Over 13 years in the past, when whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked 1000’s of labeled paperwork revealing the US Authorities was working mass surveillance programmes, the heads of main tech firms strongly denied any information of the best way their companies had been getting used.
On the time, Javier Ruiz, Amnesty Worldwide’s UK lead for tech and digital coverage, was working on the digital rights non-profit Open Rights Group. Because the world got here to grips with the huge breach of belief the Snowden leaks had created, the organisation was working intently with Google, Fb and different tech firms on the fallout. “They themselves felt that they’d been violated,” Ruiz explains.
So had the remainder of the world, as revelations that the US had spied on world leaders, embassies and full continents poured out of the recordsdata. Apologies and renewed commitments from the US to cease the in depth surveillance practices swiftly adopted. As stunning because the revelations had been, the US remained Europe’s strongest ally. The concept that US tech could be weaponised in opposition to Europe – in the identical manner legislators have come to worry how China might wield affect overseas through an organization like Huawei – was nonetheless a decade away from reaching the mainstream agenda.
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Now, as nationalist politics has taken over the political and financial path of the US, historic allies have change into warier of the extent to which US firms underpin the digital infrastructure – from information centres and software program to digital public infrastructure – that their societies depend on. Creating a digital sovereignty technique, as soon as an concept talked about within the fringes of Brussels corridors by the extra risk-prone legislators, has shot up the precedence listing.
Cultural resets within the pursuit of digital sovereignty
Regardless of the sense of urgency that’s fuelling the present wave of curiosity in digital sovereignty, it’s not the primary time that nations have realised the significance of constructing home technological capabilities. Within the early days of the web, amid the buildout of fibre-optic cables, there have been ongoing debates about decentralising web infrastructure, which was largely managed by the US. The Africa ONE undertaking, for instance, had ambitions to construct a fibre-optic cable community that might join the entire continent (though that exact undertaking by no means materialised as a result of monetary and political obstacles).
In 2013, the Snowden leaks shifted the main focus to the cloud, privateness and cybersecurity, as the sensation grew that these facets of know-how had been dangerously ignored.
“The dialogue round sovereignty moved from infrastructural sovereignty – who owns the cables – to, am I capable of ship my information on to nation X, with out one other nation with the ability to intercept it?” Ruiz explains.
Curiosity in information localisation legal guidelines surged following the Snowden leaks, with many governments demanding that firms retailer sure sorts of information inside their borders. India was an early adopter of those legal guidelines, addressing most of the worries round infrastructural sovereignty and information administration beneath the Digital India programme, launched in 2015.
Just a few years later, in 2018, the US handed the Clarifying Lawful Abroad Use of Knowledge (CLOUD) Act, enabling the federal government to request information from tech firms, even when saved abroad, to analyze severe crimes, as soon as once more reigniting the controversy on digital sovereignty. There is no such thing as a particular information on what number of occasions the CLOUD Act has been enacted, however disclosures from Microsoft say requests for enterprise information are “comparatively uncommon”. Out of 173 requests for cross-border enterprise disclosures within the second half of 2024 (H2 2024), the corporate offered US legislation enforcement with 5 non-US prospects’ information saved exterior of the US, none of which had been within the EU/European Free Commerce Affiliation space. Amazon Internet Companies’ (AWS) newest report, detailing requests for H1 2025, says no requests from US legislation enforcement resulted within the firm handing over “enterprise or authorities information” saved exterior the US.
Kassim Vera, a guide at Public Digital, notes that the dialog round digital sovereignty has been caught in an unhelpful binary, the place it’s both about “bodily infrastructure (the place are the info centres, who owns the cables) or it’s about privateness and cybersecurity”. Each are vital, however “they don’t give leaders a sensible strategy to act”.
A extra complete manner of understanding digital sovereignty, Vera notes, is as “the company and capability of any organisation to make clever knowledgeable decisions to form its digital future by design”, the definition embraced by Public Digital. This strategy, he notes, centralises an organisation’s company and capability, the significance of creating knowledgeable decisions and of working by design, fairly than being formed by market forces or inertia.
Reevaluating partnerships
In November 2025, the French and German governments convened the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty, the place EU member states agreed that strengthening the bloc’s digital sovereignty was a “cornerstone of [its] financial resilience, social prosperity, competitiveness and safety”. For years, the nations have been a few of the strongest advocates for pursuing digital sovereignty initiatives, because the dependence on US companies begins to really feel like a legal responsibility.
Nevertheless, makes an attempt at constructing home options have traditionally floundered, as a sophisticated regulatory system and competing priorities clashed. A significant Franco-German initiative to construct a European cloud was described as a “crushing failure” and “colossal waste of time” by considered one of its founding members.
One space the place this danger has been noticed is within the buildout of digital public infrastructure (DPI). DPI techniques – which may embrace digital ID techniques, fee techniques and information trade protocols – have lengthy been constructed through private-public partnerships. Nevertheless, given the delicate information that these techniques typically take care of, the involvement of overseas gamers has been a degree of competition in some instances.
