Digital independence, autonomy or technological sovereignty: the concept has taken on many names, but always refers to a long-standing goal of EU leaders. It consists of developing technology in line with standards defined by European institutions themselves – and often comes with imperatives such as transparency, trustworthiness or the protection of privacy.

“Open source has the potential to change the balance of power,” says Muto. “It’s not necessarily saying that the big companies are bad, but it’s about taking back control. The user should have control regardless of where the company comes from.”

One example is cloud services, which are dominated by Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. The EU’s near-total reliance on the trio has been problematic for a number of years: for example, an EU privacy watchdog recently launched an investigation to examine whether the bloc’s top institutions and agencies were able to effectively protect citizens’ personal information when using AWS and Azure.

See https://zdnet.com/google-amp/article/open-source-software-is-it-about-free-or-is-it-about-freedom

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