The Wrong Goal: A European Big Tech Monopoly
When discussing digital sovereignty, many instinctively imagine a European equivalent of Google or Amazon: a company large enough to compete globally while keeping profits, infrastructure, and control within Europe.
The appeal is understandable. A European technology champion could ensure that critical infrastructure remains subject to European laws, oversight, and interests.
But creating a European version of today’s Big Tech risks recreating the same problems Europe is trying to solve. Large technology monopolies create dependency. They make migration difficult, lock customers into proprietary ecosystems, and accumulate enormous influence over businesses, governments, and citizens.
Whether the headquarters are in California or Brussels, concentration of power remains concentration of power.
Digital sovereignty should not mean 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 sovereignty debate often assumes that Europe must imitate the American technology model to compete with it. Yet Europe’s strength may lie somewhere else.
The United States excels at creating technology giants. China has developed a highly centralized digital ecosystem. Europe, by contrast, has repeatedly demonstrated strength in cooperation through standards.
Telecommunications offers a powerful example. Europe did not succeed by creating a single telecom monopoly. It established common standards that allowed many providers across different countries to operate together. Consumers benefited from competition, portability, and interoperability.
The same principle could guide Europe’s digital future.
Instead of trying to produce one dominant European provider, Europe can create the conditions in which many providers compete while working together.
A Federated Alternative
A federated digital ecosystem offers a different model.
The idea is already taking shape. Gaia-X has placed federation, trust frameworks, and interoperable data infrastructure at the center of the European sovereignty discussion. EuroStack argues for a broader European technology stack spanning cloud, software, AI, connectivity, and platforms.
The next challenge is turning those ambitions into practical market rules and services that organizations can actually use.
In a federated system, providers compete while adhering to shared technical and legal standards. Customers can move between them without prohibitive cost, complexity, or disruption. Innovation continues, but no individual company becomes indispensable.
Email provides a familiar example. Users across countless providers can communicate because shared protocols make interoperability possible. Standards such as SMTP, IMAP, and newer approaches such as JMAP allow services to work together without requiring everyone to use the same platform.
Email also demonstrates why standards alone are not enough. Open protocols have not prevented concentration. Gmail and Outlook still exert enormous influence over deliverability, spam filtering, and user expectations.
That strengthens rather than weakens the case for federation. It shows that open standards must be combined with portability, transparent governance, and meaningful switching rights.
“We need to revive the spirit of the early internet: interoperability through open standards, not walled gardens.”
Applied to Europe’s digital infrastructure, federation could encompass cloud computing, storage, collaboration, identity, AI, communications, and other essential services.
The model aligns naturally with European priorities: competition instead of monopoly, portability instead of lock-in, cooperation instead of centralization, and resilience instead of dependency.
Most importantly, it creates sovereignty without sacrificing diversity.
Migration Is the Missing Piece
One issue consistently sits at the heart of digital sovereignty: migration.
Many organizations already want credible alternatives to hyperscale cloud providers. Their biggest obstacle is often not willingness to leave, but the difficulty of doing so.
Modern platforms tend to make onboarding straightforward while making departure considerably harder. Proprietary APIs, technical dependencies, incompatible data formats, contractual complexity, and operational risk create powerful forms of lock-in.
Organizations may therefore remain with a provider not because it is still their preferred choice, but because switching appears too costly or disruptive.
“Customers should stay because they want to, not because they cannot leave.”
That suggests a simple principle: every digital service should come with an exit strategy.
Migration should be treated as a core capability, not an afterthought.
A genuinely sovereign ecosystem would allow customers to move data, workloads, identities, and services between providers predictably. That requires common APIs, documented data models, standardized exports, interoperability requirements, and receiving systems capable of ingesting what another provider exports.
Again, email makes the principle tangible. The analogy is imperfect, but users understand that they should be able to access their messages through familiar clients and move their data without rebuilding their entire digital lives.
