Small batch, organic, tech to table digital sovereignty does not exist

We can’t ‘degrow’ European tech into global relevance. What we need are massive public and private investments, and news publishers ready to get serious about product and development.

This year's Public Spaces conference was organized at Pakhuis de Zwijger, a very utilitarian looking former industrial refrigeration warehouse in Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands, that has been transformed into a cultural and NGO event space. In many ways, the venue itself was a pretty neat metaphor for the kind of careful, incremental renovation that many attendees seemed to envision for Europe's digital infrastructure.

The conference was heavy with skepticism toward private enterprise, which is understandable given big tech's track record of moving fast and breaking things. And while some speakers expressed quite a bit of ambivalence about scale, profit motives, and private investment, I started wondering how exactly does Europe plan to achieve digital sovereignty while rejecting most of the mechanisms that create the infrastructure necessary to support it?

Everyone wants a sovereign European public space and infrastructure for information and democratic discourse. But whether we're willing to build it at the scale required to actually matter, or if we'll settle for beautifully renovated warehouses while the rest of the world constructs datacenters and digital empires, remains to be seen.

€300 Billion > Good intentions

This February, the Bertelsmann Foundation (backed by some other very influential organizations) released the EuroStack Report, proposing a comprehensive strategy to enhance the EU's digital strategic autonomy. The report advocates moving from what it defines as Europe's current position of vulnerability and dependency to one of competitiveness and control in the global digital landscape.

The EuroStack initiative envisions a federated and decentralized approach to digital infrastructure, explicitly contrasting with the centralized dominance of US Big Tech and China's state-directed strategies. Built on six pillars spanning everything from raw materials and chips to networks, IoT, cloud infrastructure, and AI, the proposal calls for a total investment of €300 billion over the next decade, and crucially, puts the private sector at the center of these efforts.

I can't tell whether the EuroStack approach will actually deliver the desired European digital sovereignty, but to me it feels like a more plausible path than ideas that romanticize localism and minimalism, as if we could somehow ‘degrow’ European tech into global relevance.

Journalism can be both profitable and relevant in niches, and often works better there than at scale, but the kind of technology infrastructure that can bring meaningful agency to Europe (and European newsrooms in it) does require massive investments from both public and private sectors.

There are two reasons you (highly discerning media executive with an excellent taste in newsletters) should care about this debate: