BERLIN — For years, the reality that Europe is essentially a digital colony of the United States, entirely dependent and lagging behind, was an oddly accepted fact of life. Europe comforted itself with the idea that it secretly ruled the world as a regulatory superpower: Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all had to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which the tech giants eventually adopted as a global standard.
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The EU recently tried a similar strategy to tackle the problem of a monopolized, distorted internet. One riddled with disinformation, dangerous half-truths, and heavy propaganda that erodes trust in democracy and obstructs informed public debate. The Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act are meant to address this.
But after Donald Trump’s administration threatened to retaliate with punitive tariffs, word got out last week that the European Commission might be preparing to backpedal. According to the German business daily Handelsblatt, the Commission is now considering inviting American tech firms to join a committee that would help shape digital policy — in other words, watering it down.
Regulation alone is no longer enough. That realization is now, for the first time, creating real pressure to act. At business forums and in academic settings, the term “digital sovereignty” is increasingly being floated as a possible solution. But what exactly lies behind this buzzword? And what would Europe need to do to gain digital independence from the U.S., and with it, true sovereignty?
Two main paths are currently under discussion: one market-oriented, the other more global and civil-society driven. Both fall somewhere between realism and idealism, but they share the same goal: building Europe’s own clouds, networks and data flows.
All about the cloud
Computer scientist Stefan Wrobel is a proponent of the more market-driven, territorial approach. He teaches in Bonn and heads the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems. Wrobel is also a key voice in the debate because he recently used the German-designed large language model to develop an AI chatbot trained in all 24 official languages of the EU, giving it a distinctly European character.
Without participating in digital value creation, Europe won’t benefit from future AI development.
The second approach, which takes a civic and planetary view of digital sovereignty, was recently proposed by an international group of researchers calling themselves the Democratic and Ecological Digital Sovereignty Coalition. Their ideas are especially popular in IT communities that advocate for open-source software and free knowledge, such as Wikipedia.
For Wrobel, digital sovereignty means “Europe must be able to participate in digital value creation.” When the debate was only about unprofitable-looking platforms like Twitter, this may have seemed unimportant. But now, in the era of artificial intelligence, it has become clear that the major platforms — from X to Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube — are taking much more.
“The texts, images, and videos hosted there are not only used to train language models,” says Wrobel. “They also play a central role in the further development of artificial intelligence, because they reflect everyday life and human needs.”
Wrobel believes that as AI capabilities continue to grow, countless new applications will emerge, offering the potential for economic growth and prosperity wherever intellectual work is done. Simply relying on regulation to control big tech platforms would mean cutting Europe off from the key value chains of the future. “That is not in Europe’s interest,” he says.
But how could Europe succeed in building its own large-scale data platforms? Looking at the early days of today’s tech giants helps explain why the continent has struggled. There have been attempts, after all. Take the German online auction site alando.de, launched in 1999: national platforms like these were too small to compete with the much larger U.S.-based eBay. Within six months, alando.de was bought out.
Wrobel draws the lesson that Europe’s internal market needs more legal harmonization. That way, digital products could target all 450 million EU citizens at once and quickly reach the scale needed to compete globally.
Even Mistral, Europe’s most prominent AI company, relies on American cloud services.
But platforms alone, social media, online marketplaces, are only part of the equation when it comes to sovereignty. Europe also needs the full stack of digital technologies required to develop and run these platforms: cloud infrastructure, data centers, even transatlantic submarine cables to carry data streams. Here too, the U.S. still holds most of the power.
At the heart of it all is the “cloud,” a term that has become so vague in everyday language that it confuses more than clarifies. People often think of it as a weightless space where data is stored. But the cloud is also a factory and a marketplace. It’s where digital products are created and sold. Take Netflix, for example. It runs on Amazon Web Services. The platform was built using the digital tools provided by AWS and continues to operate within that same cloud environment. Even Mistral, Europe’s most prominent AI company, relies on American cloud services, because their all-in-one solutions offer a clear competitive edge.
Dreams of digital utopia
Europe’s failure to keep up in this area has come at a price, both economically and politically. The German military, for example, backs up its data in Google’s cloud. German government agencies and the federal administration still rely on a range of Microsoft products and are plugged into the Microsoft cloud.
The vulnerability of this setup became clear in May, when the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, had his Outlook email account shut down. Why? Because he had issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump responded by backing his Israeli ally with sanctions against the court, sanctions that Microsoft enforced.
Anyone aiming for secure digital sovereignty must go deep into the development of digital technologies and must also operate their own data centers and cloud computing infrastructure. What Stefan Wrobel is calling for is already being pursued elsewhere. An initiative led by Italian economist Francesca Bria, and funded by the Bertelsmann Foundation, plans to secure Europe’s digital sovereignty through a ten-year, 300 billion euro fund combining EU resources, national contributions and private investments.
But for Cecilia Rikap, who teaches political economy at University College London, this vision is too limited. She supports the broader, planetary view of digital sovereignty and was one of the lead authors of the Democratic and Ecological Digital Sovereignty Coalition report. “Around the world,” she says, “people are being forced into dependence on Big Tech, with serious consequences for democracy, the economy, and society.”
Digital technologies should be developed by a democratic alliance of states, financed in part through high taxes on private data giants.
Europe is not alone in facing this issue. And the solution cannot be simply to copy the U.S. corporate model, which is built on “systematically capturing intangible elements like data and knowledge and converting them into private wealth.” That would just lead to profits for a few, not real benefits for the broader public. Whether the revenue goes to SAP or to Google, she says, makes little difference to European citizens.
The report therefore proposes that digital technologies should be developed by a democratic alliance of states, financed in part through high taxes on private data giants. It also calls for the creation of a public digital marketplace, where businesses could offer their products without having to depend on the dominant clouds controlled by Big Tech.
According to Rikap, the United Nations would be a natural partner for this transformation. But the UN, she adds, is now “more than ever a battlefield” and is already heavily influenced by lobbying from the big tech companies.
As an alternative, Rikap envisions a “movement of non-aligned states,” similar to the one that emerged during the Cold War. This new movement would reject the monopolistic capitalist models of both the U.S. and China, with their exploitation of data and resources. Instead, it would promote a democratic, socially oriented, and environmentally sustainable digital world built on “technological internationalism,” a model that respects planetary limits when it comes to energy use, water consumption, mineral extraction, and pollution.
“In that world, also citizens would be digitally sovereign,” says Rikap, “because they would be able to decide for themselves what kinds of technologies they want and what they want to use them for.”
European leadership
And what about Europe? Since the EU is already structured as a supranational body, Rikap argues, it should take the lead in building this movement of non-aligned states. Countries like Canada, Australia, several Latin American nations, and democratic states in East Asia might well follow.
Of course, this vision is far less realistic than the market-based model of digital sovereignty, which currently enjoys strong political backing in Europe. But you could also argue: a digital global utopia is exactly the kind of thinking that powered California’s Silicon Valley at the dawn of the internet around the turn of the millennium, the idea of changing the world. Remember, back then, Google’s slogan was “Don’t be evil.”
That spirit is largely gone from the American tech industry. Today, it is all about business and geopolitics. It’s a long overdue wake-up call for Europe to start thinking beyond regulation.
