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By Audrey Hingle —

Europe's Digital Sovereignty: Is the Political Will Ever Coming?

Eight years ago, Europe declared digital sovereignty a priority, but is it now out of reach?

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Photo by Charlotte Harrison / Unsplash

By Tara Tarakiyee, public interest technologist and a supporter of human rights, free and open internet, and open source software.

"Europe must acquire technological sovereignty," Emmanuel Macron declared at the Sorbonne in September 2017. "We must think of Europe as a power that wants to remain sovereign in a world of three empires—the United States, China, and ourselves." His words set the tone that digital sovereignty would be a focus of Europe from that moment on. The concept gained further institutional momentum when Germany's 2020 EU Council Presidency established "digital sovereignty as a leitmotiv of European digital policy."

If we check in eight years later, we get quotes with a slightly different tone. "If it comes to digital sovereignty," admitted Claudia Plattner, head of Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, "then you have to be honest with yourself. Digital sovereignty for Germany is unreachable for the time being." Plattner speaks as a responsible security official managing current realities. "Some of the big companies, especially from the US, already have a ten-year head start," she noted.

Now this is a valid statement coming from her position, yet when European leaders let bureaucratic pragmatism set the ceiling rather than the floor, they expose a profound failure of strategic imagination. Only 16% of European tech and policy leaders believe the continent will achieve digital sovereignty within five years, according to a recent survey by Wire.

Then you look at the actions of European institutions. In 2024, while again declaring digital sovereignty a continental priority, the European Union eliminated all €27 million in Next Generation Internet (NGI) funding. The NGI program had supported 1,400+ projects over five years, with 57% offering alternatives to US platforms.

The contrast reveals Europe's lost vision. Is this the same continent that created Airbus in 1970, directly challenging Boeing's aerospace monopoly through extraordinary political coordination and massive public investment? The same Europe that built the European Space Agency, developed Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standards, and created CERN's World Wide Web? So how did it get here?

Europe's technological subordination didn't happen through passive colonization from American Big Tech as some recently like to claim, it resulted from decades of deliberate institutional choices that prioritized convenience over sovereignty. The most damaging pattern reveals itself in how Europe systematically underfunded its own alternatives to US tech dominance, even when these projects showed exceptional promise.

The open source funding elimination of 2024 epitomizes European priorities. Despite documented success creating viable alternatives to US platforms, the EU Commission cut Next Generation Internet funding from €27 million to €10 million while eliminating the cascade funding mechanism that supported grassroots innovation. This occurred simultaneously with the launch of the €200 billion InvestAI initiative, which shows that Europe had money for AI ambitions that would largely go to fund American hyperscalers and chip companies, but not for the foundational infrastructure to support them independently.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund faces similar constraints, with only €23 million in funding in 2023 against €114 million in requests, an 80% funding gap. The funding requested covers only a fraction of the actual need in the field of open digital infrastructure, and it addresses maintenance alone, not the creation of new systems. 

This perennial under-investment is more visible when you zoom in on specific alternatives. PeerTube, Europe's decentralized answer to YouTube, operates on €132,000 in NGI grants against total costs of €500,000-600,000. While YouTube generates €23+ billion annually, PeerTube survives on 0.0022% of that revenue. Mastodon, the federated social network, operates with a 10-person team funded entirely by crowdfunding. Nextcloud, the leading open source cloud platform, competes against Microsoft's €50+ billion cloud revenue with a fraction of that budget. Element (Matrix), offering secure, decentralized messaging as an alternative to WhatsApp and Slack, struggles with minimal institutional support despite superior privacy features. Jitsi, providing video conferencing capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic when Zoom dominated headlines, received recognition but insufficient scaling investment.

Hardware sovereignty projects faced even neglect. Companies like Purism, developing the Librem line of privacy-focused laptops and phones with hardware kill switches and open-source firmware, struggled with limited European institutional support despite offering genuine alternatives to surveillance-capable Big Tech devices. Similarly, Fairphone's pioneering work in ethical, repairable smartphones, which address both digital sovereignty and environmental concerns never received sufficient scaling support from European institutions.

