European Technology Sovereignty Declaration for open, competitive and resilient digital infrastructure in Europe

Europe’s prosperity, democratic resilience and economic competitiveness depend on trusted digital technologies and infrastructures.

Technological sovereignty means that Europe has the capacity to freely design, understand, choose from different home-grown sources, build, operate and effectively regulate the digital systems on which its society and economy rely.

The European Union has built a significant regulatory framework for the digital economy, covering rules on competition, digital markets, digital platforms, data governance, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and energy efficiency. These rules reflect Europe’s commitment to trustworthy, human-centric and privacy-friendly technologies.

Yet this framework, while necessary, remains incomplete in its implementation and insufficient in its effect. Critical gaps persist: Europe's structural dependencies on non-EU technology providers have not been resolved. Enforcement has not kept pace with the scale of market distortions. The EU's digital ecosystem continues to face conditions where non-European providers operate at a structural advantage that exempt them from the standards Europe expects of its own actors.

These dependencies are not merely economic vulnerabilities: they represent strategic exposure in an era of tense geopolitical competition and technological decoupling. They constrain European policy autonomy, limit the ability of public and private organisations as well as citizens to make sovereign decisions and regain control over their own data and systems, while hampering the deployment of European-based technology providers who cannot compete on equal footing.

It is therefore time for the Union to act with ambition, use and strengthen its technological capabilities through investment, open ecosystems, sovereign and resilient infrastructure.

We invite the European Commission and Member States to commit to strengthening Europe’s digital foundations through openness, interoperability as well as fair competition and strategic regulations. To that regard we support the following principles:

1. Strategic Technological Sovereignty

Europe must foster the ability to operate and maintain critical digital infrastructure independently, particularly in cloud services, (quantum) computing infrastructure, networks, data platforms, online advertising and artificial intelligence, as well as operating systems, browsers, search engines, office software and social media. Developing its capabilities in the semiconductor sector is also of key importance.

2. Plurality and competition in Digital Markets

A resilient digital ecosystem requires multiple competing suppliers across all layers of the technology stack. Structural concentration - whether at the infrastructure, platform or application layer - creates systemic fragility and strategic exposure. We support a market structure that prevents systemic dependency on a single provider or ecosystem and enables European companies, start-ups and SMEs to scale and compete effectively. We call on the European public authorities to enforce the existing digital rulebook with more vigour and speed and to deploy corrective measures where enforcement alone cannot resolve entrenched dependencies.

3. Distributed and Resilient Digital Infrastructure

Europe must ensure the availability of secure, geographically distributed and interoperable infrastructures, including cloud and edge computing, sustainable data centres, secure connectivity and networks, as well as a sovereign European web index to enable independent web search and thus provide open and unbiased access to web data. A multi-vendor, interoperable and distributed infrastructure ecosystem strengthens resilience against economic disruption, cyber threats and geopolitical crises.

4. Strategic Public Procurement

Public procurement has always been a key lever for shaping digital markets. It has heavily contributed to giving non-European vendors an advantage over European companies. Now is the time to re-open the market and rebalance the way that procurement has been done. Digital infrastructure choices should aim to reduce dependencies on non-European companies subject to a different legal framework and help to build and retain talent and capacities in Europe. Public demand should help create viable markets for those European digital solutions and infrastructures that champion principles and values such as openness, collaboration, privacy and energy efficiency as well as social and environmental rights.

5. Interoperability and Open Standards

Open standards and interoperable systems are the structural foundation of competitive and resilient digital markets. They enable individuals and organisations to choose providers freely and switch when necessary, strengthening competition, innovation and resilience.

We promote open and widely accessible technical standards, data portability and full service interoperability, modular architectures enabling component substitution, digital systems designed to prevent vendor lock-in and fit to user preferences and feedback. To that regard, open source and client-to-service interoperability are recognised as enablers of greater technological autonomy by allowing users to deploy, adapt and host systems on their own terms, at the same time reducing the concentration of power over information flows.

6. Transparency and integrity in sovereignty claims

To avoid any risk of “sovereignty washing”, claims of sovereign technology must be grounded in clear and enforceable criteria, that reflect genuine operational control, privacy, transparency, as much interoperability as possible and legal independence from non-democratic jurisdictions - particularly in the context of highly critical use cases involving government data, critical national infrastructure or sensitive personal information. Policies and procurement decisions should favour solutions that demonstrably strengthen Europe’s digital autonomy.

First signatories

EU Tech Stars

• Anne Duboscq, Public Affairs and Communication Director, OVHcloud

• Christos Floros, CEO, Monnett Social

• Felix Hlatky, Executive Director, Mastodon

• Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO, NextCloud

• Julie Latawiec, Director for Public Affairs, Cloud Temple

• Jutta Horstmann, Co-CEO, Heinlein Group

• Matthijs Rijlaarsdam, Founder and CEO, QuantWare

• Quentin Adam, CEO and Founder, Clever Cloud

• Raphaël Auphan, COO, Proton

• Román Orús, Cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer, Multiverse Computing 

• Sebastian Vogelsang, Co-Lead, Eurosky; Founder and CEO, flashes for Bluesky

• Wessel Klein Snakenborg, Founder and CEO, NovaCustom

• Wolfgang Oels, Chief Operating Officer, Ecosia

Civil Society

• Alice Stollmeyer, Founder and Director, Defend Democracy

• Björn Staschen, Director, Save Social

• Michael Hrebeniak (Dr), Convenor, NSotA

• Romain Beylerian, Vice Secretary, Association Tournesol

• Siddhi Pal, Lead, AI Workforce and Innovation, Interface

• Tobias B. Bacherle, Senior Germany Lead, FOTI (Future of Technology Institute)

MEPs

• Alexandra Geese, MEP, Greens/EFA

• David Cormand, MEP, Greens/EFA

• Diana Riba i Giner, MEP, EFA President and first Vice-President of the Greens/EFA Group

• Kim Van Sparrentak, MEP, Greens/EFA

• Reinier van Lanschot, MEP, Greens/EFA

• Sergey Lagodinsky, MEP and Vice-President of the Greens/EFA Group

• Terry Reintke, MEP and Co-President of the Greens/EFA Group