By André Meij & Genevieve O’Kelly

Digital sovereignty and the future of the European cloud are no longer niche technical concerns. For years, Europe has debated how to reduce its dependence on American technology giants, but as geopolitical tensions rise, questions about data sovereignty, cloud dependence, and digital resilience have moved into mainstream political and business conversations.

The discussion is often framed around privacy or data protection, but the deeper issue is dependence: who controls the infrastructure, who sets the rules, and how freely customers can move when circumstances change? That is why the most important question is not whether Europe needs its own Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. The better question is whether it should want one.

The Wrong Goal: Creating a European Big Tech Monopoly

When discussing digital sovereignty, many instinctively imagine a European equivalent of Google or Amazon - a single company large enough to compete globally and keep profits, power, and infrastructure under European control. The appeal is obvious. A European technology champion could ensure that critical digital infrastructure remains subject to European laws, European oversight, and European interests.

Yet building a European version of today's Big Tech risks recreating the very problems Europe is trying to solve. Large technology monopolies create dependency. They make migration difficult, lock customers into proprietary ecosystems, and accumulate disproportionate influence over markets, governments, and citizens. Whether the headquarters are in California or Brussels, the fundamental challenge remains the same: concentration of power.

The goal of digital sovereignty should not be replacing one dependency with another.

"Tens of smaller vendors competing on customer experience will always beat two giants competing on lock-in."
– André Meij.

Europe's Competitive Advantage Is Not Scale

The discussion around sovereignty often assumes that Europe must imitate the American model to compete with it. But Europe has rarely succeeded by copying others. The United States excels at creating technology giants. China has developed its own highly centralized digital ecosystem. Europe, however, has historically demonstrated strength in a different area: cooperation through standards.

From telecommunications to aviation, Europe has repeatedly shown an ability to unite diverse markets behind common frameworks that enable competition while preserving interoperability. Mobile telephony provides a powerful example. Europe did not win by creating a single telecommunications monopoly. Instead, it established common standards that allowed multiple providers across multiple countries to work together seamlessly. Consumers benefited from choice, portability, and interoperability.

The same principle could guide Europe's digital future.

A Federated Alternative

Rather than building one dominant cloud provider, Europe could create a federated digital ecosystem. This is not a blank-slate idea. Gaia-X has already put federation, trust frameworks, and interoperable data infrastructure at the center of the European sovereignty debate, while EuroStack argues for a broader European digital stack across cloud, software, AI, connectivity, and platforms. The task now is to turn these visions into practical market rules and usable services.

In a federated model, many providers compete while adhering to shared technical and legal standards. Customers remain free to move between providers without excessive cost, complexity, or disruption. Innovation continues, but no single company becomes indispensable.

The concept resembles how email already works. Countless users communicate across many providers because shared protocols make interoperability possible. IMAP, SMTP, and newer approaches such as JMAP show how services can interoperate without every user belonging to the same platform.

Email also shows the limits of standards alone. Open protocols did not prevent concentration: Gmail and Outlook now exert enormous influence over deliverability, spam filtering, and user expectations. That does not weaken the case for federation. It strengthens it, because it shows why open standards must be paired with portability rules, transparent governance, and real switching rights.

"We need to revive the spirit of the early internet: interoperability through open standards, not walled gardens."

A federated European cloud ecosystem would apply similar principles to infrastructure, storage, collaboration tools, identity management, artificial intelligence, and other digital services. Such an approach aligns naturally with European values:

  • Competition instead of monopoly.

  • Portability instead of lock-in.

  • Cooperation instead of centralization.

  • Resilience instead of dependency.

Most importantly, it would allow Europe to build sovereignty without sacrificing diversity.

Migration Is the Missing Piece

If there was one theme that repeatedly emerged in discussions about digital sovereignty, it was migration. Many organizations already want alternatives to hyperscale cloud providers. The challenge is not willingness - it is the difficulty of leaving.

Modern cloud platforms often make onboarding relatively simple while making departure significantly harder. Technical dependencies, proprietary APIs, data formats, and operational complexity create powerful forms of lock-in. As a result, organizations frequently remain with providers not because they actively choose them, but because switching appears too costly or risky.

"Customers should stay because they want to, not because they cannot leave."

This highlights an important principle for future regulation and industry standards: every service should include an exit strategy. Migration should be considered a core capability, not an afterthought.

A truly sovereign digital ecosystem would guarantee that customers can move data, workloads, identities, and services between providers as easily as they can move into them. In practice, this means developing common APIs, shared data models, standardized export mechanisms, and interoperability requirements that make switching providers a routine process rather than a multi-year project.

The email world again offers a useful anchor. IMAP and JMAP are not perfect analogies for cloud infrastructure, but they make the principle concrete: a service becomes healthier when customers can use familiar clients, export their data, and move without rebuilding their entire digital life. Cloud services need equivalents - not just downloadable archives, but predictable APIs, documented schemas, workload portability, identity portability, and machine-readable export formats that receiving providers can actually ingest.

The EU Data Act now gives this principle regulatory force. Applicable since 12 September 2025, it includes provisions on switching between data processing services, interoperability, and the removal of commercial, technical, and contractual obstacles to cloud migration. Switching charges are also being phased out, with a complete ban due from 12 January 2027. That maps almost exactly onto the idea that every service should come with an exit strategy.

"An exit shouldn't be an escape. If leaving your provider feels like a prison break, the market is broken."

Sovereignty Requires More Than Data Residency

Many technology providers now offer "European clouds" or localized data centers. While these initiatives address some concerns, they do not solve the deeper issue of sovereignty. Physical location alone does not guarantee independence.

Organizations increasingly worry about scenarios in which foreign governments could exert influence over critical digital services. Recent geopolitical developments have made these concerns feel less theoretical than they once did. For many businesses and public institutions, sovereignty means more than knowing where data is stored. It means understanding who controls the infrastructure, who governs access, and under which legal framework critical decisions are made.

True sovereignty therefore requires transparency, portability, and operational independence - not merely regional hosting.

The Role of Regulation

Europe often faces criticism for over-regulation. Poorly designed rules can slow innovation and create barriers for smaller companies. But regulation remains one of Europe's strongest strategic tools when it enables markets rather than dictates technologies.

The challenge is distinguishing between regulation that restricts innovation and regulation that creates the conditions for fair competition. Instead of prescribing how technologies must be implemented, policymakers should focus on defining outcomes:

  • Customers must be able to migrate.

  • Data must remain portable.

  • Providers must support interoperability.

  • Open standards must be encouraged.

  • Critical infrastructure must remain resilient.

In other words, legislation should define what is required while leaving industry free to determine how best to achieve it. This approach creates space for innovation while preventing the emergence of new monopolies.

Why Europe Must Act Now

The urgency of the conversation stems from a growing recognition that technology has become a geopolitical asset. Cloud infrastructure, communication platforms, artificial intelligence, and data ecosystems are no longer merely commercial products. They are strategic capabilities that influence economic competitiveness, political independence, and national security.

Europe cannot afford to miss another technological wave. Artificial intelligence presents a unique opportunity. Rather than attempting to replicate the centralized models that dominate today's cloud landscape, Europe can build an ecosystem founded on interoperability, openness, and federation from the start.

This is where smaller European providers have a different role to play. They do not need to become hyperscalers to matter. They need to become interoperable, trustworthy, portable, and easy to leave - because a market where customers can leave is also a market where providers must keep earning trust.

"In Europe we don't really have competitors, we have friends working toward the same goal."

The window may be narrow, but it remains open.

A European Way Forward

“Europe doesn’t need to build a copy of Google. It needs to build something fundamentally different: open, sovereign and aligned with European values.

Real digital independence starts when communication, collaboration and infrastructure are no longer controlled by surveillance-driven platforms. And true resilience means having a credible Plan B built through European collaboration instead of dependency on a single vendor or ecosystem.”

Diana Krieger, CEO, Soverin

The future of European digital sovereignty does not depend on creating a single technology giant capable of rivaling Silicon Valley. Instead, it depends on creating an environment where many providers can succeed together.

A federated ecosystem built on open standards, easy migration, and interoperability would reflect Europe's greatest strengths: collaboration, diversity, and institutional trust. It would also build on the direction already visible in the Data Act, Gaia-X, EuroStack, and the broader push for a more resilient European digital infrastructure.

The objective should not be a European Google. The objective should be something more ambitious: a digital infrastructure where no organization becomes too powerful, no customer becomes trapped, and sovereignty is achieved through freedom of movement rather than concentration of control.

That may not be the American way, but it could become the European one.