The Case for a EuroStack

Over the last few years, Europe’s dependency on global tech companies has been identified as a critical weakness, prompting the need to work on alternatives. Until now, most efforts have focused on regulation, but their impact has been minimal. Indeed, we are still missing several key parts of the story: companies that can be accelerated, capital to accelerate them, and smart buyers who can act as early adopters. When they do exist, they are not part of a coordinated strategy. Can we Europeans use our money, our people, and our energy in a better way? Can we realistically get to a “EuroStack” of solutions that provides workable alternatives at all the layers of our digital infrastructure, and, if so, how?

A quest for digital autonomy

The words “digital sovereignty” and “digital autonomy” have become ubiquitous in European political and regulatory debates. In Brussels and most other capitals, at conferences and on mailing lists, policy people lament how our economy and all our lives are based on products and services provided by a few big American or Chinese companies. This dependency is dangerous for a number of reasons, from national security to tax revenue, from privacy to competitiveness, from employment levels to democracy itself. In line with the principles of a market economy, the scarcity of competition and the consolidation of gigantic amounts of money and power (and data!) into a few hands is a clear failure.

The solution seems simple: let’s develop European products that are viable alternatives that we can use instead. Europe has strong capabilities; we have innovators and business people, software developers and hardware designers, researchers and academics. Somehow, however, we often fail to create companies and products that can compete with the American ones.

The last European Commission decided to attack the problem through regulation. All in all, they said, GDPR was an outstanding success, setting the privacy agenda throughout the planet, so we should just do the same for digital markets. They produced some good pieces of legislation, like the Digital Markets Act, that try to prevent dominant companies from enclosing customers in walled gardens and thwarting competition. They are slowly starting to be enforced, but the process will take time.

However, it is now clear that we need more. Regulation can restore the conditions for fair competition, but it is not enough. Even if potential competition exists, or even if a group of developers can produce a messaging app as good as WhatsApp or an AI system as good as ChatGPT, they will not become seriously competitive if they lack the capital to grow and get known and provide services at scale. Furthermore, European buyers are tied to the incumbents by a web of contracts, relationships, lack of awareness, and digital conservatism.

Moreover, true autonomy requires alternatives for all links in the chain, from chips to mobile apps; if one is missing, the dependency remains. We do not just need a new app, we need an entire ecosystem of European solutions at all layers of the deep stack of digital technologies that underlie the icons on the screen of our phones; in short, we need a “EuroStack”.

How do we get there?

We now have a few years of experience in our collective attempts to provoke alternatives; some of them were useful, others were not.

Top-down approaches have often produced scarce results, if not total failures. The European Union’s attempts to make the cloud infrastructure market contestable, first via regulation and then via GAIA-X, have not brought forward any significant change; the share of European players, even the biggest ones, is still shrinking. Sometimes, these attempts were misguided or a victim of incorrect assumptions; sometimes, they were weakened by the direct or indirect action of big tech players. Sometimes, European institutions have been paralyzed by a desire to “play fair” towards global commerce and international partners, even if the other geopolitical players are not playing fair at all.

On the other hand, we have seen workable models emerge in the productivity and communications sphere, such as openDesk and La Suite Numérique. These models are based on the private sector federating and integrating its products, while the public sector provides leadership and requirements and acts as an early adopter. They seem promising, as long as governments are ready to “buy European” by choice.

For this kind of project, we can rely on open source and open standards, as they enable cooperation. Europe’s archipelago of countries, languages, markets, and SMEs can join forces through openness and standardization so that big platforms can be broken down into smaller components that can realistically be developed by individual companies. Such a modular approach would also prevent vendor lock-in.

Big tech’s icons are more iconic, or maybe not

End-users vote with their feet. The public sector may decide that adopting locally developed platforms is more important than a good-looking, super-effective user interface. The private sector and consumers are different. To succeed, we must put users and adoption at the center; “buy European” should not imply acquiring inferior products.

Sometimes, there is indeed a feature and usability gap; we need investment to put European alternatives on a par with the best global competitors. In many cases, there is no real gap; European products seem weird because they are different. We are so used to the American ones that the burden of change seems too high, even if it’s just the position and shape of the icons.

In other cases, the incumbents impose the gap; for our products to work well, it might be necessary to force open the existing closed solutions. Our software should be allowed to interoperate and provide good user experiences or have fair access to the same datasets.

This kind of barrier needs to be addressed by European institutions through regulation and enforcement. In the past, the implementation of pro-competitive regulation has been “too little, too late”; for a global giant, even a fine of one billion euros may be too little to prompt changes in behavior. In a world where other countries are ready to ban entire apps or de-facto nationalize them if this suits their national interest, Europe’s enforcement of fair digital markets needs to become more daring and firmer.

A collective effort, a comprehensive strategy

Each layer of the digital stack is different. In some layers, a private initiative to federate and integrate existing products can be sufficient; in others, direct public investment is necessary – for example, in chip-making facilities and computing capacity. All of these considerations must become a strategy, so no link is missed. We need to address all of the planes of the “EuroStack”, building alternatives for all layers as part of a reasoned strategy, focusing efforts and money on what is urgent and actually missing.

However, all these efforts will be moot without firm political commitment. Public procurement can be the key to starting and accelerating the development and adoption of new products, making them ready for full competition in the B2B and B2C markets. Indeed, the new Commission has declared the intention to prioritize European products in public procurement.

As an industry, the responsibility lies upon us; first of all, the responsibility to ensure that there are great products to buy, and that we are not just rebadging code and devices produced elsewhere. If we succeed, we will succeed as companies, and we will succeed as a society. In a world where tariffs, cold conflicts, and even open wars resurface quickly, if we continue depending on global, closed platforms, Europe as a continent is bound for decline.

Vittorio Bertola is Head of Policy & Innovation at Open-Xchange, a global leader in services and free software for the Internet's email and DNS infrastructure, where he follows regulatory and standardization developments advocating an open Internet based on user choice, privacy, and federation, and promoting the adoption of open source software. Previously, he worked as a freelance consultant, as a website developer and as partner, founder or CTO in several Internet start-ups in Italy. In the last twenty-five years, he served in many Internet governance organizations, including the ICANN Board and the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance.