European Approaches to Digital Sovereignty – MT 02 2026

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27 May 2026 | 11:00 - 12:30 CEST | Alcide De Gasperi | Video recording | Transcript
Consolidated programme 2026

Proposals: (#8), #11, #12, #18, #25b, #26, #37, #40, #61

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Session teaser

Europe’s dependence on non-European digital infrastructures and technologies has fired up the debate on digital sovereignty. From cloud services and semiconductors to social media platforms and payment systems people are asking how Europe can strengthen its tech independence and resilience while remaining open and innovative.

The ongoing debate highlights that sovereignty is not only about infrastructure but also about protecting our democratic values and fundamental rights. Thus the trust in existing digital ecosystem is crucial. It is now clear for everyone that technological design choices can shape European economic autonomy and democratic resilience.

This session will explore whether digital sovereignty in Europe is desirable and feasible. We want to discuss what strategies Europe should pursue to balance autonomy with openness and security in the digital age.

Session description

The following guiding questions are intended to spark discussion and will be put to the speakers and the audience.

Guiding Questions

  1. Is “digital sovereignty” the right term for Europe’s goals, or are autonomy, resilience, or governance capacity more accurate—and how do these framings influence policy choices and the feasibility of initiatives like GAIA-X?
  2. Can European regulation (e.g., the Digital Markets Act) alone deliver digital sovereignty, or are parallel investments in infrastructure, innovation, and industrial capacity essential to avoid falling short?
  3. How can Europe assert its digital sovereignty against the US and China without fragmenting the open internet, and what technical and political solutions are most urgently needed now?

Format

Please try out new interactive formats. EuroDIG is about dialogue not about statements, presentations and speeches.

  • 5 min – Welcome and orientation
  • 30 min – Expert inputs (3 × 10 min presentations)
  • 35 min – Moderated discussion with the audience, guided by key questions
  • 15 min – Agreement on key messages

Further reading

Links to relevant websites, declarations, books, documents. Please note we cannot offer web space, so only links to external resources are possible. Example for an external link: Main page of EuroDIG

People

Please provide the name and affiliation/institution of all people you list here like this:

  • First Name Last Name, Affiliation/institution

Programme Committee member(s)

  • Izaan Khan, Member of the UK Internet Governance Forum steering committee
  • Martina Barbero, Policy Officer – Internet governance and multistakeholder relations / European Commission DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology

The Programme Committee (PC) supports the programme planning process throughout the year and works closely with the Secretariat. Members of the PC give advice on the topics, cluster the proposals and assist session organisers in their work. They also ensure that session principles are followed and monitor the complete programme to avoid repetition. 1-2 PC members have signed up to each session and will compile the messages.

Focal Point

  • Charalampos Kyritsis, Digital World Summit Greece (IGF GREECE)

Focal Points take over the responsibility and lead of the session organisation. They work in close cooperation with the Programme Committee and the EuroDIG Secretariat and are kindly requested to follow EuroDIG’s session principles

Organising Team (Org Team)

List Org Team members here as they sign up.

  • Miguel Vidal, Deutsche Telekom
  • David Frautschy, Internet Society
  • Francesco Vecchi, Civic AI Coordinator - Eumans, YOUthDIG 2024
  • Roberto Gaetano, EURALO Individual Member
  • Valeriia Filinovych, Kyiv Aviation Institute
  • Vittorio Bertola, Open Xchange
  • Nicolas Varlot, National project manager for Nuage, France
  • Sofie Wiedemeyer
  • Paulo Glowacki
  • Hubert Romaniec, European Commission
  • Jamal Shahin, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The Org Team is a group of people shaping the session. Org Teams are open and every interested individual can become a member by subscribing to the mailing list.

