We Need More Than the EuroStack

The EuroStack initiative aims to establish Europe’s digital sovereignty by advancing key industries like AI, cloud computing, and quantum technology. I’ve spent the weekend reading it, and I would highly recommend that. It is clearly the result of very hard work, and contains many good ideas as well as background research and information. Yet, while the report contains valuable and long-overdue proposals to reduce dependence on external digital infrastructures and address decades of underinvestment, it is not immune from the pervasive shortcomings plaguing EU technology policy.

European tech policy at large in my opinion remains constrained by a lack of political imagination and a fetishization of market competitiveness and growth. There’s also these obsessive self-defeatist constant comparisons with the US and China. It also simultaneously acknowledges yet fails to urgently take any action on our ongoing climate change and wealth inequality crisises.

Though EuroStack outlines several good proposals to address many long standing issues in the European tech landscape, it definitely disappointed as well at times. It combines lots of lofty talk about values, democracy and participation, yet it is painfully pragmatic in its vision and policies, glossing over contradictions and leaving complexities unaddressed.

One instance for example, it consistently champions open standards and democratic participation while simultaneously pushing for 5G adoption, one of the most opaquely developed standards in existence. Similarly, while chip production is a core pillar—mentioned 112 times—the report references open hardware only once. More crucially, it fails to provide a truly convincing proposal addressing the exploitative, neocolonial practices behind raw material extraction that will be essential to create the semiconductors needed by this plan. Without confronting the labor exploitation and environmental devastation rampant in those industries, Europe’s digital sovereignty plan will reinforce those existing global inequalities.

Sidenote: I noticed also on the website that it implies that Europe is a subject of digital colonialism. *cringe af*

Moreover, technological sovereignty does not equate to economic justice. Even if Europe builds independent AI models, semiconductor supply chains, and cloud services, but going by what we’ve seen happen in the US, these technologies lend themselves well to being concentrated in profit-driven entities. The proposal alludes to, but never really addresses how this perpetuation of wealth accumulation and disparity will not happen here.

Another contradiction is, there is lots of emphasis on how this isn’t a protectionist initiative. Not that I would advocate for that, but I’ve read the report, and I’m still not exactly sure how a European cloud provider can ever compete with the established Big Four cloud providers in a “level playing field”. Maybe with some anti-trust? Can an expert on this let me know?

While initiatives like the European Sovereign Tech Fund and DataCommons are promising, they do not tackle the fundamental issue of economic power over digital infrastructure. True digital sovereignty requires more than technical advancements—it demands a reorganization of economic power and the political will to challenge the status quo. Without this, EuroStack risks becoming another piecemeal effort rather than a transformative step toward a fairer, more inclusive technological future.

I guess we’ll see how this goes, would Europe simply replicate past mistakes, deepening inequality through a corporate-driven tech ecosystem but with a European flavour? Or will it embrace a radically different path that prioritizes public ownership, democratic control, and sustainable resource use over unchecked growth. Interested to hear what you think will happen.