Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have overwhelmingly adopted a landmark report calling for a concrete push toward "Digital Sovereignty." The resolution urges the European Union to drastically reduce its "deep dependence" on foreign multinational technology, particularly the dominant giants from the United States.
The Risks of Digital Reliance
The report highlights a critical vulnerability: Europe’s digital backbone—ranging from cloud infrastructure and enterprise software to operating systems—is currently controlled by non-EU providers. MEPs warn that this dominance poses several strategic risks:
Data Privacy & Security: Challenges in enforcing EU data protection standards on foreign-owned infrastructure.
Vendor Lock-in: The difficulty for businesses and governments to switch providers due to proprietary standards.
Economic Leverage: A weakened bargaining position in the global digital economy.
A Strategy for Open Standards and Independence
To counter this, the European Parliament has proposed a series of mandates for the European Commission:
Open Source Procurement: Prioritizing Open Source software and Open Standards in public sector procurement to ensure transparency and flexibility.
Boosting the European Tech Ecosystem: Injecting significant funding to nurture homegrown tech firms capable of competing with and eventually replacing foreign services.
Infrastructure Autonomy: Investing in pan-European projects to build sovereign cloud and data processing capabilities.
This move signals Europe’s clearest intent yet to establish itself as a third technological superpower, balancing the influence of the United States and China amidst an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape.
- Project Gaia-X is a European effort to create a common cloud standard to make it easier for users to migrate data between smaller providers in Europe without being trapped by hyperscalers like AWS, Google, or Azure.
- This demand for digital sovereignty works in conjunction with existing DMA (Digital Access Management) laws aimed at reducing the "gatekeeper" power of large tech companies and opening up greater market access for European startups.
- In some countries, such as Germany and France, major transitions are already underway, such as the adoption of locally developed document management systems or the shift to LibreOffice and Nextcloud in government agencies to reduce reliance on foreign software leases.
- Analysts view this as a sign of a "Splinternet," or a polarized global internet, where each region is building its own technological barriers to protect its national interests—not just economic, but also national security.
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