Key Participants

  • Fabrizia Benini - Head of Unit, DG Connect
  • Peter Janssen - General Manager, EURid
  • Jamal Shahin - Chair in Digital Sovereignty & Programme Director MSc in European Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
  • Frank Krüger - Director of the Directorate DW I Digital Policy at theFederal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, Germany

Key Participants are experts willing to provide their knowledge during a session – not necessarily on stage. Key Participants should contribute to the session planning process and keep statements short and punchy during the session. They will be selected and assigned by the Org Team, ensuring a stakeholder balanced dialogue also considering gender and geographical balance. Please provide short CV’s of the Key Participants involved in your session at the Wiki or link to another source.

Messages

Rapporteur: Paulo Glowacki, EURid Youth Committee, Izaan Khan, Member of the UK Internet Governance Forum steering committee

  1. EuroDIG recognizes that Europe’s dependencies on external digital technologies and infrastructures have created strategic vulnerabilities, including for democratic values. Europe must shape and self-determine its human-centric digital future while maintaining Internet openness, preserving choice of technologies and providers that adhere to open standards and interoperability, while remaining grounded in multistakeholder values and human rights.
  2. Digital sovereignty is a cumulative, transformative process that requires action by all stakeholders. This effort should consist of: active industrial policy such as investment in – and the development and scaling up of – trusted European platforms and players in Chips, semiconductors, Cloud, AI, open data; supporting investment in and maintenance of open source infrastructure, interoperability, and alignment of values. This should encourage innovation, while retaining balanced regulatory approaches to key issues like procurement, competition, privacy & cybersecurity.
  3. To achieve European digital sovereignty we must take a holistic approach, bringing together national policy multistakeholder efforts under a common European dimension to empower citizens, especially youth. Further, the importance of cognitive sovereignty and ensuring that European residents are afforded the ability to have a digital public sphere should be encompassed by this topic. We note the Cannes Declaration on the Sovereignty of the Mind in this regard.
  4. Digital sovereignty should ultimately be interpreted to mean resilient openness and strategic autonomy leveraging Europe’s strengths. Digital sovereignty should not mean isolation, stepping away from global digital cooperation, protectionism or the creation of walls that lead to fragmentation.

Video record

https://youtu.be/CGA9c2U4Vag

Transcript

Disclaimer: This is not an official record of the session. The DiploAI system automatically generates these resources from the audiovisual recording. Resources are presented in their original format, as provided by the AI (e.g. including any spelling mistakes). The accuracy of these resources cannot be guaranteed.

The Geneva Internet Platform will provide transcript, session report and additional details shortly after the session.


Florence Ranson: Hello. Yes. Sounds back on. So welcome back. And the time has come to move on to the second main topic of the day and consider European approaches to digital sovereignty, a topic on which we already exchanged yesterday in particular with the executive vice president. So let’s step on from this. And to lead this particular session, I’m going to hand over moderation to Jamal Shaheen from Vrije Universiteit, Brussels. Please, Jamal.

Jamal Shahin: Welcome to everybody. It’s quite energizing to see a number of familiar faces, but also quite a lot of new faces. For me, at least a lot of young faces and even younger faces in the room. I’m very happy to be moderating this session, which will be an exciting one. My name is Jamal Shaheen. As I was introduced, I’m a senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, as well as the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where I’m also a principal investigator of a research project called Digital Sovereigns in a Non -Sovereign Internet, which means that I guess I might be able to moderate this session. Thank you very much to the organisers of the conference who’ve brought this discussion up and have been framing, and particularly the org team who’ve been working on this topic, who’ve been framing the reflections on digital sovereignty.

I want to also thank Hadis, the focal point for this, for bringing the panel together and getting us and giving us the opportunity to share some thoughts on this talk. My job as a moderator… is both easy and difficult today. It’s easy because this is a topic that flows. We’ve had discussions on digital sovereignty yesterday. Even when sovereignty is not supposed to be discussed, it is being discussed. So we will be having quite an easy flow of conversation, I think. But sovereignty also means many different things to many different people. And it’s my job as the moderator to try and bring some structure to that. Luckily, we have guiding questions which will help stimulate the conversation after we’ve had our interventions.

