The European Commission has published its new Tech Sovereignty Plan. On the surface this sounds promising. Europe talks about reducing dependence on foreign tech giants, strengthening digital autonomy, and supporting open source. These are all things many of us in the #openweb world have been arguing for decades.
But when you look at where the money and attention actually go, a different picture emerges. The plan allocates vast resources to semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, AI, and data centres. Open source gets a much smaller slice of the pie, and native #openweb like the #Fediverse barely registers at all. The one notable mention is support for decentralised social media, highlighted through the Commission’s continued use of Mastodon. (Digital Strategy)
The problem is that this isn’t new, as the European Commission has already been running a Mastodon server for years. Extending account creation to more EU institutions is not a strategic breakthrough, it is clicking a button that could have been clicked years ago. If this is the flagship example of support for social communication sovereignty, then the ambition is criminally limited.
The issue is that the Commission still does not understand that social infrastructure is infrastructure. We hear endless noise about sovereign AI, sovereign cloud, sovereign chips, and sovereign data centres. Yet the FOSS code and communities through which citizens actually communicate, organise, publish, collaborate, and build are treated as an afterthought.
The result is a contradiction – Europe recognises that depending on foreign cloud providers is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign AI companies is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign semiconductor supply chains is a strategic weakness. Yet dependence on a handful of US-owned social platforms for public discourse apparently remains acceptable. Who needs sovereignty over communication anyway?
The #openweb blind spot is the normal long-running #geekproblem in institutional form. Policymakers see infrastructure as technical systems. Servers, processors, storage, networks. But the real value of the internet was never the hardware, it was always the social layer built on top. The #openweb succeeded because it created shared public spaces based on open standards. Email. RSS. Blogs. Forums. Early independent media. Later, federated systems like ActivityPub.
The Commission’s sovereignty agenda focuses on plumbing while ignoring the public spaces that the plumbing exists to support. Without investment in #4opens social protocols, community governance, and public communication infrastructure, Europe is building sovereign pipes that still carry people back into the same #dotcons corporate platforms.
Open source without communities is the unspoken problem. The Commission talks about open source as a strategic asset for European competitiveness and sovereignty. That’s welcome as far as it goes. But open source is not simply a collection of code repositories, it survives because communities maintain it.
The danger is that Europe treats open source as a procurement strategy rather than a social ecosystem. Buy some software, fund a few projects, write a strategy document, then assume the problem is solved.
Real digital sovereignty requires long-term investment in communities of use, admins, mods, maintainers, governance, interoperability, and public institutions that can steward shared infrastructure over decades. Even many open-source advocates point out that procurement rules, short-term funding cycles, and “open-source washing” continue to undermine the ecosystem. (FSFE – Free Software Foundation Europe). You cannot buy sovereignty off the shelf.
From an #OMN perspective, the weakness in the Tech Sovereignty Plan is that it remains trapped inside an industrial understanding of technology. Technology is not just hardware, technology is not just software, technology is social relations embodied in tools. If Europe wants genuine digital sovereignty, it needs to invest in:
- Open social protocols.
- Federated communication infrastructure.
- Community-owned media.
- Public digital commons.
- Open governance.
- Long-term stewardship of shared resources.
- The social institutions needed to keep these systems alive.
Without this, “tech sovereignty” is another industrial policy aimed at creating European versions of existing #dotcons platforms. That may reduce dependence on Silicon Valley, but it does not necessarily increase freedom.
Beyond “sovereignty” is the deeper question – not whether Europe controls its technology stack. The deeper question is whether citizens control the systems that shape their lives. The Commission is slowly beginning to recognise the importance of open source. That’s a positive step. But as things stand, social communication sovereignty remains a tiny footnote in a strategy dominated by chips, cloud, AI, and data centres.
For the #openweb, that is the wrong way round, the future of “digital sovereignty” is not simply owning the infrastructure, it is owning the public spaces built on top of it.
#OMN #OpenWeb #Fediverse #ActivityPub #TechSovereignty #EU #OpenSource #DigitalCommons #4opens
The problem with the #EU Eurocracy on social and tech issues isn’t usually only malice, it’s institutional incompetence. They struggle to understand grassroots digital culture, the #openweb, commons-based governance, and the social realities of how technology actually works.
That leaves us with a choice. We can try to engage, push, educate, and help them become a little less incompetent. Or we can focus entirely on tearing down existing institutions.
The danger with the second path is obvious. Vacuums rarely stay empty. If progressive and grassroots voices walk away, the people most ready to fill the space are the nationalist, authoritarian, and right-wing forces already waiting in the wings.
This isn’t just an #EU issue. It applies to most #mainstreaming institutions. They are often failing, slow-moving, and trapped in outdated assumptions. But abandoning them entirely doesn’t automatically lead somewhere better.
The challenge is to build alternatives like #OMN and the #openweb while also applying enough pressure, education, and challenge to stop existing institutions from becoming even worse.
Not a comfortable path, but likely the least dangerous one.
