Our European correspondent takes a gander at Eurostack’s “European alternative for digital sovereignty” and finds it surprisingly filled with ideas and solutions that seem to be informed by US interests.
On February 13th, 2025, a German foundation launched Eurostack, a “European alternative for digital sovereignty” that would “take roughly a decade and require investments of around €300 billion.” The full plan, defined for the European perspective as “our moonshot – a digital evolution of the euro and single market,”, makes me happy and concerned at the same time. Here’s why.
What’s Good
Eurostack does a great job of summarizing the systemic digital risks the EU is exposed to, such as the fact that “Europe consumes about 20% of the world’s microchips but manufactures only 9%,” and the meta-issue that “over 80% of Europe’s digital infrastructure and technologies are imported, creating systemic vulnerabilities and hampering the region’s capacity for innovation and self-reliance.”
I also like the main solution, which is an “EU Sovereign Tech Fund to scale homegrown chips … and open-source, federated systems.” For chips, Eurostack suggests that “rather than relying on NVIDIA GPUs, which are locked into the proprietary CUDA ecosystem, Europe could prioritize GPUs developed through open-source initiatives, promoting transparency, interoperability and sovereignty over critical technologies.”
That’s music to the ears of a European who asked 13 years ago for European microprocessors and field-programmable gate arrays and later for “regional, open microprocessors.”
Even “open source federated systems” that protect EU’s citizens privacy and rights sound promising for a humble, ten-year preacher of realistic [“PERmanent/PERsonal clouds — or Percloud, my own proposal for a feasible and usable alternative to Facebook, Google and similar services that average people could actually use.
Above all, Eurostack acknowledges that “competing directly with such vast expenditures as those in the US or China would neither be sustainable nor strategically prudent for the EU. Instead, Europe can turn its relative vulnerability in computing resources into an opportunity by leveraging its collective purchasing power and expansive public compute network to shape global industry standards.”
That’s playing to EU’s real strengths and purpose, which is (my summary) “peace through mutually beneficial regulations.” Good!
The Concerning Parts
The main thing in Eurostack that disquiets me is the TINA attitude that pervades it, purposely or not.
Positioning Europe as a “leader in values-driven, citizen-focused innovation, shaping a digital future that prioritizes privacy, trust, and accountability” should be the primary purpose. Instead, the main goal throughout the whole paper seems to be growth of GDP, a focus that wasn’t making sense anymore in the US 57 years ago.
Also, inferiority complexes seem to be at play.
Personally, there’s a lot I like about the US. However, reading that, for example, it’s crucial to fix “Europe’s slower productivity relative to the United States,” or that what “ultimately contributes to a broader decline in living standards” is lack of competitiveness, leaves me wondering what Europe could become by adopting Eurostack as it is: a better place in its own way or — against the wishes of Eurostack’ authors — another America (just with a sensible measurements system and saner, better food)? If Eurostack is a “call to action for a united Europe to take control of its digital destiny,” shouldn’t that destiny be tailored for Europe?
Instead Eurostack warns that, for example:
- “EU firms represent only 7% of global R&D spending in software and internet technologies, compared to 71% by U.S. firms and 15% by Chinese companies.”
- “EU underinvestment is mirrored by the difficulties startups face in scaling within Europe.”
- In general, “AI everywhere, now! No doubts allowed!”
I suspect even ChatGPT would summarize this as “EU governments, firms and investors must hurry to spend colossal amount of resources on doing software like the US, even if their main exports hallucinate, make people click more ads and make them spend more time alone.”
Ditto for hardware: “Key resources such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, gallium, graphite, and tungsten are essential for batteries.”. Sure, but batteries for what? Dangerous, uselessly big US-style trucks, for cities never made for cars?
Finally, democracy: I really don’t know why (no, wait — I do) but seeing “inability to protect democracy, or worse actions that undermine it” at the bottom of “Europe’s vulnerabilities and critical dependencies in the digital sphere” worries me. Eurostack must “strengthen Europe’s competitiveness, security, and democracy,” but why in that order?
Summing up
Doing wrong or unnecessary things better doesn’t make them good. Eurostack can and must help Europe to “promote indigenous innovation that aligns with European values of transparency, accountability, and privacy,” but I strongly doubt that “investing in sovereign AI ecosystems” is, while necessary, a priority on that front.
Still, there are plenty of good ideas and proposal in Eurostack, and believe me, none of them could come too soon. Why? Well, just one week after the study was released, Poland signed a $700 million cloud, AI, and cybersecurity investment with… Microsoft. I just hope Eurostack isn’t hijacked to make the EU a US clone — an endeavor that would be doomed to fail even if it made sense — or that it unwillingly opens the way to some EU version of Musk.
Last but not least, allow me to suggest three more policy proposals for Eurostack:
- Outlaw Microsoft office file formats across Europe: the main, if not the only, thing that made Windows maintain approximately 70% of the global desktop operating system market share for decades is the use of MS Office formats by public administrations.
- Brain drain, done right: While Eurostack suggests that we “retain… talent within Europe,” I say why stop there? There are plenty of talented people living across the Atlantic who are quite unhappy with their new leader — both the real one, and the one that was elected. Let’s reach out to them, and make them a Europe relocation offer they can’t refuse!
- Change our transportation priorities: Since traditional carmakers are doomed anyway, just get all the (not many) EVs EU would really need from China, on EU’s terms, as I outlined here.
Why? Because “you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” said (more or less) an American.
Marco Fioretti is an aspiring polymath and idealist without illusions based in Rome, Italy. Marco met Linux, Free as in Freedom Software, and the Web pre-1.0 back in the ’90s while working as an ASIC/FPGA designer in Italy, Sweden, and Silicon Valley. This led to tech writing, including but not limited to hundreds of Free/Open Source tutorials. Over time, this odd combination of experiences has made Marco think way too much about the intersection of tech, ethics, and common sense, turning him into an independent scholar of “Human/digital studies” who yearns for a world with less, but much better, much more open and much more sensible tech than we have today.
Be First to Comment