The second and possibly most important part of my job is to keep to time. And I’m aware that I will be eating into our lunch if I do not finish on time. And that is possibly, in these meetings, one of the most important, most important moments in time. So I will be… a kind but strict moderator, I believe, and I have told my speakers that I will start huffing and puffing, which is very British for saying that I will try and kick them off of the microphone once they exceed their time limit. We are here to discuss European digital sovereignty. It’s not necessarily a new topic. It’s been discussed at Eurodig many times before. We’ve seen the topic come up.

We’ve seen messages that have been delivered about European digital sovereignty in previous Eurodigs. But there is recently a new framing for the debate, and I think that the framing of the debate right now captures a lot of the political moment. We’re talking a lot about the contemporary geopolitical situation, which has been raised by many of the speakers also yesterday, and it reflects a lot on Europe’s, on a set of debates that Europe has about how to act. I’m really excited to be digging into these topics and I really honestly can’t believe that nobody else has been playing with the metaphor of digging around the Eurodig but anyway I’m really excited to be digging into these topics with our three distinguished guests but before I do that I did just want to say there’s one thing as somebody who’s been working on digital sovereignty for quite a while my main ambition is to get everybody to say the word correctly and it’s sovereignty not sovereignty we keep it simple, we keep it more efficient and there are less syllables in it than some people use so if we can use the word digital sovereignty to discuss this, I’ve already briefed our speakers on that, they will be doing that I am very excited to welcome everyone to our three speakers I will give an introduction to all three, and then I will let them take the floor later on.

First of all, we have Fabrizia Benigni, who is the head of unit for the Future Internet at DG Connect in the European Commission. We have Peter Janssen, who is the general manager for EURID, who has spoken to you yesterday. EURID is one of the hosts of EURIDIG, as you know. Also, last night, they showed us that there are no limits to Internet governance dialoguing. And finally, we have Frank Krüger, who is the director of the Directorate Digital Policy at the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization in Germany. So our three speakers will be starting with interventions that are quite short. We will then move on to the leading discussion. Questions that will appear on the screen and have your intervention.

and your conversation points, which we hope will make this a true dialogue with everybody. And I would like to reserve the last 15 minutes to produce the messages. I’m pretty certain that we won’t initially have agreement on these messages. Sorry, Paolo. But I’m pretty certain that we will have quite an interesting conversation that will cover a lot of different topics in the next hour and a half. So without further ado, I’d like to pass the floor to Fabrizia. If you want, you can take the microphone in front of you and I’ll come and join you at this stage.

Fabrizia Benini: Thank you very much, Jamal. We are very happy to be digging with you on European sovereignty and the path towards it. And obviously, this is a very timely moment, because the geopolitical question, tensions are unfortunately something that we cannot. forget. There are physical confrontations, there is war in many parts of the world, and in others, there is the weaponization of dependencies, be they physical or digital. And of course, this is a new way of international relations and one that we need to face in a multi -stakeholder framework where we are. Now, the European way, the European voices towards how is it that we attain digital sovereignty are many, but I think we, and I hope very much that today we will come out with one good consensus approach as it befits all internet governance activities.

I think we can all agree that the technology, the technology is the technology of the future. The digital technologies that underpin our economy, our society, our democracies. are very much, and to a significant and dangerous degree, not European -made. They are made elsewhere. So therefore, in terms of Europe, from Europe’s perspectives, we are dependent on others. We have dependencies. And these dependencies, of course, go across the entire Internet stack, from cloud infrastructure to AI models to platforms. And these dependencies didn’t come overnight. They were the result of the choices that we made over the years. It was, of course, easier to buy rather than to build. It was more convenient to adopt. Rather than develop, and so on and so forth.