Within the UK, the Nationwide Well being Service’s contract with US information software program firm Palantir has come beneath scrutiny by workers, MPs and members of the general public, who query why an organization that has been tied to Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations within the US and the Israel-Gaza struggle ought to be concerned within the dealing with of delicate well being information. In India, activists and attorneys have questioned why overseas firms that had been concerned in constructing the nationwide ID system had entry to the biometric information of Indian residents.
“Relating to overseas suppliers, the danger evaluation adjustments. It goes past regulatory compliance to how home regulation interacts with worldwide frameworks. Beneath whose authorized jurisdictions does the infrastructure function? And critically – if the connection wants to alter, can you progress?” Vera notes.
In France, the federal government is changing its use of US video conferencing platforms reminiscent of Zoom and Microsoft with home platform Visio, saying the swap would save Paris as a lot as €1m ($1.19m) yearly for each 100,000 customers. The Netherlands has made comparable strikes, saying a blueprint final December to scale back the nation’s dependency on overseas tech firms for important authorities operations. The nation is at present in the course of tensions over US IT firm Kyndryl’s proposed acquisition of Solvinity, the Dutch organisation that underpins the nation’s digital ID system. The proposed takeover prompted a parliamentary roundtable and a 140,000-signature petition.
Nevertheless, embracing sovereign options may also include the danger of unnerving US firms. Just a few years in the past, Brazil developed an instantaneous fee platform referred to as PIX, which has had an enormous uptake within the nation. The platform is now on the centre of an investigation by the US Commerce Consultant, launched final July, which is alleging unfair commerce practices. Main US fee platforms Visa and Mastercard have lengthy complained that PIX prevents their potential to develop their market share within the nation.
Nevertheless, the best way nations develop digital techniques will finally be formed by their particular set of circumstances.
“The thought of constructing your individual issues, there are nations that may permit themselves to have their very own information centres, and there are nations that can’t afford that or don’t have the circumstances to have it,” Daniel Abadie, head of know-how and partnerships on the Centre for DPI, says. “Each nation chooses its personal path.”
Strategic sectors
The arguments as to why totally decoupling from US tech is an unrealistic aim are well-known. By way of software program alone, US firms management about three-quarters of the EU market. In Whitehall, a report discovered that every one departments surveyed used considered one of two main cloud suppliers – AWS and Microsoft. The buildout of knowledge centres in Europe is difficult by the continent’s comparatively excessive price of vitality in comparison with the US or Center East and North Africa area, for instance. To not point out, regardless of the various makes an attempt and incentives through the years, there are few to no European firms of a comparable dimension that might swiftly take over the administration of the continent’s digital infrastructure. Because the CEO of Berlin-based search engine Ecosia places it: “If the US determined to tug US know-how from Europe… then we must return to telephone books.”
Nevertheless, a fractured atmosphere, the place the best danger areas – authorities communications and corporations in strategic sectors reminiscent of important minerals and nuclear know-how – shift in direction of home or in-house tech infrastructure, might already be beneath manner.
“The path of journey, I feel, is a breaking down of digital sovereignty into particular granular dangers, in particular granular contexts, after which seeing whether or not suppliers can provide adequate mitigation on these particular dangers in that particular context,” GlobalData principal analyst Gavin Sneddon notes.
Ruiz echoes this view.
“There may be simply no assure that you’re not being surveilled. Now, most individuals are clearly not going to be, however if you’re working something like a enterprise, for instance, having to do with important minerals, I don’t assume you’ll be able to. You actually can not do something on an American server. That will be insane,” he notes.
Trying inward
Whereas mistrust has been constructing for the reason that begin of Donald Trump’s time period, it almost reached what would have been an unprecedented end result this January, when the US President’s threats to invade Greenland – the autonomous territory belonging to Denmark – reached an all-time excessive, prompting a number of European nations to ship troops (albeit in small numbers) to the territory. The worst-case state of affairs was abated following a dialog between Trump and Nato Secretary Normal Mark Rutte, throughout which a “framework of a future take care of respect to Greenland” was reached.
French President Emmanuel Macron has urged the EU to make use of the momentum from the “Greenland second” to push long-stalled reforms to make the bloc extra aggressive. He says he’s “sure” that, regardless of a lull in tensions, the US will “assault” the EU over digital regulation within the coming months.
“We’re in an atmosphere of a lot much less belief. We appear to be shifting away from the earlier liberal, globalised world order, the place everybody imported the whole lot from everybody,” Alaa Owaineh, analysis director at GlobalData, notes.
Final 12 months, the AP reported that Microsoft cancelled electronic mail entry for the Worldwide Prison Courtroom’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, following the US backlash to the ICC bringing a number of instances in opposition to Israeli leaders for alleged struggle crimes in Gaza. The incident prompted fears of a US “kill swap” of the digital companies offered by US firms to European establishments.
Some might argue that the Snowden leaks, which occurred throughout a extra trusting period, had been a a lot bigger offence, but, at the moment, fears might nonetheless be assuaged. Nevertheless, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated in his now-famous Davos speech, the “outdated world order will not be coming again”.
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