Europe’s Misguided Plans for Pursuing Digital Independence

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, August 30, 2026

 

After years of living in denial, the European Union has seemingly finally noticed that it lacks something the U.S. has: a vibrant tech sector. Europe’s lack of a tech industry has increasingly left it dependent on America and Silicon Valley. Two new initiatives aim to mitigate this issue and take Europe toward “digital independence.” Sadly, they are both misguided.

 

The first is EuroStack, an initiative that originated from a multiparty conference at the European Parliament in September 2024. Out of this came a policy report envisioning a way to break European dependency across raw materials and chips, networks, cloud, software, data, and AI through €300 billion of investment across ten years.

 

In parallel, the industry-led EuroStack Industry Initiative began its work lobbying policymakers to create artificial demand for European tech through public procurement (its pillars are “Buy European,” “Sell European,” and “Fund European”). EuroStack has been publicly endorsed by several European leaders, as well as by the European Parliament’s industry, research, and energy (ITRE) committee.

 

While one cannot fault the European tech sector for looking for a bailout, it is unlikely it will be able to grow as long as the regulatory attitude toward tech remains hostile. The EU itself is the main culprit through regulations such as the GDPR, Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, and AI Act. It is, perhaps, quite telling that the EU tech sector seems to have given up hope that these regulations may be lifted and instead seems to simply aim to have some of the costs of compliance reimbursed through public procurement contracts.

 

Yet, the idea that €300 billion over ten years would bring Europe anywhere close to digital independence is ludicrous. In Silicon Valley, this kind of money is spare change. Spread across an entire continent’s technological supply chain, it looks more like miserly alms to the impoverished EU tech sector.

 

The industry wing has conceded as much and made it clear that the €300 billion figure is not the real prize, going as far as to say it’s become a “distraction.” What they most want is a slice of the demand that Europe already sends abroad: most importantly, the roughly €260 billion that European organizations spend on U.S. cloud and software annually.

 

Most of the €300 billion would not be a single new line on the EU’s budget. Yet, for contrast, over the 2021–2027 period, the EU has earmarked approximately €661 billion to be spent on the climate transition. Clearly, nobody in Brussels anticipated the AI race when going all in on climate. Now, with so much of the budget already dedicated to a transition that is leaving Europe less technologically independent by the day, options to genuinely support the continent’s tech sector in a meaningful way are far more limited.

 

Beyond deregulation, Europe’s best chance is — for once — to follow Sweden’s lead: As one of the only European countries that is punching above its weight in producing “unicorns,” Sweden could teach the rest of the European Union a lesson on facilitating venture capital growth. For a high-tax economy, Sweden’s treatment of start-ups and serial entrepreneurs is shockingly libertarian, with highly preferential tax treatment of employee stock options and angel investors. And of course, we don’t have silly things like wealth taxes.

 

Limiting public procurement options through “Buy European” rules is likely to have the opposite effect: Unable to simply purchase digital services from whoever offers the best quality, public sectors throughout the union would become less efficient, giving taxpayers even less bang for the large buck they pay in taxes in most of the EU. It is also debatable if such rules will even prove to be compatible with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Government Procurement Agreement — not that anyone seems to care about the WTO anymore.

 

More troublingly, a tech sector kept alive through the life support of taxpayer money would not be a tech sector that could meaningfully innovate in a way that contributes to productivity. Instead of optimizing for everyday users, businesses will optimize for tenders. Once businesses are on the receiving end of bureaucratic chest compressions, their goal turns from pleasing consumers to pleasing the bureaucrats pounding on their ribcages. Of course, considering the EU’s hostile attitude toward tech, it may not view an enthralled tech industry as a bad thing; at least it will be easier to regulate.

 

Which brings us to EuroSky, a project launched publicly in April this year by the Netherlands-based Modal Foundation, providing a European-hosted infrastructure for the AT Protocol, which is the same open standard that Bluesky runs on.

 

While a separate initiative from EuroStack, it too seeks to bring digital independence to Europe by creating a European social media ecosystem with data servers based in Europe and a shared layer of social media infrastructure. Among its founders is Sebastian Vogelsang, who also founded the Bluesky-based app Flashes.

 

With all EuroSky social media platforms based in Europe, the shared content moderation envisioned by its founders would by necessity have to align with EU law. Apparently not seeing the irony, Robin Berjon, another one of its architects, described EuroSky as a way to get around “authoritarian infrastructure providers.”

 

While he did not explicitly name Elon Musk as the “authoritarian” in question, Musk has a long-running conflict with the EU, with European policymakers repeatedly threatening to ban X. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the very first homegrown EuroSky social media app is a microblogging platform, Mu.

 

Of course, on its own, any EuroSky social media platform will fail for the same reason that Bluesky, Threads, and all others did: The number of people willing to abandon a thriving platform because they dislike the owner’s political views is small. Competitors therefore almost automatically become intolerable leper colonies full of bitter people who use their competing platforms for little else than just complaining about the other platform and posting stuff that would not be allowed or would not be prioritized by the other platform’s algorithm.

 

Prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, several right-wing alternatives like Parler failed like Bluesky to gain widespread adoption because their initial user bases of angry political radicals scared off any users other than those on the fringes of politics.

 

That is not to say that EuroSky platforms may not play any role. One reason European policymakers have failed to ban X and other repeat offenders of the Digital Services Act is that they know there is no alternative they could direct users to if these platforms were geoblocked. Without an alternative, the political price of taking away platforms that users have come to rely on for years would just be too great. This is where EuroSky would come in.

 

While digital independence is a serious issue for Europe, neither EuroStack nor EuroSky offers serious answers: Europe does not lack for engineers, capital, and market size. What it lacks is a political class willing to let go of its “regulate first, ask questions later” attitude toward tech innovation. Neither public procurement nor a “safe space” social media ecosystem will ever replace the successful formula that once built Silicon Valley: allowing people to build things that the state has not already approved.