European governments and industry chose dependency over development. 92% of European data sits in US clouds. Over 90% of Nordic companies rely on American platforms for basic operations. Six Spanish sectors show complete dependence on US technology, including critical infrastructure like energy and banking. This dependency generates enormous profits for European intermediaries who benefit from the current system. The systems integration market, projected to reach €372 billion by 2033, depends fundamentally on managing rather than eliminating US technological relationships. Major consulting firms like Capgemini and Atos have built practices around connecting American platforms to European enterprises, creating business models that actively resist genuine sovereignty.

These firms now position themselves as digital transformation experts while deepening US dependencies. They recommend Microsoft Azure over Open alternatives, implement Salesforce rather than open CRM solutions, and migrate European organizations to US cloud platforms. Their revenue depends on complexity and vendor relationships that sovereign alternatives would eliminate.

Meanwhile, European research and funding continues to strengthen proprietary competitors. Belgium's IMEC research center, despite €1.034 billion in annual revenue and world-leading semiconductor research, sees 60% of partnerships benefit Big Tech companies. European institutions made these choices because they served immediate interests within existing market structures. Each decision seemed rational in isolation, but collectively they constructed a cage of technological dependence, and combined with a lack of political will and coherent industrial policy, we ended up here.

EuroStack: A Vision Emerges

In February 2025, the Bertelsmann Stiftung published the comprehensive "EuroStack – A European Alternative for Digital Sovereignty" report, commissioned from UCL's Francesca Bria and described by its authors as Europe's "moonshot" moment. The proposal calls for €300 billion in investment over a decade, including a €10 billion Sovereign Technology Fund to develop open-source, federated systems that could genuinely compete with US platforms.

Parallel to EuroStack, Germany has been developing its own national approach with the "Deutschland-Stack" vision. In August 2025, Schleswig-Holstein published an "Impulspapier" setting guiding principles for "sovereign, interoperable, and Europe-compatible digital infrastructure" mentioned in the federal coalition agreement. The Deutschland-Stack emphasizes open standards, transparent development, and European cooperation, representing Germany's attempt to create practical national infrastructure that aligns with broader European sovereignty goals.

The European Commission's Digital Building Blocks team has explicitly embraced EuroStack language, arguing their existing programs "can help bring EuroStack's vision of European digital sovereignty to life." Multiple Commission directorates are engaging with EuroStack submissions on procurement reform, strategic foresight, and single market strategy, representing broader institutional engagement than previous sovereignty efforts achieved.

Yet the proposal faces familiar obstacles that killed earlier initiatives. The €300 billion price tag dwarfs existing EU programs, compared  to the entire Digital Europe Programme budget of €7.5 billion over seven years.

Critics worry about repeating past failures. Competition economist Cristina Caffarra, one of EuroStack's own contributors, has previously characterized EU digital sovereignty efforts as "useless" when not backed by serious industrial policy. The same consulting firms and systems integrators that profit from US dependency are now positioning themselves as EuroStack implementers, potentially capturing and diluting the initiative.

The Buy European Trap

The make-or-break question is whether this iteration can overcome the structural forces that killed previous sovereignty initiatives. Unlike Gaia-X, which became diluted when US companies were permitted to participate, EuroStack explicitly calls for "Buy European" procurement rules and European-first policies. But implementation requires coordination between member states unwilling to pool digital capabilities, massive public investment during fiscal constraints, and confrontation with powerful European business interests that profit from current arrangements.

While "Buy European" policies appear to offer a direct path to digital sovereignty, and may even be appealing as a way to support "open" approaches, it is a dangerous shortcut and it risks creating new dependencies. Protectionist approaches often produce inferior solutions that survive through regulatory protection rather than technical merit.

The telecommunications sector offers a cautionary example. European governments spent decades protecting national champions like France Télécom, Deutsche Telekom, and Telecom Italia through procurement preferences and regulatory barriers. The result was fragmented, incompatible systems that lagged behind global standards. Only when European telecoms faced genuine competition did innovation accelerate, leading to breakthroughs like GSM that succeeded globally through technical excellence rather than regulatory protection.

