) #

A sovereign transition only holds if staff accept it day to day. Yet Qwant offers no equivalent of Google's “Knowledge Panel”: no business listing, reviews, directions or opening hours directly on the results page. For a parliamentary assistant or a logistics department, that means more clicks on external links for routine secretarial tasks. The lost convenience is real.

There is also a language barrier: Staan is decent in French and German, much less so in the other official languages. Feedback from users in Northern and Eastern Europe points to poorly relevant local results in Danish, Finnish or Polish without very precise geographical keywords. Predictable consequence: some teams get round the directive by changing the default engine, or by going to Google manually. A sovereignty policy that ignores usability sabotages itself.

What I take from it, as a craftsman of sovereign hosting #

The Parliament's gesture is a good political signal, but above all it illustrates the gap between intention and infrastructure. Changing a browser's default engine takes ten minutes of GPO. Regaining real technological independence means funding and maintaining a European index for years. Sovereignty is not a setting, it is a low-level layer: where the servers run, who can be compelled by which law, who owns the index.

That is exactly the logic I apply when I host my clients' applications: a cluster in France, out of reach of the Cloud Act, with no hidden dependency on an American hyperscaler (our sovereign hosting). Same principle when I replace Google Analytics with self-hosted Matomo to avoid letting a US tracker back in through the side door; I talk about it here: read the article

The real question to ask, for an SME as for the Parliament, is not “is this a European tool?” but “what lies beneath the top layer?”. Do the exercise on your own stack: your hosting provider, your CDN, your analytics tool, your AI component. How many actually depend on infrastructure subject to American law?

In summary #

The European Parliament's move to Qwant is a sincere and useful step, but it will not on its own make Europe a sovereign technology power, as long as the backbone remains dependent on Microsoft Bing. The way out of dependency has a name, the Staan index, and a price: funding, industry and time. If you are wondering where your own business is exposed, and how to bring back what needs to be brought back onto French infrastructure, that is precisely the kind of scoping I do with my clients in Strasbourg and remotely across France.

Sources #

• Euractiv, “European Parliament to ditch Google for European alternative”: https://www.euractiv.com/news/european-parliament-to-ditch-google-for-european-alternative/
• Cybernews, “EU Parliament drops Google for Qwant”: https://cybernews.com/tech/european-parliament-default-search-engine-google-qwant/
• Developpez.com, “The EU Parliament about to drop Google Search in favour of Qwant” (in French): https://web.developpez.com/actu/383828/Le-Parlement-de-l-UE-en-passe-de-delaisser-Google-Search-au-profit-d-un-moteur-de-recherche-francais-Des-rapports-citent-Qwant-que-des-rapports-designent-comme-une-surcouche-de-Microsoft-Bing/
• Boursorama / AFP, “The European Parliament will drop Google in favour of a French search engine” (in French, 03/06/2026): https://www.boursorama.com/bourse/actualites-amp/le-parlement-europeen-va-abandonner-google-au-profit-d-un-moteur-de-recherche-francais-dans-le-cadre-de-ses-efforts-en-faveur-de-la-souverainete-technologique-ce172adf391978a165b30a95c03b3ace
• Autorité de la concurrence, rejection of Qwant's complaint against Microsoft (27/11/2025): https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/en/press-release/search-syndication-and-online-advertising-sectors-autorite-rejects-complaint-merits
• Wikipedia (EN), Qwant: 2019 DINUM audits, Bing Ads integration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
• European Search Perspective (EUSP), official website: https://www.eu-searchperspective.com/
• Qwant / BetterWeb, “Ecosia and Qwant join forces to develop European search index”: https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/
• Cybernews, “European Google alternatives urge governments to back €50m search index”: https://cybernews.com/tech/european-google-ecosia-qwant-eur50m-search-index/
• Ifri, “(Extra)territoriality of data: what sovereignty for Europe?” (in French): https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/ifri_badaoui_norodom_extraterritorialite_des_donnees_en_europe_2026.pdf