Why Europe should buy Substack

Digital sovereignty is either a policy goal or a conference theme. Here's how to tell the difference.

Substack’s last valuation stood at $1.1 billion as of mid-2025. That’s roughly what the EU spends on agricultural subsidies in a week. It’s 1/1470th of Meta’s market capitalization. In strategic infrastructure terms, it’s a rounding error.

Europe should acquire it.

We talk endlessly about digital sovereignty: “to enhance Europe’s strategic autonomy in the digital field“ as the European Parliament puts it with characteristic flair. The debate centers on cloud infrastructure, AI models, chips and data centers. Important things. But we keep ignoring the obvious: the digital public sphere. The infrastructure where public discourse actually happens, where opinions form, where elections are won and lost.

We communicate entirely on platforms controlled by foreign entities: Meta, Alphabet, TikTok/ByteDance, LinkedIn, and whatever Elon Musk decides X should be this week. In an era where information flow correlates so closely with power, Europe has outsourced most of its information ecosystem to American companies subject to American law, American politics, and increasingly erratic American billionaires.

The standard response has been to regulate. GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, we seem to excel at writing rules for other people’s playgrounds. But regulation without ownership is ultimately just commentary.

Europe has zero social networks at scale

China operates behind its Great Firewall with WeChat and Weibo. Russia, with a fraction of Europe’s economic power, maintains VKontakte. Even smaller markets have managed to build social platforms of national significance. Europe, with 450 million people and the world’s second-largest economy, has produced precisely zero social networks of critical scale. Not one.

The one partial exception is instructive. Spotify, Swedish, European, global, isn’t a social platform, but it is the only European-built content platform that competes at world scale. And it’s worth noticing why it works: it runs on subscriptions. It pays creators (imperfectly, but it pays them). It doesn’t need you to be angry to keep you engaged. Its incentive structure rewards quality and catalog depth, not viralisation. Compare that with TikTok, where the entire architecture is designed to hijack your attention span. Spotify isn’t perfect, but it’s proof that European platforms can compete globally and that the subscription model produces something fundamentally less toxic than a purely ad-driven alternative.

Substack follows the same logic. Which is precisely why it’s interesting.

This isn’t about pride. When push comes to shove (and geopolitics suggests quite a bit of pushing and shoving in the near future), the platforms answer to Washington, not Brussels. They collect and exploit the data of European users to generate advertising revenue while systematically destroying the business models of European media companies. And so far we’ve mostly responded by writing more rules about how they should destroy us more politely.

Why Substack?

Substack is developing into something beyond a newsletter platform. It’s becoming a social network built on trust rather than doomscrolling, on subscription rather than surveillance, on writers rather than trolls and bots. The verification mechanism isn’t a blue checkmark sold to the highest bidder, it’s readers paying for content they value. A concept that nowadays feels almost quaint: quality as credential.

Its business model, writers charge readers directly, platform takes 10%, aligns more closely with what Europe claims to care about than anything Meta has ever attempted. Like Spotify for audio, Substack is building infrastructure where the economic incentives and the public interest roughly point in the same direction. That alone makes it an anomaly worth protecting.

The platform hosts over 5 million paid subscriptions and is growing, particularly among the kind of serious writers and thinkers who could anchor a genuine European public sphere. Unlike TikTok or Instagram, where European adoption is cultural colonization almost by default, Substack could plausibly become more European while remaining globally relevant.

For context on the price: media giant Axel Springer bought Politico in 2021 for more than $1 billion, and more recently the Telegraph Media Group for €665 million. These are clearly not unthinkable numbers. It just requires someone to think of them.

There is, however, something uncomfortable to acknowledge about the platform.

Substack is, by European standards, close to a free speech absolutist and not only does it permit content that would be illegal in many European jurisdictions, it allows creators to monetize it. Hate speech, conspiracy theories, and political extremism generate revenue on the platform. The Guardian documented the extent of this problem just weeks ago, and it wasn’t the first time. From a US perspective, this is the cost of prioritizing the First Amendment above other values. From a European perspective - where hate speech laws, dignity rights, and democratic protections routinely override speech freedoms - some of what Substack currently hosts simply wouldn’t be legal. This is a core tension in the proposal, and we’ll return to it.

There is a market for digital infrastructure that doesn’t need your rage