A Governance Lexicon for Digital Public Infrastructures

Digital Sovereignty

8 min read

by Carlos Cámara and Emrys Schoemaker

Preamble: Sovereignty, sovereignties

Sovereignty refers to the ultimate authority someone has over things. Historically, sovereignty has been used to refer to the power of States to exert independent control and lawmaking over their territories (i.e. without the involvement of any other party in such decisions and enforcement).

However, with the rise of social movements advocating for alter-globalisation, climate justice, social justice, or the Commons, the subject of such authority has also been applied to other smaller units beyond Nations (such as regions or communities), and its meaning has permeated to many other contexts, such as physical resources (food1, energy, water) and, more recently, digital resources (infrastructure, data, platforms, AI…).

Regardless of their scale or domain, these new forms of sovereignties share an aim to protect communities from external shocks and coercion by demanding that critical systems are completely governed without depending on any external agent with a different agenda. This is usually achieved through favouring the conditions for these systems to be produced locally and democratically and the empowerment of all the communities involved in their production, distribution, and consumption. These demands are usually rooted in the following pillars: a rejection of globalisation and neoliberal dogmas about markets, and a pursuit of fairer, more democratic and resilient systems.

Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty2 refers to the political perspective in which the digital technologies and infrastructures that are essential for competitiveness and welfare are in accordance with the laws and interests of a particular community or region (usually, but not always, a nation). This is typically achieved through favouring Free/Libre OpenSource software, open formats and protocols, federated platforms or self-hosting, or, the creation of Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI), particularly in public organisations and governments.

Digital sovereignty is increasingly supported, demanded and enforced by governments (e.g. France3, Canada4), organisations, or social movements and communities of users, and their motivations range from economic motivation, justice (e.g. Digital Rights) or -more recently, due to the complex geopolitics context- security and privacy.

The reason can be found in the following: today, almost every facet of our lives is mediated by the digital. There are few (if any) instances in the way we work, socialise, consume and access to leisure or culture that do not require any kind of digital infrastructure (e.g. servers, hardware), technology (e.g. software) or data. At a national level, this means that the economy is more and more dependent on such technologies, the vast majority of which is provided by a handful of big techs from the US (with China gaining momentum). Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google) alone “control almost 70% of the cloud market, and over half of the world’s undersea cables once Meta is included. The accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has only made the situation more acute”5. These companies, along with Apple, Nvidia and Tesla (known as the “Magnificent seven” due to their high performance in the stock market) have a combined market capitalisation of $20.8 trillion, surpassing the GDP of the European Union (approximately $19.4 trillion).

This over-representation of US big tech along with their monopolistic practices often collide with EU’s interests and regulations. Some recent examples of these tensions are the number of lawsuits6 against US big techs for not complying with EU regulations (e.g. AI Act, Digital Services Act, and Digital Markets Act), which triggered heated reactions from their CEOs. The US-president, Donald Trump, threatened to impose tariffs7 as a form of retaliation against what he considers to be “discriminatory” against American companies and, therefore, “unfair”. Other examples include Microsoft blocking email accounts based on U.S. sanction over investigations of Israel8. Given the growing hostilities with the USA, Digital sovereignty has become a strategic priority for the many countries, including the EU9, where it is supported by leaders like Ursula von der Leyen (European Commission) and Mario Draghi (European Central Bank).

Who is working on Digital sovereignty?

Governmental
  • European Commission — Digital Sovereignty Strategy: The EU’s overarching framework including the GDPR, Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, and AI Act. Aims to regulate Big Tech, protect citizens’ data, and reduce Europe’s dependency on foreign digital infrastructure.digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
  • France–Germany Digital Sovereignty Task Force: Joint Franco-German initiative launched in November 2025 to develop a common definition of European digital services, sovereignty indicators for cloud and AI, and measures to promote European competitiveness and tech independence. elysee.fr
  • Canada’s Digital Sovereignty Framework: a framework aimed to improve Canada’s “digital readiness” to “manage and protect its data, systems and infrastructure to operate securely and independently in a globally connected environment”. https://www.canada.ca/

Organisations and grassroots

  • Open Rights Group: UK-based digital campaigning organisation protecting privacy and free speech. Challenges government surveillance legislation, mass data collection, and censorship through legal action and public advocacy. openrightsgroup.org
  • The Digital Sovereignty Coalition: a coalition to protect civil liberties, democratise technological power, and ensure that the future of artificial intelligence, data, and digital infrastructure reflects the values of freedom, equity, and self-determination. https://digitalsovereigntycoalition.org/about

Initiatives

DPI and Digital Sovereignty

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has emerged as one of the most prominent policy instruments through which states, particularly in the Global South, seek to translate digital sovereignty commitments into operational practice.

The DPI approach centres on foundational digital systems (identity, payments, data exchange) built on open standards, open-source software, and interoperable architectures, with the explicit aim of enabling states to exercise genuine authority over the technologies their societies depend on, rather than outsourcing that authority to foreign commercial providers (Massally, Matthan & Chaudhuri, 2023; Varma et al., 2024). By moving from siloed, vendor-specific solutions to shared public infrastructure, DPI promises to convert digital dependency into digital choice, restoring, in principle, the conditions for critical systems to be governed in the interests of the communities they serve (TechPolicy.Press, 2025).