Until we got to a point where we are, in fact, tied hand and foot. to those that build, offer, and deploy those technologies. We need to recognize that others were very good at doing that. They were quicker. They sensed what the market would buy. They sensed whether customers were able and willing to pay for it or to give up for it, and they moved on, and we reacted. Now, the problem is that the accumulation of those dependencies results in a strategic vulnerability, and a strategic vulnerability that touches every aspect of our lives. It’s not only about economy. This is about our democracies and our values. And today, unfortunately, dependencies or digital sovereigns are not just a matter of growth, convenience, economics.

It is a matter of survival of democracies. And those amongst us that might come from countries that have undergone political campaigns recently have probably experienced that firsthand. Now, this was one of the reasons why this question became at the center of the European political debate. Yesterday, the Executive Vice President, Ena Virkunen, reminded us of that. Our own President of the Commission, Ms. von der Leyen, has said over and over again that Europe must be able to shape its digital future. And the mission of our EVP is exactly to do that on the basis, and I repeat, on the basis of our principles and values. Democracy. Democratic principles and values for a human -centric digital transition.

I will lose my voice over repeating these words, but it is important because it’s not just what we do inside Europe. It is also how we project ourselves outside, how we do it in the global stage through the Internet governance, for instance. And here at Eurodig, we have a multi -stakeholder forum. So the question that is important for me as a policymaker is how is it that we achieve this whilst remaining open? Because one of our commitments, and it is a decade -long commitment to the international arena and to our partners, is that we believe, strongly believe, in an open global secure Internet. So how is it that we do this? Well, in fact, the answer has already been given in some commission papers.

For those that read that morning, afternoon, and night, and very attentive to every line we read, we write, it is about the management of our interdependencies. So what does that mean? It means that we will, and the EVP mentioned that yesterday, We will continue to partner with trusted countries, with partner countries, i .e. those that share our very strong belief in human -centric approach to digital transformation. And with them, we will develop the tools that will allow us to continue in our mission. And that mission can be, in my view, summed up in one word, choice. Choice. Our objective, our duty, I would say, is to make sure that in every act, in every provision, in every project that we support, we make sure that our business and our citizens are given the choice of where they keep their data, what they do with it, what provider they choose, and that they can, on top of it, change their minds and move from one to the other with a sense of portability.

choice underpins a human -centric approach to the digital transformation because it underpins the notion of self -determination. So this is, I would say, one of the very strong characteristics of the digital transformation and digital sovereignty in Europe. Now, we have a very strong rulebook, and I think, and it’s not ironic on my part, this is a strategic asset. And the reason for that is that a rulebook allows you to develop the same idea over time. It gives you a path. It gives you a guidance because digital sovereignty, just as the growth of dependencies, is not something that happens overnight. It’s a cumulative process. So whatever it is that we want to do in order to get out of dependencies and to more digital sovereignty in European terms, and we hope.

Not only European, but shared with all of those that believe in self -determination and in choice. We need to do that, indeed, with having in mind a guiding light, a guiding rule, a guiding principle. Now, Europe has fantastic capacities in terms of researchers, thinkers, as Jamal has just shown us, on all matters digital, both in terms of concepts and in terms of technical development. And on the 3rd of June, there will be the adoption of the Sovereign Tech Package. And the Sovereign Tech Package, as you heard yesterday, will be composed of a series of instruments. There will be a CHIPS Act that will tie the production of chips we need to the exact users of it, so a matching, so increase of production, but increase of production that is targeted to our needs.

A Cloud and AI Development Act. talks about sovereign cloud, what is sovereign cloud, how can you procure sovereign cloud, and how can you facilitate the uptake of a sovereign cloud. Again, this is something that will take time but it will be very important. And there will be an open source strategy for which my team is directly responsible. And just a few words on that. An open source strategy is important because we have a very vibrant community of developers in Europe. These developers are fantastic people that have their, for the most part, aligned their work with the values and principles of the digital transformation in Europe. And that’s quite, you know, a gift. An unexpected gift.

