The Switch

I. A Man Does His Job — and Disappears

Nicolas Guillou is a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In November 2024, he signed the arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in the Gaza Strip. That was not a political act — it was the exercise of a judicial mandate on the basis of international law, for which the ICC was established precisely.

The consequence: his accounts on US platforms were blocked. Within a short time, he was excluded from large parts of digital life. In an interview with the French daily newspaper Le Monde, he described his everyday existence as a regression to the 1990s.

This is not an isolated incident. It is structural proof.

A judge acting within the framework of international law is punished by the switch of a private American company — without trial, without right of appeal, without European legal remedy. The punishment is immediate, comprehensive and invisible to the broader public. Those who have not experienced it themselves barely notice it.

II. The Structure Behind the Case

The Guillou case shows what is concretely meant by abstract terms like "digital sovereignty" or "extraterritorial law". It is not about technology. It is about power: the capacity to exclude someone — a person, a company, a state — from economic and communicative life, without that person being able to defend themselves.

This power rests on a simple fact: the digital infrastructure that carries modern life — payment systems, communication platforms, cloud services, search engines — lies overwhelmingly in the hands of American companies. And American companies are subject to American law. That includes the possibility of, on instruction from the US government, blocking services, freezing accounts, denying access — to anyone who uses these services, regardless of where they are located or what nationality they hold.

Over 65 percent of card payments in Europe run through Visa and Mastercard. PayPal dominates digital payments. The major rating agencies are American. Pension funds are invested in American funds. Digital commerce runs on AWS and Microsoft Azure. If America decides that someone should no longer participate in economic life — it can enforce that. Not because it has the right to. But because it controls the infrastructure.

III. Wero — A First Building Block

Against this backdrop, Wero deserves more attention than it currently receives. Wero is a digital payment system developed by the European Payments Initiative — a consortium of European banks from Germany, France, Belgium and other countries. It is based on SEPA Instant Credit Transfer: payments directly from account to account, in real time, without Visa, without Mastercard, without PayPal, without an American company seeing or controlling the transaction.

By September 2025, Wero already had 43.5 million registered users. In February 2026, Bancomat from Italy, Bizum from Spain, SIBS from Portugal and Vipps MobilePay from Scandinavia joined in a cooperation. From 2027, payments in physical retail should also become possible. This would theoretically give Wero access to around 84 percent of the EU population.

What distinguishes Wero from failed predecessors like Giropay: it was conceived as European and cross-border from the outset. Giropay was a national project that ultimately fulfilled none of its promises. Wero is an institution that is growing.

GLS Bank — one of the first German banks to introduce Wero — describes it accurately: for consumers, Wero means more choice, more data protection, less dependency on US corporations. That is not marketing. It is the structural consequence of a system that processes European data on European servers under European law.

IV. What Wero Does Not Solve

Wero is an important first step. But one must see clearly what it does not achieve.

Wero does not solve the Guillou problem. His account at a European bank was probably never at risk — it was the US platforms that blocked him: communication services, social networks, digital identities. That is a different layer of dependency from payments.

Wero is also a consumer instrument. It enables transfers between private individuals and payments in online and retail trade. What it is not: an instrument for sovereign settlement in international trade. BNP Paribas paid eight billion dollars in fines to the US Justice Department in 2014 — not because their private customers used PayPal, but because trade transactions between companies were conducted in US dollars. The SWIFT system that mediated those transactions is nominally Belgian — but factually under considerable US influence. Wero changes none of that.

And Wero does not protect against the actual lever of American economic power: the dollar as the global transaction currency. Whoever uses dollars — and almost everyone does, in almost every significant international transaction — enters US jurisdiction. This mechanism is the core of European financial vulnerability. Wero does not address it.

V. What the Complete Answer Requires

The complete answer to the Guillou case — and to the structural vulnerability it makes visible — requires three levels simultaneously.

First, the consumer level: here Wero does real work. A European payment system that operates without American intermediaries, that processes data on European soil and that is subject to EU jurisdiction, is a structural advance. Wero must grow, must enter physical retail, must become self-evident.

Second, the institutional level: European banks, authorities and critical infrastructure must use communication and payment systems that are not subject to the CLOUD Act. That means open-source communication infrastructure, European cloud services for state data, and — crucially — a European equivalent to SWIFT for institutional transactions, operating under EU jurisdiction.

Third, the strategic level: Europe needs a wholesale payment system — a digital euro that functions not only for citizens, but for foreign trade finance, for commodity transactions, for settlement between central banks. As long as oil, gas, metals and agricultural goods are traded in dollars, every company operating in those markets is subject to American extraterritorial law. That is the actual lever — and it is addressed by neither Wero nor any of the current European initiatives.

The AGORA concept developed on this website describes the architecture of a complete answer: sovereign clearing on European infrastructure. Autonomous European sanctions capacity modelled on the American OFAC. A bridge architecture that communicates with the dollar system and the Chinese yuan system without being controlled by either. And the digital euro as a wholesale instrument that makes Europe a genuine alternative for all those who want to stand under neither US nor Chinese extraterritoriality.

VI. Why the Guillou Case Matters

Nicolas Guillou is not a terrorist, not a criminal, not an enemy of the western community of values. He is a judge who signed an arrest warrant — on the basis of the same international law that western democracies jointly built after the Second World War to prosecute war crimes.

That he can be excluded from digital life for this — not by a court, not by a democratically legitimised decision, but by the switch of a company — says everything about the state of our digital infrastructure. It is not neutral. It is political. And it follows the politics of a single country.

That is the actual problem. Not PayPal. Not Visa. Not AWS. Those are symptoms. The problem is that Europe has not built its own infrastructure on which its values, its jurisprudence and its democratic decisions could materialise.

Wero is a beginning. It is the first step of a long journey. But it is a genuine step — and it deserves support, not as an end in itself, but as a building block of a European digital architecture that is still missing.

Infrastructure is not neutral.
Whoever controls the infrastructure
controls who is permitted to participate
— and who is not.