Europe is a digital colony, importing four-fifths of our digital infrastructure and technology. Radical action is needed to reclaim our technological sovereignty and reduce our vulnerability to foreign coercion.
The Eurostack initiative aims to do just that by building full tech stack subject to European standards, from basic infrastructure to consumer-facing applications. The idea has recently won the support of the European Parliament’s ITRE Committee and deserves to become EU policy.
Think of Eurostack as a digital layer cake. The base is made up of infrastructure such as fibre optics, mobile networks and cloud services. Next up is a layer of hardware such as the chips our machines run on, and the data centres that store our information. The third layer contains the protocols our devices need to communicate with each other. The apps we all use are the icing on the cake: They can’t exist without the layers beneath.
Building strategic autonomy
Our digital cake would have a distinctly European flavour, with private and public players working hand in hand and governed by EU values such as interoperability, privacy, openness, transparency, user rights and democratic principles. Most importantly, the whole system would be under EU jurisdiction so no outside actor could pull the plug.
Currently, this is not the case. The US-owned digital ecosystem, which spans the globe, is driven by private companies. Based in theory on market principles, it is in reality an oligopoly run by a handful of players who are vulnerable to political coercion from the White House. China’s digital ecosystem is state-driven, prioritising central control and national security.
In both cases, our economy and security are hostage to foreign actors. We are at risk of American blackmail, Chinese espionage, Russian sabotage or simple supply chain disruption. Eurostack would serve both as an industrial policy tool to help our companies grow and as a geopolitical tool to guarantee our digital independence.
We cannot be in a situation where services and products can be toppled on an American president’s whim. Eurostack won't close our digital ecosystem to non-EU players, but it would insist they respect EU law. Ultimately we want more European companies to thrive and European citizens to have more choices.
A full European tech stack
Building the Eurostack will not be easy. It’s hard enough for consumers to switch from one brand of smartphone to another, or between different apps or software providers. So imagine doing that for our entire digital life — and on a continental scale. But we have tools, and the track record, to do it.
First, we need to ensure interoperability to make the migration effortless. Changing phones used to mean changing phone number too, but we made that much easier by law. Similarly with the common USB-C charger, which is now mandatory for all small and medium electronic devices thanks to the work of the European Parliament.
This logic needs to guide the adoption of the Eurostack. Connectivity, network-sharing and cloud systems all need to be built according to the principles of interoperability, with a big role for open source software.
Second, we need to spur private investment by creating demand for the Eurostack. One powerful way to do this is through public procurement, which accounts for 14% of the EU’s GDP, or €2 trillion each year. We’re in the process of reopening the rules governing it, including a requirement that any future infrastructure with a digital component must abide by the Eurostack principles.
Germany and France are building momentum around the Eurostack. I hope Poland joins them soon. Now the European Commission must respond to this momentum and make building a European tech stack a policy priority for the whole EU.
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