We didn’t realize it until we really studied it in detail. Of course, those that were in the community knew very well. Should I say communities, plural, because it’s not one block. It’s a series. It’s a series of blocks. so just to cut it short because I see you’re looking at your watch innovation is not enough what we need to do now is scale up we have the talent we have the raw materials so it’s up to us to make sure that we go into that path with confidence and trust yes

Jamal Shahin: thank you for but it’s yeah and for mentioning a number of key issues I think that that leads very well into a discussion for later and responds very well already in advance to some of the guiding questions that will will come so I’d like to thank you also for talking specifically about questions around the open internet that was if I may that was one of the things that was quite important on the discussion list that led up to the creation of this meeting and so we’ve had quite some discussions about squaring the circle between the open internet and a sovereign internet and you’ve started to address those points. Another thing that you mentioned was this question of choice or this aspect of choice and I think that leads very much into what or some of the things that we will discuss when we talk about EURID and EURID’s role in providing a European approach to digital sovereignty.

So Peter, if I could pass the floor to you.

Peter Janssen: Thank you, Jamal. Yeah, I’m very much in danger of repeating a lot of the points that Fabrizio brought to the table so I’ll try to be brief but first on thank you, Jamal, for the kind words on our little intervention yesterday evening but I truly believe that, you know, by working together the powers that we bring together it’s truly unlimited what we can achieve so in that sense I I , I think it was very apt for the choice that we made yesterday. For those that weren’t there yesterday, too unlimited. Sure you should have seen it but, you know, too late. Maybe next time. Okay, about the pronunciation of the word. I’m a native Dutch person, or Flemish, actually, I’m Belgian, but in English I agree with Jamal at sovereignty.

But, you know, I could say it in Dutch, souverainiteit, which sounds much nicer than the English version, but it is what it is. Anyway, for URID, the digital sovereignty is actually about choice, we heard that word already several times, and control. As a registry operator of .eu, there are two aspects that are really going into that digital sovereignty aspect. First is, you know, the product that URID provides, the .eu domain name, allows citizens, organizations, SMEs, it doesn’t matter, to have free choice with what they do with their domain name. They have free choice in what the name of their website should be. They can, you know, choose whatever. Like, you know, if you have a website that you want to use, you can choose what you want We think if you’re European, it should end on .eu, but that, I think, stands for itself.

But also, you can choose freely what your email address looks like, not just before the ad, which any provider will allow you to do. If you go to your ISP, your home internet, they will allow you probably to get an email address. But what is after the ad sign is mostly bound to either the ISP or American or not big tech provider. Your own domain name allows you to actually have that free choice and that control on the full aspect of your email address. And that email address, as we all know, represents your identity on the internet in one way or the other. And with that choice comes control. You can choose where you host your domain name.

You can choose your domain name. You can self -host your domain name if you’re technically inclined to do so. But at the very least, it gives you the power and the control to choose a provider. That actually cares about you. your privacy and your data. So you have that control, you have that choice, and that domain name is yours. You can do with it whatever you like, as long as it’s legal. But it also allows you to grow with you, to move with you, and to go wherever you want. You want it to go independent of the technical choices that you make at a certain moment in time. And if you think you made the wrong choice, you have that power to actually move away and go somewhere else.

But on the other hand, if we’re talking about a domain name as a European digital sovereign identity, we as the registry operator have to make sure that that is actually true also at the basis of that domain name. So we as Europe, we have to make the right choices in terms of how the digital .eu domain space is actually happening or appearing on the internet. So that second aspect is really, what choices we as a registry. have to make. We have to make the right choices in that respect. And actually, you know, from the very beginning, over 20 years ago, the European Commission already had that insight and said, you know, W should be on European soil.

