The European Union presents its digital sovereignty plan to compete with the US technologically. It's a wonderful utopia

The European commission has just announced the European Technological Sovereignty Package. The objective is to reduce European dependence on foreign suppliers of both hardware and software solutions, and to achieve this the plan is simple: ensure that European companies can compete with North American companies. And precisely there lies the problem.

For a European cloud. The entire focus of this initiative is on drastically reducing the exposure of the Old Continent to cloud services controlled by American companies. The concern generated by the CLOUD Act and the current geopolitical situation has caused the EU to try to migrate at least part of its critical services to local nodes so that this data always remains under European jurisdiction.

The regulation trap. The great Achilles heel of this strategy is once again the way of trying to solve the problem. The European Union is a superpower in regulation, but it is a secondary actor in the field of creation and innovation. Both the US and China do not stop investing billions of dollars from the private sector to develop new AI chips or models. Meanwhile, Brussels responds with AI surveillance agencies and bureaucratic obstacles to the companies it precisely wants to try to promote.

Hello, Linux. In the document published by the EC, an open source strategy is repeatedly mentioned as an essential weapon to avoid dependence on foreign suppliers. Operating systems such as Linux and developments with this philosophy can undoubtedly provide a basic pillar to develop competitive projects, and of course there are already movements that aim to replace proprietary solutions such as Microsoft Office with open source ones such as LibreOffice.

The reality is harsh. The harsh economic and technological reality is that in many segments Europe does not have companies that can compete with the technological giants of the US. One of these segments is precisely that of cloud infrastructure: Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominate this market imperially, and although the intention is to change to "sovereign" clouds; The question is, which one? It is true that there are some companies such as OVH (France) or T-Systems (Germany) that have their own infrastructure, but they are still far from their American rivals.

Worrying precedents. In 2020, Europe launched the GAIA-X project, a large cloud platform that would theoretically make it possible to face the three large hyperscalers in the US. Dozens of companies were going to get involved in an ambitious project that six years later is in a state that is difficult to define: the official website publishes news frequently and there is a specification and code that, for example, talks about GAIA-X 3.0 'Danube', but it does not seem that at the moment this platform is being used practically.

The money comes, but from outside. And while the EU becomes entangled in regulation and ethical debates, the projects that should theoretically boost that digital sovereignty are weakening it. Investment in data centers in Europe is a good example: practically all of the ones that want to be built are simply branches of large US technology companies.

A wonderful utopia. Digital sovereignty is a logical objective as the world is currently moving, but in the EU they seem to confuse priorities once again. That sovereignty is not gained by prohibiting or regulating foreign technology. You win by making yours so competitive that the rest of the world has no choice but to use it. That requires a lot of work and a lot, a lot of capital investment. Not even the European Court of Auditors trusts that something like this will come to fruition.

Image | Rafael Garcin