As global tensions rise and dependence on foreign tech becomes uncomfortable, a tempting cry for complete independence echoes across the continent. Proponents of a “EuroStack” argue that Europe must build its own alternative at every level — from chips to cloud to software.
But this path represents a €5-trillion mirage. Attempting to decouple from the global tech ecosystem through massive subsidies and “Buy European” clauses is not only unrealistic; it is a recipe for stagnation. Instead, Europe must embrace Open Digital Sovereignty.
True sovereignty isn’t about where a company is headquartered; it’s about who has control over the technology. History shows that closed, proprietary systems often fail because they stifle adoption and create “gilded cages” for their users.
When Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn developed TCP/IP, governing how data moves through a network in 1974, they made the protocols open and gave them away for free. Cerf and Kahn didn’t become rich — and sometimes Cerf expressed regret about his lost fortune — but he acknowledges that if he had not “opened” up the protocol, which he dubbed “Internet,” few would have used it.
“When asked to explain my role in the creation of the internet, I generally use the example of a city,” Cerf says. “I helped to build the roads — the infrastructure that gets things from point A to point B.” Others built proprietary systems on top of his invention, fueling the Internet revolution.
Two decades later, Finland’s Linus Torvalds released a free, open-source operating system software called Linux. While originally developed for personal computers, it is now used on a wide variety of devices, including workstations, mainframes, and servers, and is used in all the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. Europe next benefited from open standards in mobile phones, with its GSM mobile standard outperforming the American proprietary CDMA standard.
Proprietary technology ecosystems often restrict adoption, slow ecosystem growth, and inhibit competition. They can function as practical gatekeepers on supply, accessibility, and innovation. It is easy to shut down a proprietary system. The owner controls it. In contrast, it is difficult to shut down a system run on open source. No one “owns” it. Anyone can build on top of it. Security of supply, never absolute, can be reinforced by maintaining vendor diversity. Multiple foreign vendors competing for European business is better for sovereignty than single-vendor dependency on any supplier, even a hypothetical European one. Open standards and open source allow for this diversification and competition.
Conversely, the greatest revolutions in tech — the Internet itself, the Linux operating system, and GSM mobile standards — succeeded because they were open. Openness lowers barriers, fosters innovation, and creates ecosystem effects that proprietary walls can never match. Even though proprietary hardware and software dominate the current global AI landscape, open products are making important inroads. As many as 80% of American AI start-ups rely on capable and affordable open Chinese models, Silicon Valley venture capitalists estimate. Chinese models now account for 17.1% of global downloads, ahead of the US at 15.8%, according to new research from MIT and Hugging Face, a repository of open-source AI models and datasets. Only two years ago, American models dominated with more than 60% of downloads.
Rather than building walls, Europe should leverage its existing world-class strengths — such as ASML’s lithography dominance and Merck’s chemical expertise — while ensuring that the “connective tissue” of the AI stack remains open.
To achieve this, I propose three critical shifts in European policy:
- Prioritize the Software Layer: The unseen software that links chips to applications determines whether developers are “locked in” to a single vendor. Europe should mandate those public investments in AI infrastructure, like our new AI Factories, use open software layers. This ensures that a researcher can switch hardware providers without losing years of work.
- Rethink Cloud Sovereignty: Sovereignty in the cloud shouldn’t mean forcing data into high-cost local data centers based on a provider’s passport. True resilience comes from vendor diversity and interoperability. As Ukraine’s experience during the Russian invasion proved, data is often safer when it is distributed and portable, not just localized
- Attach Portability to Funding: When taxpayer money funds AI, the results should be “open by default.” Models should be deployable without vendor permission, and code should run on multiple platforms. This ensures we are building lasting European capabilities, not just deepening our dependence on closed foreign platforms.
Digital sovereignty has for too long been viewed as a defensive shield against American and Chinese tech. By embracing openness, Europe can turn it into an offensive strategy.
Open ecosystems allow European companies — especially in our powerhouse industrial sectors — to customize AI for their specific needs while keeping the value they create. It allows us to work smarter, not harder, participating in global innovation while maintaining the freedom to chart our own course.
The choice for Europe is simple: it can spend trillions trying to duplicate the past, or it can use openness to own the future.
William Echikson is a Brussels-based non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. He worked at Google for six and a half years, and began his career as a foreign correspondent in Europe for a series of US publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and BusinessWeek.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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