If Europe wants sovereignty, it must back its digital infrastructure

Europe keeps asking why it does not produce global hyperscalers. That question misses the strategic layer entirely.

Europe’s most consequential digital contributions were never designed to become dominant platforms. They were designed to become shared infrastructure.

The Web emerged as an open standard, not a product. Linux underpins data centers, cloud platforms and critical systems worldwide. Git structures how almost all modern software is built. Projects like LibreOffice, VLC and Mastodon follow the same pattern.

None of these optimized for market capture. All of them optimized for durability, interoperability and reuse.

That design choice has second‑order effects that matter far beyond technology.

Open infrastructure reduces asymmetries of power. It allows startups, public institutions, NGOs and smaller states to operate on the same technical footing as large corporations. No permission is required to participate. No single actor controls access or pricing.

It also preserves the right to exit. When governance fails, users can switch providers, fork projects or continue independently. That ability to leave without consent is not a nice‑to‑have. It is a structural precondition for democratic systems.

Finally, open systems shift trust away from corporate authority towards verifiable processes: published standards, auditable code, shared governance. Legitimacy comes from procedure rather than ownership.

These properties explain why open infrastructure tends to outlive companies, regimes and political cycles. It is resilient precisely because no one owns it.

This is where Europe’s strategic failure becomes visible.

Europe already hosts communities that build and maintain infrastructure for the common good, often explicitly choosing long‑term usefulness over personal wealth. These communities deliver exactly the resilience policymakers say they want.

Yet they remain underfunded, under protected and politically peripheral.

At the same time, Europe continues to deepen its dependence on expensive, opaque and increasingly politically vulnerable US technology stacks. Lock‑in is no longer just commercial. It is legal and geopolitical.

If Europe wants digital sovereignty, copying hyperscalers with an EU flag attached is the wrong response.

The harder, more effective path is to recognize open digital infrastructure as strategic, to nurture the communities behind it, and to protect them through funding, procurement and governance.

The real strategic question is not why Europe lacks tech giants. It is why we systematically undervalue the infrastructure we already depend on.

That is a choice. And unlike platform dominance, it is one we can still reverse.