Software & Sovereignty
Europe's path to software sovereignty lies through American tech
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Arena Magazine promotes an article by Miquel Vila discussing Europe's software sovereignty in relation to American tech. The article explores the power imbalance between the US and its European allies in software control. It argues that European countries must decide which dependencies on American software are acceptable and which are not.
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Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
Software & Sovereignty
In today's newsletter from Arena Magazine, Miquel Vila explains how Europe can secure its software sovereignty through deeper integration with, not separation from, American tech. This article was first published in Issue 009: Hello, World, our ode to software.
In a silicon civilization, software is the basic infrastructure of state power. States, armies, factories, hospitals, banks, and households all run on code — and almost none of them control, see, nor understand the source of the systems that run and manage their daily lives. As that code is increasingly being written and operated by AI, the dependency deepens. Users are discovering that their data is being handed off to a handful of closed frontier models concentrated in a handful of American labs, accessible only on their terms. From a political and strategic standpoint, the question of who controls software is therefore a question of sovereignty.
The power imbalance between the United States and its European allies has been widening for decades, and one of the widest gaps has opened in software. Depending on American security guarantees is one thing; relying on American software to run the state and power the economy is another. European countries are right to lament how access to their own basic services and most important institutions depend on systems they do not fully control. But recognizing this vulnerability does not mean that those dependencies can be reversed by decree. Taken literally, software sovereignty would require every country to build its own cloud provider, operating system, office suite, cybersecurity industry, frontier AI laboratory, and developer ecosystem, closer to the fantasy of autarky than to the reality of sovereignty. It’s also unattainable for virtually every country on earth, the US and China included.
European countries must decide which dependencies are acceptable and which are not. In some areas, like defense, intelligence, or critical infrastructure, domestic ownership or direct control of the stack may be necessary. In others, sovereignty is better secured through competition among providers, open standards, portable infrastructure, contractual protections, and the ability to mix domestic and foreign, closed and open-weight technologies without becoming captive to any one of them.
America’s Software Monopoly
The role of software in sovereignty is not a new concern. The dominance of Microsoft’s operating systems during the PC era already raised questions about Europe’s dependence on American technology, and spurred interest in domestic and open-source alternatives. The most consequential to emerge was Linux, released by Finnish student Linus Torvalds in 1991 and developed thereafter as open-source software, by a global community of enthusiasts. Linux never unseated Windows as the dominant desktop operating system, but it became a major rival in servers and, eventually, the cloud (which most of the internet now runs on). We have seen similar dependence on American software in almost every category: Google in search, Zoom and Teams in workplace software, and the American social networks — X, Facebook, Instagram — that shape media narratives around the world. Now, AI has raised the stakes of American technological dominance once more; the models writing most of the world’s software are themselves made in American labs.
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