EU & Civil Society need to progress on Digital Autonomy

# EU & Civil Society need to progress on Digital Autonomy - Bert Hubert's writings Source: [https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-civil-society-need-progress-digital-autonomy/](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-civil-society-need-progress-digital-autonomy/) By now \(happily\) everyone wants to talk about digital autonomy, although some parties insist we talk about sovereignty\. Fine\. > tl;dr: The discussions on digital autonomy are now going round in circles\. Civil society and think tanks want to contribute, and are well placed to do so\. In this piece, I urge everyone to look further ahead, beyond legislation and talking about European values\. The road to digital sovereignty is very long, and we need to make progress along that entire road, which includes things further afield than what we are discussing now\. We will not attain any form of digital sovereignty without the help of civil society, and below is a list of things I think we should be doing more of\. I often attend events,[often in Brussels](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/democratic-tech-alliance-may-2026/), on how to improve Europe’s autonomy/sovereignty, and lately these events have left me feeling somewhat frustrated\. Although a lot of ground has been covered, it appears we are stuck\. Our talking is no longer getting us closer to digital sovereignty\. Getting actual “boots on the ground” digital sovereignty requires work by European government technical staff, who need to have management that approves of that\. That in turn requires a ministry that has decided to work like that\. And that also requires a procurement department that is VERY on board, and willing to suffer lawsuits over their efforts to procure European services\. Also, there need to be software/services companies willing and able to deliver such services to governments\. This in turn only happens if senior government people are either forced to do it because of EU rules, or they themselves believe this is necessary, and that in turn only happens if politicians care\. This is a very long chain of things that need to happen\. Yet when we \(civil society\) do events on this, no one from procurement is present\. Not even procurement groups or trade bodies\. And they are important, since they currently have no time or money to deal with the lawsuits that come with doing anything other than big tech\. Also, no IT department people ever join the conversation over at think tanks\. We rarely have vendors present\. And also, no member state government executive people in general chime in\. The work on digital sovereignty is appreciated, and I know it is also well\-intentioned\. But we need more\. ## A brief aside: what is civil society and what is its role? [Civil society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_society), including think tanks, councils, boards, committees etc, tries to influence government or more broadly societal decision making\. In a way this looks like a weird place to try to change policies\. You could join a political party and make policy directly\. Why sit on the sidelines and**talk**nonstop about things, hoping that this will deliver change? Yet, by dint of its very out\-of\-power setting, civil society has a license to speculate, to entertain quarter\- or half\-baked policy ideas, without immediate reputational consequences\. Although government and political people often attend, they won’t be held liable for listening to a discussion where novel and perhaps as yet unpalateable ideas are being raised\. Things the politician would not be able to talk about in an official setting\. “Since when is party XYZ ok with nuclear power?”\. And it is good that we can discuss such things without making headlines in the news\.  *I like to compare our civil society activities to the sweeping that happens in curling\. Source:[By Krazytea \- Own work, CC BY\-SA 4\.0](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67418322)* Policy making is difficult enough\. There are many unknowns\. The best ideas are non\-intuitive, and politicians and other decision makers are not fluent in everything \(nor even in most things, to be honest\)\. Government workers typically abhor “novel ideas”\. By discussing an idea to death in over 20 panels, it is possible to rob an idea of its dangerous novelty, and make it staid enough for people to go to bat for it in political debates\. A simple change in law may need lots of work on downstream rules and regulations\. And before authoring the change, legislators need to know a lot about the landscape and the eventual effects\. Civil society can massively smoothen this process by engaging with participants, having them speak their minds, and elaborate how they think things should work\. In this way, think tanks can also provide proven talking points to politicians\. In addition, panels, debates, work groups can expose legislators to a broad set of often world class experts\. Civil society can level a path towards desired policies, and mostly do so in a more transparent way than professional commercial lobbyists trying to do the same\. With all that, civil society is in a great place to inform, facilitate and influence decision making\. In fact, it is hard to imagine how many laws could even be made without being “pre\-soaked” in civil society meetings\. So, it is not all about \(these days\) mostly vegetarian lunches, drinks and endless discussions over definitions and what our values are\. Digital autonomy is a very physical thing\. It is not CBAM\. It is not MFF\-wrangling\. Lots of daily operations will have to be changed\. New contracts will have to be signed, data centers will have to be found, new \(kinds of\) vendors will have to be onboarded\. Staff will either need to reskill or \(more likely\) be changed for different kinds of IT professionals\. A grand overhaul\. In addition, most EU member states today are not in good control of their IT systems\. These are often outsourced, and often not working that well in the first place\. And it royally sucks to migrate a system that doesn’t work well to a new and as yet unknown \(European\) platform with which there is no experience\. Meanwhile, most IT\-professionals \(big four accountants, consultancies, integrators\) are entirely onboard with US platforms, and don’t see the need for digital sovereignty in the first place\. And beyond that, not only don’t they see the need, they’ll tell everyone that it is impossible to do it\. So governments will have to swim against the tide of accepted wisdom to get any kind of autonomy\. In short,**moving towards digital autonomy is everything that governments hate doing**, and a whole chain of politicians, directors, ministers, managers, vendors and employees people need to be convinced to make it happen\. Meanwhile, we hold near