The Politics of the EuroStack
European digital sovereignty / Build your own algorithm / LLM scrapers
Last week, a colleague sent me a message asking if I could briefly explain what the EuroStack is. I tried to explain the initiative in a couple of sentences, but the question kept bugging me. After following the discussions around the EuroStack for several weeks, one thing is clear to me: it’s complicated. The EuroStack is, at its core, a vision – and a movement – for achieving full-stack digital sovereignty for Europe. Different groups are rallying behind the EuroStack as a means of establishing European digital sovereignty, fuelled by rising geopolitical tensions that make today’s de facto IT monopolies riskier than ever.
It is impressive that the initiative has managed to bring together a diverse range of actors, given that Europe has long suffered from fragmented efforts in IT. However, ideas about how to build the EuroStack exactly, and who should be leading the movement, are contested, and I believe it's worthwhile to start teasing apart the interests and motivations of the actors involved – in short, the politics of the EuroStack.
Not to cause conflict, on the contrary. I've seen collaborations go sour after the honeymoon phase when the actors discover their differences too late. So, I think it's a good time for an assessment of the EuroStack. As human geographer Till Straube observes, the layers of the tech stack are interdependent: “Each of [the stack’s] layers is an articulation of a specific logic and already encompasses the entire system.” Conflicting logics can compromise the tech stack, and this is also true for the politics surrounding the stack.
The genesis of the EuroStack
The conception of the EuroStack is commonly traced back to a conference held by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) in December 2023, titled “Shaping Europe’s Digital Model”. FEPS is a foundation primarily financed by the European Parliament and is considered to be intellectually close to the Party of European Socialists. Ideas discussed at the conference were refined at follow-up events, which brought together people from across the political spectrum, leading to the conception of the name “EuroStack” and a multiparty conference in the European Parliament in late 2024, titled “Toward European Digital Independence”. Economists Francesca Bria and Cristina Caffarra, among others, have been leading the movement since its inception.
The EuroStack movement, and Bria and Caffarra in particular, have produced various documents, ranging from a 19-page pitch published in January to a 128-page paper released in February this year. These documents are interesting not only for the vision they set out for the EuroStack but also because they provide insight into the goals and motivations of the different actors involved. The pitch, written by Caffarra et al., “#Eurostack: European Strategic Sovereign Digital Infrastructures”, articulates a vision of the EuroStack that is largely industry-led. Notably, it references the India Stack – a set of APIs backed by the Indian government that enable third-party software development with access to government IDs, payment networks, and data – multiple times as a model to emulate.
Opinions on the India Stack are divided to say the least. While it has driven the digitalisation of government services, it has also been criticised for facilitating government surveillance, coercing and disenfranchising Indian citizens, and promoting a form of entrepreneurship that blurs the lines between government and private interests. This may not be what the authors of the pitch intended to say, but the India Stack is a problematic model, and its selection as a template for Europe is, at the very least, careless.
A 128-page blueprint for the EuroStack
In February, the EuroStack pitch was followed by an extensive paper, “EuroStack – A European Alternative for Digital Sovereignty”, written by Bria et al., including a long list of contributors and reviewers. The text provides a kind of blueprint, rather specific instructions on how to build the EuroStack, including a governance structure – modelled on the European Central Bank – and a mechanism for investment: the European Sovereign Tech Fund, which aims to secure €300 billion in investments over 10 years. The governance model, the paper claims, "is rooted in the principles of digital commons – collectively managed resources designed to serve the public good – and draws inspiration from successful industry-led and publicly backed initiatives."
Whilst the proposal is extensive and offers, also due to its sheer length, a more nuanced perspective than the January pitch, it sometimes appears to try too hard to cater to everyone's needs. Fortunately, green tech and the climate play a more prominent role in the paper than in the pitch, but it is apparent that some of the contributing authors have incorporated their own organisations into the text to establish them as relevant actors on the European stage. This is, of course, how the political game is played, but it warrants close scrutiny of the list of contributors and the suggestions made in the paper.
An open letter and an alternative stack
Just a week ago, the proposals set forth in the EuroStack pitch and paper were reinforced by an open letter signed by around a hundred European businesses and business organisations, including, for example, Airbus, Ecosia, and Ionos. The letter states: “The signatories to this letter are diverse European businesses and associations that share the EuroStack assessment, and in particular its vision for an industry-led effort.” Thus, the signatories emphasise the focus on industry as the driving force behind the implementation of the EuroStack, and help to further shift the discourse towards an industry-led initiative.
With much less fanfare, a whitepaper entitled “Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty – A roadmap to build a digital stack for people and the planet” was published in December last year, written by political economist Cecilia Rikap, together with a host of co-authors from the left of the political spectrum. The paper calls for an “international, ecological, public-led stack.” It does not explicitly set out a vision for the EuroStack – in fact, this would be at odds with its global perspective. The whitepaper emerged from “a deliberative exercise that sprang from a support letter … signed in opposition to Big Tech’s authoritarian responses and attempts to impose their technologies on the public sector in Brazil.”
The suggestions made in the paper, written in the style of a manifesto rather than a blueprint to implement, are less concrete than those in the EuroStack texts. But they put people and the planet at their centre, offering a valuable corrective to industry-led digital sovereignty. This perspective is particularly important because governments, such as Germany's, have been slow to provide clear direction on the EuroStack, instead introducing vague concepts like the Open German Stack that lack concrete definitions and are open to interpretation by others.
Where does all this leave us? It shows that the sovereign digital stack, and the EuroStack in particular, are multifaceted concepts. The EuroStack's malleability is both a strength and a weakness: it allows diverse actors to rally behind it, with industry currently taking the lead, but it also masks underlying differences in interest. To avoid collaborations turning sour in the future, we should acknowledge the politics at play and negotiate interests early on. Rather than seeking the lowest common denominator, I believe we should strive for the greatest common factor: Europe clearly needs a tech stack independent of Big Tech, and this can only be achieved through a broad, multilateral movement focusing on how to make the biggest possible impact across political lines and sectors.
The Toybox
“Timeline algorithms should be useful for people, not for companies. Their quality should not be evaluated in terms of how much more time people spend on a platform, but rather in terms of how well they serve their users’ purposes.” If you agree, you'll love the Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm project, which was recently showcased at FOSDEM. It introduces personal, local timeline algorithms that you can either use off-the-shelf or adjust to your needs.
As always, if you have an open source project you'd like to share, don't hesitate to reach out to me at theartofherdingcats [at] proton.me, and I'll be happy to feature it in a future issue.
Treats
I wouldn’t call it a treat, but I wasn’t aware of just how serious the problem of LLM scrapers is (especially for OS projects) until I read this article on LibreNews. Moreover, I found this BBC article interesting about "drunk-dialling" YouTube and what it revealed about the long-tail of YouTube videos. Plus, the FOSS Backstage 2025 playlist is now available and features several talks dealing with digital sovereignty, which fits nicely with the theme of this newsletter.
