European Parliament sets French engine Qwant as default search, dropping Google in sovereignty push
Google $GOOGL has lost the European Parliament as a search customer. As of June 4, the Parliament set France's Qwant as the default search engine across the browsers used by its 720 lawmakers and staff, citing digital sovereignty and data protection. Users can still switch back.
The European Parliament has changed which search engine sits behind the screens of its 720 lawmakers and thousands of staff. As of June 4, the browsers used inside the institution, Microsoft Edge $MSFT and Mozilla Firefox, default to Qwant, a French search engine, rather than to Google $GOOGL. The change was applied automatically, and staff can still switch to another engine if they prefer. According to the Parliament, the decision rests on digital sovereignty and the protection of personal data. Qwant presents itself as a privacy-focused service that does not track users, does not build advertising profiles, and does not rely on third-party cookies. For an institution handling sensitive legislative and political material, those characteristics are the stated reason for the switch. The move arrived in the same period that the European Commission presented a tech sovereignty package covering chips, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, described in connection with a Buy and Use European approach to public technology purchasing. Both steps share a common thread: reducing the European Union's reliance on technology supplied by US-incorporated companies. In practical terms, the Parliament represents one institutional user base, so the direct effect on Google's traffic is limited. What is documented is the policy itself: a default setting, applied across official browsers, that points the EU's directly elected chamber toward a European search provider over the dominant American one.