The servers, platforms, and protocols that carry European commerce, governance, and communication are overwhelmingly owned, operated, and subject to the laws of jurisdictions outside the European Union. This is not an abstract concern. It is a structural condition — one that shapes what Europe can do, what laws it can enforce, and how resilient its institutions are when the political weather changes.
The question is no longer whether Europe should build alternatives. It is whether it will move quickly enough to matter.
I. The Geopolitical Stakes
Digital infrastructure is not neutral. Every service hosted outside European jurisdiction is subject to the legal regime of the country where it operates — including extraterritorial provisions such as the US CLOUD Act, which can compel disclosure of European data regardless of where that data is physically stored. When European institutions use foreign platforms for sensitive communication, they are, in practice, operating under foreign law.
This dependency is a strategic liability. Europe has learned, through energy, what happens when critical infrastructure is controlled by parties whose interests may not align with European values and long-term stability. Digital infrastructure is following the same trajectory — but faster, and with deeper integration into daily governance, healthcare, finance, and education.
A Europe that cannot run its own digital systems without permission from foreign jurisdictions is not fully sovereign. Geopolitical disruption — whether political, legal, or commercial — can translate directly into operational failure for organisations that have not prepared for it. The exposure is not hypothetical. It is present in every cloud contract signed under a foreign governing law.
II. The Business Case
Sovereignty is not a retreat from the global economy. It is a precondition for participating in it on European terms.
European organisations face growing regulatory obligations that are difficult or impossible to fulfil when infrastructure is operated by entities outside European law. Compliance is not only a legal matter — it is a commercial one. Contracts, audits, and public procurement increasingly require demonstrable data residency and verifiable chain-of-custody. Organisations that cannot evidence these will be excluded from markets that require them.
There is also a risk management dimension that is too often underweighted. Vendor lock-in — technical, contractual, or jurisdictional — is an operational risk. Organisations that have built critical processes around a single foreign provider are exposed to unilateral price changes, service terminations, or political disruption in ways that well-designed European alternatives largely eliminate.
The economic case for investment in European digital capacity is strong. European cloud providers, open-source alternatives, and interoperability standards create real market opportunities. Organisations that transition deliberately and early gain competitive advantage over those that wait until transition is forced upon them.
III. Compliance and Enforcement
European law already provides the framework. GDPR establishes data subject rights and processing obligations that cannot be delegated to jurisdictions that do not recognise them. NIS2 imposes security and resilience requirements on operators of essential services. DORA creates binding standards for financial sector ICT risk management. Sector-specific regulation — in healthcare, critical infrastructure, and public administration — extends this logic further.
The gap is not legislation. It is enforcement — and enforcement requires that infrastructure be legible. When data is processed in systems that European regulators cannot audit, when contracts are governed by laws that do not recognise European judicial authority, enforcement becomes theoretical. Compliance on paper without operational sovereignty is a fragile position.
Moving infrastructure under European jurisdiction is not a bureaucratic preference. It is what makes compliance real and defensible — before regulators, before auditors, and before the organisations and citizens that depend on it.
IV. The Path Forward
Europe does not need to rebuild the internet from scratch. It needs to make deliberate choices about which systems are critical, who operates them, and under what legal framework. It needs to invest in the capabilities — technical, organisational, and financial — that allow those choices to be made without compromising operational continuity.
That means mapping exposure honestly. It means identifying European alternatives that are viable today, not just aspirationally. It means governing transitions with the same rigour applied to any other operational risk. And it means treating digital sovereignty not as an ideological stance but as a practical engineering and governance challenge — one that is solvable with the right approach and the willingness to act.
The window for this work is open. The question is whether Europe will use it.