Europe just started a fight over two kinds of sovereignty. The kind that builds walls, and the kind you can read, run, and trust.
Yesterday the European Commission unveiled a package of new laws meant to cut Europe's dependence on American technology. A senior EU official called it "Tech Liberation Day".
A few hours later, someone who lobbies for the big tech companies called his own industry's response to it "one of the saddest press releases I've ever worked on".
Same announcement. Two completely opposite reactions. The gap between them tells you almost everything.
So I spent yesterday reading the actual press release and the strategy documents behind it, not just the headlines. Here is what is really going on.
Start with the scale of the problem. By the EU's own reckoning, Europe gets more than 80% of its digital products and services from companies based outside the bloc. That is the hole this whole package is trying to climb out of.
For years, the official answer to that was mostly theater. "Digital sovereignty" meant renting a data center on local soil and calling it independence. This package finally drops the pretense. At its center is an open source strategy built on one simple idea: public money should buy public code. Software the state can read, run, and host itself, owned outright instead of rented from a company on the other side of an ocean. It even proposes a fund to pay the unpaid volunteers who quietly keep the world's critical software running.
Now, there is a fair objection coming, and it is worth taking seriously. Isn't this just protectionism? If Europe walls itself off and backs its own national tech giants, doesn't it split the internet into separate camps that stop working together? That worry is real. One version of "sovereignty" would do exactly that.
But it is not the only version on offer, and the difference between the two is what the next 18 months are really about.
Open source is not a wall. Open code has no nationality. Anyone can read it, run it, check it, and build on it. A government running open software it controls is free of any single vendor, and still works fine with everyone else. That is independence without cutting yourself off from the world.
Which is exactly why the lobby is unhappy. It is also the part most likely to get quietly watered down over the next 18 months, or left as a nice-sounding goal instead of a rule governments actually have to follow.
So watch for the trick. It even has a name now: sovereign-washing. A "sovereign" label slapped on the same old dependence, with nothing underneath it actually changed.
The direction is finally right. Almost all the hard work is still ahead.
So the real question for the next 18 months is not whether Europe believes in sovereignty. It is which kind wins. The kind that builds walls, or the kind you can actually read, run, and trust.
Which one are you fighting for?
