HEILBRONN — When the ancient Chinese wanted to curse someone, says Joschka Fischer onstage in Heilbronn, they’d say: “May you live in interesting times.” The former German foreign minister offers the line as a wry joke to open the conference, referring to the current state of global affairs. But he also argues that these so-called “interesting times” might not be all bad — after all, they could bring new opportunities for Europe.
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Still, anyone attending the TECH conference in Heilbronn might walk away with the feeling that interesting times are most certainly a curse. The event is supposed to be about digital sovereignty — how European companies can free themselves from the grip of U.S. tech giants. That’s a major question for the future. German firms routinely host their data on Amazon or Google servers, communicate via Slack and Zoom, and run their systems on software from Apple or Microsoft.
Yet over the three-day event, one gets the impression that it’s less about taking action — and more about complaining. Specifically, about the European Union’s tech regulations.
“AI regulation is German fear codified into law,” quips Claudia Nemat, head of Technology and Innovation at Deutsche Telekom. Sven Mulder, head of SAP Germany, adds: “One thing we clearly need to change is regulation.” MIT researcher Andrew McAfee puts it more bluntly: Europe’s strict rules make innovation impossible. “You want to be world champions of regulation, but that doesn’t go hand in hand with innovation”, said McAfee.
Bayer CEO Bill Anderson thinks he’s got a solution: scrap the EU’s AI Act entirely and start over. “We should ask the top 10 AI leaders in Europe to rewrite it,” he says. “Then Europe would finally enter the 21st century.”
You want to be world champions of regulation, but that doesn’t go hand in hand with innovation.
Letting the regulated write their own rules — only at a conference like this could such an idea be floated without ridicule.
The event, co-hosted by Handelsblatt and the Schwarz Foundation, gathered tech entrepreneurs, managers, and (mostly male) executives from across Europe. The conference’s tagline: Europe’s cluster of optimism. In theory, optimism is the order of the day. In practice, it seems to mean railing against basic digital protections and hard-won workers’ rights.
But the business leaders and politicians in attendance aren’t just making one major mistake — they’re making two. Or perhaps they know exactly what they’re doing.
What exactly is digital sovereignty?
For starters, the term itself gets thrown around so much that no one stops to explain what it actually means. Rolf Schumann, Chief Digital Officer of the Schwarz Group, at least makes an effort during a panel discussion on how much dependence Europe can afford: “Sovereignty means having the ability to walk away from the negotiating table,” he says.
In other words, sovereignty isn’t about doing everything yourself — it’s about having a real choice.
He illustrates this with an example: Schwarz Group also uses Google Cloud, like many other firms. But they negotiated terms until they ensured that only their organization could access sensitive data. Just in case, they also built an alternative infrastructure on the side.
This point is crucial. Digital sovereignty has become such a buzzword that we often forget to ask: What does it really entail? Should companies sever ties completely and use only European software? Should they minimize U.S. tech usage and tailor exceptions to their needs? Or is sovereignty simply about securing backup options, especially in sensitive areas?
More importantly, how can Europe develop competitive alternatives of its own?
These are pressing questions — but in Heilbronn, few seem interested in answering them. On the same panel, Parliamentary State Secretary Thomas Jarzombek, from the Ministry of Digital Affairs, shifts the blame to Germany’s worker protections, saying they make failure too costly.
Mistake #1: Blaming regulation instead of understanding power
This is the first major fallacy when it comes to digital sovereignty. The constant refrain that German or EU laws are too strict distracts from the real issue.
The kind of negotiation strength Schumann describes doesn’t come from obediently giving tech companies whatever they want. It comes from pushing back — from having demands of your own. To negotiate on equal footing, you need leverage.
Societies benefit when rules and laws protect citizens from corporate overreach. Thanks to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it’s harder (though not impossible) for companies to exploit personal data for ads or sophisticated attention-grabbing tools targeting adults and children alike.
In other words, just because companies want something doesn’t mean you have to hand it over.
Framing these laws as a problem — laws that are designed to protect citizens — actually plays into the hands of the very tech giants Europe is supposedly trying to escape. When companies threaten to withhold services from Europe over “unfriendly” regulations, that’s a power move. If Europe backs down, it’s giving away more than a product feature — it’s giving away real, hard-won sovereignty.
Sovereignty means standing tall. If you make yourself small, you give up your ability to bargain at all.
A “new mindset” or just deregulation in disguise?
At Heilbronn, the business crowd keeps calling for a new culture — a new “mindset,” as many say. Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger echoes the sentiment: the fundamentals are there — good universities, smart people. What’s missing is confidence. Europe needs to be bolder, take more risks.
Again and again, participants cite the “Deepseek moment”: in January 2025, a little-known Chinese firm unveiled a language model that rivaled those from U.S. giants like OpenAI — despite using a fraction of the funding and computing power. China’s sudden AI leap proved you can catch up, even as an outlaw.
China’s data and AI regulations are actually stricter than Europe’s.
But here’s what no one mentions — and that’s the second big fallacy in Heilbronn: China’s data and AI regulations are actually stricter than Europe’s. And California’s landmark privacy laws are copied straight from the EU.
Clearly, tough regulation isn’t what’s holding innovation back. If it were, neither China nor California would be making tech breakthroughs. But this inconvenient truth would shatter the cozy consensus in Heilbronn, where everyone seems to agree that regulation is Europe’s biggest obstacle.
Why smart regulation can boost innovation
A closer look shows that well-designed rules can actually drive innovation. GDPR, for instance, has given the EU a position of global strength. Because Europe is a major and influential market, U.S. tech companies now adapt their products to comply with GDPR — worldwide.
In this way, Europe has helped make the internet a slightly better place.
Demanding regulation can also spark technological advances. Computer science researchers often point out how GDPR has raised interest — and funding — for privacy-preserving data analysis. We can benefit from AI without handing over deeply personal data to companies that sell it off to the highest bidder.
Technologies like privacy-friendly machine learning could become Europe’s ace in the hole — a competitive advantage over both the U.S. and China, where both corporations and governments increasingly intrude on citizens’ private lives.
When rights are sacrificed in the name of sovereignty
Of course, it’s no shock that a business conference reflects business interests. But the extent to which current global tensions are being leveraged to undermine critical regulations under the banner of “digital sovereignty” is startling.
The more the term is repeated in Heilbronn — almost always tied to demands for rolling back social protections — the more it starts to feel like we’ve stumbled into the world of grey men from Momo, the fantasy novel by Michael Ende. Would they vanish into thin air if we just banned the word “sovereignty,” like the novel’s time-thieves who can’t live without their cigars?
A few speakers stand apart from the crowd. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, for instance, talks about ensuring that everyone benefits from innovation. She warns passionately: Germany is still a democracy — “but you have to fight for your rights now. Once they’re gone, they’re hard to win back.”
Don’t make the same mistakes we did!
Taiwan’s Cyber Ambassador-at-large Audrey Tang shares how the country imposed strict regulations on Facebook to curb disinformation. And yet, one gets the sense that these speakers are mostly ornamental — brought in to add color, not to shape the conversation.
Sadly, that goes for UCLA’s Ramesh Srinivasan as well. During his talk, the professor flashes a Wired headline: “Europe Is Breaking Open the Empires of Big Tech.” He urges the room: “Don’t make the same mistakes we did!” In the U.S., he says, people came last — tech came first. And that needs to change.
But that morning, the room is nearly empty. “I know it’s early,” he says with a hopeful smile. Truth is, no one here wants to hear what he’s saying.
