Bridging the Dutch and European Digital Sovereignty gap

Now is the time for Europe to be digitally sovereign,” German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja
Kallas, and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said this in a joint letter1 because:
• 92% of data from the West is hosted in the US and only 4% is stored in
Europe.2
• The core of the digital infrastructure is provided by non-European suppliers
(e.g. for routers, switches, encryptors and servers).3
• There are no European companies in the Top 20 of global tech brands.
At least four nations from the EU want to become digital sovereign since it has
become a concern for policymakers who feel too much power is in the hands of a
small number of large tech companies.4 This results in a strong digital dependence,
which means a lack of competition which could adversely affect the setting of fair
prices and the quality of products, as well as innovation.5
The COVID19 pandemic,
which made us more dependent on digital technologies, has stimulated the debate
on digital sovereignty in the Netherlands and in Europe; digital sovereignty has
recently been placed on the political agenda, and can be defined as: “control over
the design and use of (business) critical digital systems, algorithms and the data
generated and processed with them”.6
In the digital domain, Europe is primarily focusing on regulatory power, in its most
explicit form through for instance the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
the Data Governance Act., and the Digital Services Act (DSA). The American
sometimes say about this: ‘the US innovates, Europe regulates’.7 Europe claims
moral and legal authority, in which, for example, privacy is regarded as a collective
fundamental right and not as something that can be arranged between the
individual consumer and service provider through conditions and settings.8 The
chairman of the European Commission von der Leyen has commented on this and
said; “you must not only regulate, but also have the technology to anchor your own
values”.9 However, this involves a balancing act when achieving a certain degree
of autonomy and self-reliance without pursuing protectionist policies.
In general, there is a lot of unclarity about digital sovereignty, and a clear
multidisciplinary overview to enable digital sovereignty is currently lacking.
Questions such as: ‘what measures are currently in place and which measures are
still missing’, are pressing yet remain unanswered. In this paper, we will answer
these questions. We also focus on the role that applied research can fulfil to
improve digital sovereignty for the Netherlands and Europe.