Here are the reasons why David Eaves’ “lesson” on digital sovereignty leaves aside the geopolitical dimension of digital infrastructures.
It is easy to understand why European finance ministers were captivated by the “lesson” from David Eaves, professor of digital governance at University College London, on digital sovereignty, as reported a few days ago in an article from Le Point.
Just think: a solution at almost zero cost for States seeking digital sovereignty which are drowning in operating expenses, the weight of debt and have little room for investment, necessarily constitutes an attractive prospect.
Because David Eaves’ “lesson” has something refreshing about it. It brings a breath of economic realism to a debate that is often too ideological. She reminds us that digital sovereignty cannot be built to the detriment of competitiveness. She emphasizes that interoperability is a formidable market weapon. It shifts the debate from technical independence to economic efficiency. She considers – rightly – that the search for European autarky is a technical utopia and would condemn European companies to downgrading. Finally, it reminds us that even the United States no longer controls its entire technological value chain.
And, on this point, David Eaves is probably right: interoperability is an essential condition for resilience. It reduces lock-in effects, promotes competition and gives users room for maneuver. But resilience alone does not constitute a power strategy. Because being able to change your addiction is not yet ceasing to be dependent.
His analysis even has something reassuring. Europe, failing to catch up with the physical infrastructure train that has already left, would still have a capacity for action thanks to its market power. The idea is simple: force players, particularly through public procurement and market shaping, to make their services interoperable so that cloud providers truly become interchangeable. European freedom would then no longer reside in the ownership of servers – and in a largely illusory sovereignty – but in the ability to change them at any time. Like USB-C, Europe could continue to impose global standards through its normative force alone.
But, as refreshing and reassuring as it is, this analysis is a little short.
In the history of nations, power has never been built solely with laws and regulations. It has always relied on factories, energy and today silicon. David Eaves’ vision remains fundamentally economic and competitive, while the public cloud is no longer just a market or an infrastructure service: it has become a ground for geopolitical confrontation.
In a world marked by geopolitical fragmentation, the interoperability it promotes has difficulty withstanding a major crisis or a commercial conflict. It protects neither against a physical interruption of services – the famous “kill switch” – nor against the application of extraterritorial laws, especially when three American players concentrate nearly 70% of the global market.
Believing that the law can sustainably resist raw power is illusory. The regulatory lever only works as long as the players share the same rules of the game, those of the World Trade Organization. However, everyone knows the high regard that some people have today for multilateral institutions.
More generally, the weapon of law, even if it can “liberate the weak and oppress the powerful”, to freely use the expression of Abbé Lacordaire, suffers from the pace of technological progress. By the time Europe debates, negotiates and adopts a text, technologies have already evolved several times.
As for the idea of imposing standards, as David Eaves suggests for storage – in this case an American standard – it certainly promotes interoperability in the short term, but also amounts to constitutionalizing the technological domination of American players and freezing the margins for European innovation.
The argument of commoditization, which he uses to encourage Europeans to turn away from the lower layers of the cloud – storage and calculation – is not entirely convincing. Certainly, value and dependencies have shifted to higher layers: managed databases, analytics tools, artificial intelligence services. But imagining that we could easily decouple these different layers and make AI models or complex microservice architectures interchangeable is an excessive simplification.
Likewise, considering that computing power has become a simple commodity, comparable to electricity, is no longer entirely accurate. Large hyperscalers are increasingly integrating hardware and software more closely — and by design. If an algorithm works five times faster and ten times cheaper on a proprietary architecture than on a European infrastructure, then the dependence will automatically go down to the lower layers. Interoperability will then become largely theoretical.
The reality is more complex. Value moves in pendulum movements, and dependence is exerted simultaneously at both ends: dependence on use at the top, dependence on sovereignty at the bottom. Without servers, semiconductors, and power, the upper layers are just code that cannot run. It’s a stark reminder that physical scarcity and geopolitics remain the real drivers of lockdown.
The European challenge therefore consists less of opposing the pragmatism of David Eaves to a sovereign ambition than of reconciling them. Standardize and intelligently use existing tools, of course, but without giving up gradually building true strategic autonomy.
Because interoperability is a policy of resilience; it is not power politics. It allows you to better manage an addiction, not to abolish it.
However, the public cloud – to which the entire artificial intelligence “stack” is now based – is no longer a simple software industry. It is a heavy, ultra-capital-intensive industry, comparable to rail transport or oil refining. The investments required to build and maintain cutting-edge data centers are staggering, but it will be difficult to sustainably save this industrial base. Unless we definitively agree to move from an imposed dependence to an organized dependence, and, ultimately, assume our status as a digital colony.