More fundamentally, protectionist approaches contradict the open standards and interoperability that make genuine digital sovereignty possible. True sovereignty emerges from systems that resist control by any single actor, which should include European governments and companies. Procurement preferences that favor European vendors risk creating new forms of technological lock-in, where European organizations become dependent on European monopolists instead of American ones.

Early signals suggest familiar patterns may be emerging. National governments express enthusiasm for digital sovereignty while maintaining existing procurement practices that favor US vendors. European consulting firms tout their EuroStack expertise while continuing to recommend American platforms to clients. Industry associations support sovereignty initiatives in principle while lobbying against specific policies that might disrupt profitable dependency relationships.

The more dangerous risk is that "Buy European" becomes a substitute for the hard work of building genuinely superior alternatives. Political leaders may declare victory by mandating European procurement while European users continue seeking better foreign solutions through unofficial channels. This creates the worst of both worlds: official digital sovereignty that exists only on paper while real dependency deepens underground.

True success requires recognizing that genuine digital sovereignty cannot simply recreate Big Tech with European characteristics or rely on regulatory protection to shield inferior European alternatives. Any lasting solution must be built on open standards and interoperable architectures that prevent new monopolistic gatekeepers from emerging, whether American, European, or Chinese.

Beyond Digital Empires

Europe's approach to digital sovereignty has been fundamentally limited by imperial thinking that views technological independence as a zero-sum competition between "digital empires." Macron's original formulation of "three empires" reflects the same extractive mindset that characterizes current Big Tech dominance. Real sovereignty requires abandoning this framework in favor of collaborative networks based on shared standards and mutual benefit.

Countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia face identical challenges of technological dependency and seek alternatives to both American and Chinese digital hegemonies. Brazil's struggles with US platform dominance mirror those of Germany. India's efforts to develop indigenous payment systems parallel European sovereign technology initiatives. African nations seeking to avoid Chinese digital colonialism through Belt and Road infrastructure projects share European concerns about technological sovereignty.

Europe's path to digital freedom requires working with the Global Majority as equal partners rather than passive markets for European solutions. This means supporting genuinely federated and open systems, rather than replacing American gatekeepers with European ones. Such collaboration requires abandoning colonial mindsets that view other continents as implementation territories for European technology. Instead of exporting European digital solutions, genuine sovereignty emerges through co-developing interoperable systems that serve local needs while maintaining global connectivity.

This approach offers strategic advantages beyond moral considerations. Network effects that currently benefit US platforms could instead support European alternatives if those alternatives serve global rather than purely European markets. A federated social network with users across six continents becomes more valuable to European users than a European-only platform competing against global US alternatives.

Protectionist "Buy European" policies would undermine this global approach by creating artificial barriers that fragment the very networks Europe needs to compete effectively. Even if procurement preferences protect European digital infrastructure and meet regulatory requirements, global users will choose platforms based on functionality, not because politicians mandate them. The result could be a "sovereign" European internet that becomes increasingly isolated and irrelevant as global digital networks evolve elsewhere.

IX's Mallory Knodel on Power Station Podcast

On a recent episode of the Power Station podcast, Mallory discusses how the internet has become central to politics, culture, and daily life, while social media companies profit from disinformation. She asks: What if we looked at the internet and social media apps not as the final arbiter of politics and culture but as a tool we can shape and control together? What if the way these platforms are built helped protect human rights and support democracy?

Mallory talks about her work with the Social Web Foundation to make this vision real by advancing the Fediverse and ActivityPub as open, community-driven alternatives that support intentional, equitable, and creative online connection.

Listen Now

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This week in our Signal community, we got talking about:

Google’s new requirement that developers verify their identities even when distributing Android apps outside the Play Store. Google says this adds a “crucial layer of accountability to the ecosystem” and is designed to “protect users from malware and financial fraud,” but it raises questions about privacy, surveillance, and whether these kinds of checks are even effective in the first place, given malicious actors could just use stolen identities. Is this a step toward censorship in the West, echoing practices we usually critique elsewhere? Could the EU’s Digital Markets Act eventually weigh in on this kind of gatekeeping? And at a bigger-picture level, will this kind of behavior reignite the case for a real open-source mobile operating system? Maybe it’s time to dust off the Firefox Phone.

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