The structural irony of this promise is that DPI systems require substantial cloud computing capacity to function at scale, and for most governments deploying DPI to reduce foreign dependency, that capacity runs on the very same hyperscalers identified above: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (Rest of World, 2026). India’s own case is telling, while the India Stack represents domestically designed and governed foundational systems, the cloud and AI backend sustaining those systems is provided by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia (TechPolicy.Press, 2025). These companies have responded to the sovereignty moment not by retreating but by expanding, launching “sovereign cloud” offerings that repackage dependency as a product feature (Lawfare, 2025), deploying them directly in markets where governments are undertaking DPI programmes (Fierce Network, 2024). The concept of sovereignty that mainstream DPI discourse mobilises also sits in tension with the pluralist, community-rooted understanding described above.

Dominant DPI framings operate from a Westphalian, state-centred conception: sovereignty as the capacity of national governments to assert control and set the terms of digital governance within their territory (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). As Pohle (2024) argues, this framing displaces other legitimate sovereignty claims, from sub-national communities, civil society, and indigenous peoples, that the broader concept could and should accommodate. The sovereignty DPI delivers is sovereignty for the state, often mediated through infrastructure that remains, at its operational core, in someone else’s hands.

References

Fierce Network (2024) ‘Google, AWS, Microsoft invest in sovereign cloud in Asia-Pac’, 11 July. https://www.fierce-network.com/cloud/google-aws-microsoft-invest-sovereign-cloud-asia-pac Lawfare (2025) ‘Tech’s “Sovereignty Washing” in Europe Will Ripple in the Global South’, 9 October. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/tech-s—sovereignty-washing—in-europe-will-ripple-in-the-global-south

Massally, K.N., Matthan, R. and Chaudhuri, R. (2023) ‘What is the DPI Approach?’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 15 May. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/05/what-is-the-dpi-approach

Pohle, J. (2024) ‘Unthinking Digital Sovereignty’, Policy & Internet, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.437

Pohle, J. and Thiel, T. (2020) ‘Digital sovereignty’, Internet Policy Review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1532

Rest of World (2026) ‘India AI Impact Summit pitches “third way” beyond U.S. and China’, 11 February. https://restofworld.org/2026/india-ai-summit-third-way-global-south-big-tech/

TechPolicy.Press (2025) ‘India’s Digital Infrastructure Is Going Global. What Kind of Power Is It Building?’, 22 July. https://www.techpolicy.press/indias-digital-infrastructure-is-going-global-what-kind-of-power-is-it-building/

Varma, P. et al. (2024) The Future of Digital Public Infrastructure, Carnegie India. https://carnegie-production-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/files/The_Future_of_Digital_Public_Infrastructure-_A_Thesis_for_Rapid_Global_Adoption-1.pdf

Footnotes

  1. Food sovereignty was coined in 1996 by Via Campesina (“the peasants way”), an international organisation formed by 182 organisations in 81 countries that describes themselves as “an international movement which coordinates peasant organisations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe”. The term refers to a system where the people who produce, distribute and consume food also have control the mechanisms and policies that regulate those processes. Usually, this means that food is produced locally. ↩

  2. The term is often used interchangeably with Technological sovereignty and there are some overlaps with Data Sovereignty, Cloud sovereignty or AI Sovereignty, albeit this term aims to be more inclusive, as the latter refer to specific ways in which the digital is operationalised. ↩

  3. Last 8th April, France government (At the initiative of the Prime Minister, the Minister of Action and Public Accounts, and the Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, the Inter-Ministerial Directorate of Digital Affairs ) organised a seminar to discuss how to to reduce their non-European digital dependencies. In their official announcement, the term “digital sovereignty” is explicitly mentioned several times.  Specific, immediate plans include migrating the operating systems of their government PCs and laptops from Windows to GNU/Linux. Source: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/souverainete-numerique-reduction-dependances-extra-europeennes/ ↩

  4. Canada has recently implemented a Digital Sovereignty Framework to improve their “digital readiness” to “to manage and protect its data, systems and infrastructure to operate securely and independently in a globally connected environment”. Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-government/digital-government-innovations/cloud-services/digital-sovereignty/digital-sovereignty-framework-improve-digital-readiness.html ↩

  5. Rikap C., Durand, C., Paraná, E., Gerbaudo, P. and Marx P. (2024). Reclaiming digital sovereignty: A roadmap to build a digital stack for people and the planet. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/Reclaiming-Digital-Sovereignty ↩

  6. Refer to https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/12/17/eu-takes-on-big-tech-here-are-the-top-actions-regulators-have-taken-in-2025 ↩

  7. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech ↩

  8. https://apnews.com/article/trump-icc-sanctions-israel-order-01beee050ae84d0d9eae66d00bc8ead9 ↩

  9. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/digital-sovereignty-europes-declaration-of-independence/ ↩

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