weekly meetings on how we should focus on autonomy versus sovereignty, or that “we” should work towards defining our values right, or intricate schemes to force member state governments to do what they don’t want to do\. But “we” in civil society simply don’t have that power, even if we define our values right\. ## Still, we could have an important role The traditional civil society role is to facilitate policy making, and we can still do that\. For example by talking and thinking about the things few people are talking about yet: - Procurement departments have never been incentivized to “go against the flow”\. They also have no budget to do, so they’d have a hard time funding the inevitable lawsuits\. Let’s get these people on board and air these worries, and suggest how governments could set up funds to make sure any procurement department that is doing the right thing can get the support they need - There is a lack of clarity, and frankly a lot of misinformation, about when EU member states can restrict tenders to European suppliers\. The[TFEU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Functioning_of_the_European_Union)is \(intentionally\) none too clear\. Governments trying to not have to do anything have used the[Agreement on Government Procurement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_on_Government_Procurement)to claim there is nothing they can do\. Yet, recent rulings from the EU court of justice[show that there is ample room for national security exceptions](https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/428551)\. Civil society could help publish these recent insights, and thus reassure procurement departments that it is[indeed possible to tender a government’s national login system only to European vendors](https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/05/dutch-govt-will-allow-european-company-operate-digid-platform)\. - While member state governments are reticent to attempt to procure sovereign solutions, they have absolutely**NO QUALMS**about straight up procuring Microsoft Exchange licenses\. We could help shine a very bright right on these questionable procurement practices, practices which are likely flat out illegal in many places\. - Despite the work on defining tech sovereignty or autonomy, there is a severe lack of understanding of the hierarchy of the problems\. We do have servers and software in Europe\. What we lack are work\-alikes of the US clouds\. Also, there is only one company in the world that is seen as capable as delivering office computing \(Microsoft\)\. We[should work on educating participants on which problems we actually have](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/)\. - There is a belief that governments could simply order different IT systems\. The problem is that most governments are by now*infused*with big\-tech aligned employees, contractors and consultants\. These people aren’t necessarily corrupt, but if you’ve delivered services for 25 years based on Microsoft platforms, it becomes very tricky to think about anything else\. They are good at what they’ve been doing\. Asking them to do something else might not deliver the best results, for all kinds of reasons\. This problem is not well appreciated, and talking about it more would socialize the idea that we won’t get any digital autonomy without some sort of*regime change*\. - Beyond the alignment of employees, it is a well documented fact that states have lost a lot of executive skills in general\. What[Mariana Mazucatto](https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-big-con/)calls the infantilization of governments\. Doing digital autonomy means leaving the beaten path, doing different things,*innovating*even\. This in general is something governments struggle with today\. To get anywhere, new ways may have to be found to do IT\. This might involve state owned companies that can marry private sector agility with public goals\. Airing such hybrid solutions could well pave the path towards digital autonomy\. - User experience, prepare people for some friction\. It is currently acceptable for people to say they’ll move to new \(European\) software as long as it is EXACTLY the same as the current software\. There is generally zero willingness to accept any kind of change\. Many of us probably agree\. Try getting people to*also*use Signal for example\. We should be talking about this problem and involve professional change managers who know how to get people used to new things, and document how this should be done\. - European vendors are full of ideals but need to learn how to deal with government rituals\. It is an acquired skill to win a government tender, or even to be invited to take part\. There are European software places that know how this works, and we should work with the procurement people \(see above\) on how to educate European software places on how to do this\. - Open source evangelists need to be stimulated to not only deliver open, pure and technically attractive solutions\. We should also, somehow, make regular users happy\.[I wrote a long screed on this](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/what-the-open-world-must-do-better/), and it might help to get these people at our tables as well\. - What does AI mean for our digital sovereignty? Is it an opportunity[to do something else](https://next-frontier.ai/)? Or should Europe join the queue and hand over billions of euros to NVIDIA just to take part? Let’s talk\. - European media is not engaging with European solutions\. And when they do, they hunt for people who are dissatisfied and want their normal \(Microsoft\) computer back, in the interest of balance\. Media themselves meanwhile are fully dependent on US big\-tech\. Media too might be invited so they can see what the problems are, and possibly stop “both\-sidesing” US hegemony & its risks\. - The[EU Digital Sovereignty Package](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-tech-sovereignty)contains a lot of words on supporting Open Source and on stimulating the use of European software\. Many sections “urge” for things to happen\. How do these urges map to existing initiatives? It would be very useful to map these exhortations to things/clubs/organizations already doing things like that, and getting them at our tables\.- The[EU Digital Commons EDIC](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/digital-commons-edic-launches-advance-europes-technological-sovereignty)might have a role here ## Good luck\! I hope the above will be perceived as constructive\. While I’ve written words critical of the meetings I’ve attended, know that I’m a great believer in what think tanks and civil society can achieve for digital autonomy\. In fact, I think no other place would be able to get us to where we need to be\. But that does require us to spread our attention further ahead to all the things that are holding Europe back\!