If Europe wants sovereignty, it must back its digital infrastructure

Debates about European digital sovereignty frequently focus on the absence of EU-headquartered hyperscalers. This framing equates sovereignty with platform valuation and global market share.

However, Europe’s most durable digital influence has emerged not from platform dominance, but from foundational infrastructure: open standards, protocols and software layers that structure global markets without enclosing them.

If sovereignty is defined as reduced exposure to external control and lower structural lock-in, then infrastructure — not hyperscale platform replication — is the relevant policy lever.

Collaboration over Consolidation

Europe’s strongest digital contributions were built under public or collaborative governance models rather than venture-capital scaling logic.

• The Web was released from a European research institution as a non-proprietary standard.
• Linux evolved through distributed contribution and now underpins most global cloud infrastructure.
• Git became the dominant software version control system because interoperability and forkability were design principles.

These systems achieved global reach because they maximised reuse, neutrality and substitutability. Their value compounded precisely because no single actor could restrict access or impose unilateral governance changes.

This pattern suggests that Europe’s comparative advantage lies in standard-setting and shared infrastructure rather than vertically integrated platform consolidation.

Key properties that promote sovereignty

Open digital infrastructure exhibits three characteristics directly relevant to sovereignty:

Reduced asymmetry Participation does not depend on permission from a dominant vendor. Access and pricing are not controlled by a single corporate entity.

Credible exit Users can switch providers, fork projects or continue independently if governance deteriorates. Exit constrains authority and reduces switching costs over time.

Procedural legitimacy Trust rests on published standards, auditable code and transparent governance processes rather than corporate assurances. These properties mitigate lock-in and distribute control across actors. They do not eliminate dependency, but they reduce its concentration.

Current misalignment

Despite this historical pattern, European industrial policy and procurement frameworks continue to channel capital toward proprietary cloud ecosystems dominated by non-European firms.

Dependence on vertically integrated hyperscale platforms embeds:

• Contractual lock-in through bundled services
• Technical lock-in via proprietary APIs
• Jurisdictional exposure through extraterritorial legal instruments such as the US CLOUD Act

These dependencies are structural. They cannot be resolved through branding or data localisation alone.

At the same time, open-source maintainers and infrastructure projects often operate with fragmented, short-cycle funding and limited procurement access. Maintenance — not innovation — remains systematically undercapitalised.

This creates a strategic inconsistency: resilience is declared as an objective, while funding flows reinforce concentration.

Policy implications

If sovereignty is understood as reducing exposure to unilateral external control, then industrial policy must shift emphasis from platform competition to infrastructure reinforcement.

Key levers include:

• Long-term maintenance funding for critical open-source components
• Procurement criteria favouring interoperability and open standards
• Legal protections for portability and forkability
• Institutional support for European standard-setting bodies
• Public investment mechanisms designed for shared infrastructure rather than equity-driven scale

Platform competition concentrates value and governance authority. Infrastructure investment distributes capacity and preserves exit.

The historical record suggests that Europe’s durable digital power has emerged where interoperability, neutrality and reuse were prioritised over enclosure. Aligning industrial policy with that pattern offers a more direct route to sovereignty than attempting to replicate foreign platform models.

Strategic choice

Europe has already demonstrated the ability to shape global digital systems through shared infrastructure. The question is whether industrial policy will reinforce that layer or continue privileging vertically integrated platform competition.

Sovereignty depends on which layer receives sustained capital, legal protection and institutional support. Infrastructure is where structural control resides.