To protect our digital future, we need robust action now
This week, Dr. Corinne Cath, Head of Global Team Digital, took part in the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in Berlin. Speaking on an expert panel, “The Power of Digital Commons: Building Europe’s Shared Digital Future", Corinne – one of only a few representatives from the civil society community invited to address the summit – urged European ministers, AI innovators, tech leaders, and companies to take action now to build hope for our digital horizon.
Just as the summit got underway, news emerged that Cloudflare outages were preventing people from accessing public media, government portals, social media sites, and thousands of key websites, including ours.
Coming just weeks after the AWS outages, it was a clear reminder that concentration within a small cadre of infrastructure providers can crash major parts of the internet in an instant. Once again, it was obvious that technical failure is a democratic failure, and that open-source software without open infrastructure is a democratic illusion.
ARTICLE 19 emphasises the urgent need to address Big Tech’s infrastructural hold around the world by building entirely different infrastructures rooted in the needs of communities and people to protect democratic participation, public services, and fundamental rights.
“Digital commons initiatives can only deliver if Europe breaks Big Tech’s infrastructural stranglehold,” Corinne says. We need infrastructure that prioritises human rights, a level playing field, public interest governance, and well-resourced change makers. And civil society, with its unique technical standards expertise, legal capacity, and independence, can challenge this concentration, and build truly democratic alternatives.
During the summit came promises to build new infrastructure for Europe. But the reality is that market concentration has made competing with US tech companies structurally difficult. Without intervention now, Big Tech’s power will grow and further exacerbate existing dependencies.
EU member states must break the pattern of awarding massive cloud contracts to AWS, Microsoft, and Google, even as they champion European alternatives. This means dramatic market interventions that will make it viable for choices to exist, for alternatives to thrive. It requires regulation, not deregulation, because in concentrated markets, removing rules primarily benefits those who already dominate. Beyond that we need to address the infrastructural imbalance: Big Tech’s big capital will remain, even if we have local alternatives and better markets.
Digital self-determination requires technical standards and legal expertise. It requires independence and commitment to bringing the digital ecosystem back into the democratic fold for the public good. Civil society organisations like ARTICLE 19 can harness this expertise and commitment to help build a new way. But we can’t do it alone. We must all – governments, tech companies, activists, academics, communities – take action together, starting today.