Cloud services need equivalent mechanisms: not merely downloadable archives, but documented schemas, workload portability, identity portability, machine-readable formats, and interoperable interfaces.
European legislation is increasingly moving in this direction. The EU Data Act includes requirements relating to switching between data-processing services, interoperability, and the removal of commercial, contractual, and technical obstacles to cloud migration. Switching charges are also being phased out.
The principle is powerful because sovereignty becomes measurable. Can the customer leave? Can another provider take over? Can essential data and services continue operating?
“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
The rapid growth of “European cloud” offerings and European data centers addresses an important part of the sovereignty question, but physical location alone cannot guarantee independence.
Organizations increasingly consider what would happen if foreign governments, legal regimes, or corporate decisions affected access to critical infrastructure.
For businesses and public institutions, sovereignty therefore means more than knowing where a server is located. It means understanding who controls the infrastructure, who governs access to it, which laws apply, and whether operations could continue if relationships or geopolitical conditions changed.
True sovereignty requires transparency, portability, legal clarity, and operational independence.
Data residency matters. But it is only one component of a much broader resilience strategy.
Regulation as Market Infrastructure
Europe is frequently criticized for regulating technology too aggressively. Poorly designed regulation can indeed slow innovation or impose disproportionate burdens on smaller companies.
But regulation can also be one of Europe’s most effective strategic tools when it enables markets rather than dictates technologies.
The distinction is crucial.
Policymakers do not necessarily need to prescribe exactly how systems should be built. They can instead establish the conditions that a healthy digital market must provide: customers must be able to migrate, data must remain portable, providers must support interoperability, open standards should be encouraged, and critical infrastructure must remain resilient.
Legislation can define the outcome while leaving companies free to compete over how best to achieve it.
Done well, this approach supports innovation while making lock-in and excessive concentration harder to sustain.
Why Europe Must Act Now
Technology has become a geopolitical asset.
Cloud infrastructure, communications, artificial intelligence, software platforms, and data ecosystems are no longer merely commercial services. They influence economic competitiveness, political independence, public administration, and national security.
Europe cannot afford to approach the next generation of digital infrastructure as merely a consumer.
Artificial intelligence creates a particularly important opportunity. Rather than building AI on top of the same centralized infrastructure model that dominates today’s cloud market, Europe can embed interoperability, openness, portability, and federation from the beginning.
Smaller European providers have an important role in that future. They do not all need to become hyperscalers.
They need to become interoperable, trustworthy, portable, and easy to leave.
Paradoxically, a market in which customers can easily leave may produce stronger providers, because companies must continuously earn loyalty through service, innovation, security, and trust rather than technical dependency.
“In Europe we don’t really have competitors, we have friends working toward the same goal.”
A European Way Forward
Diana Krieger, CEO of Soverin, summarizes the opportunity:
“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.”
The future of European digital sovereignty does not depend on producing one company capable of rivaling Silicon Valley.
It depends on creating an environment in which many providers can succeed together.
A federated ecosystem based on open standards, interoperability, portability, and simple migration would build on some of Europe’s greatest strengths: collaboration, diversity, institutional trust, and the ability to establish common rules across complex markets.
It would also build on the direction already visible in initiatives such as Gaia-X, EuroStack, the EU Data Act, and the broader movement toward resilient European digital infrastructure.
For the Data Sovereignty Pavilion at Expo 2026, this is perhaps the most important idea to demonstrate: sovereignty is not simply about owning infrastructure. It is about preserving freedom of choice.
The objective should not be a European Google.
It should be something more ambitious: a digital ecosystem in which no provider becomes indispensable, no customer becomes trapped, and resilience comes from the ability to move, cooperate, and adapt.
That may not be the American way.
But it could become the European one.
This blog post is a contribution from Soverin, a privacy-first European email provider working to advance digital sovereignty through open ecosystems, European infrastructure, and a no-surveillance business model. For more information, visit https://soverin.com/? or stop by the Soverin booth at Data Expo.
Authors: André Meij & Genevieve O’Kelly