What I mean with that is the infrastructure, the physical infrastructure should reside physically within the European Union, and it should be controlled by a wholly European entity. In this case, it’s Europe. We are a Belgian organization and we host or we manage .eu under contact with the European Commission, and we are a wholly European entity. So the control of the .eu domain namespace is fully European and fully hosted on the European infrastructure, let’s call it like that. So the core services provided by Europe are actually on European soil. And lastly, to briefly, to cut it up really short, so that Frank also has a little bit of time left, there is a choice of infrastructure.

That might be both hardware as well as software. But, you know, EURID is continuously evaluating every aspect of the infrastructure stack. And, you know, that analysis takes into account, obviously, costs, possible alternatives, risks. And it’s all about a journey to make every part of that infrastructure stack adhere to open standards and make them interchangeable. So it’s not about here and now we have to be fully European sovereign, if that even would be a word, but it’s about where do we want to go and how will we go there by reducing the risks as much as possible and actually making sure that we get there in a controlled way and that we go where we want and need to go.

And I’ll stop there for the moment. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you very much. thank you very much Peter I was on mute thank you very much Peter for that contribution which raised a number of important points I think sovereignty as control over the infrastructure and the regulatory control over that but also raising the first part of your intervention the idea of sovereignty as a form of self determination so enhancing the idea of choice and I think these are very different aspects of the digital sovereignty debate that we’re all contributing to here Frank is going to contribute yet another angle to this I believe Frank in your position in terms of the federal ministry working towards digital transformation you’re going to tell us a bit about how that’s actually working in in Germany, I guess, and how this is actually leading from the discussions that we’re already working into with the contributions from Fabrizio and Peter already.

So thanks, Frank.

Frank Krüger: Open standards, trusted infrastructure and collaborative innovation are essential for Europe long -term technological resilience. This is why Germany is engaged in the open Internet infrastructure. This infrastructure is built and maintained by contributors all over the world, very often and on a voluntary basis. Germany supports the people behind the code. Our sovereign tech agency is an instrument for that. It maintains key open source components, and these components underpin security, stability, competitiveness and innovation. By strengthening essential elements of the global digital infrastructure, we aim to improve security and resilience not only for Germany, not only for Europe, but globally. That is why Germany welcomes the fact of the open source. The European strategy and open source and digital commons are key building blocks of European digital sovereignty, resilience and innovative capacity.

And this goes hand in hand. The DC EDIC, the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium, creates a permanent European framework for supporting strategic digital commons and open source infrastructure. It can strengthen coordination, maintenance, scaling, and long -term support for the critical open source technologies that Europe depends on. We therefore welcome the operational progress already made. This includes the appointment of its director and the ongoing institutional setup. And we see strong synergies here with the Southern Tech Agency in Germany. The agency already has practical experience in supporting security -critical open source infrastructure, and that operational expertise can scale to the European level automatically. And that’s why the DC EDIC framework. For us, these are two practical instruments to implement the future of open source strategy, and they belong together.

Let me close with this thought. Digital sovereignty is not the final destination. It’s a direction where we are going to, and it’s a question of democracy, of investment, of openness all at once. We will not get there with regulation alone. We will not get there by going it alone, but we can get there together in Europe and with our partners around the world. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Frank. A round of applause for all of our speakers. Thank you very much. I think you’ve raised some very important points there, but thanks also for showing us how you are living. And to all our panelists, thank you for showing us how you’re living these debates and implementing them. Thank you for demonstrating European digital sovereignty in your own ways. I think it’s very important, Frank, that you raise this question of resilience, again, which ties into many of the points that were raised by previous speakers about the control over infrastructure. I think it’s also nice to hear you say where the red line is in terms of digital sovereignty, what it’s not. So the questions of is digital sovereignty about promoting protectionism, and protectionism, and so on.

So I think that was very important to actually have as part of the conversation. We now have the responsibility of moving towards the three questions that we have, and I’m looking on our screens to see whether the questions, we will put the questions in order. We have a number of people who would like to comment. If you want to contribute, the order is determined by how quickly you signed up. to submit an intervention to the group. So I would like maybe to start with Ramjan Timilsina. Where is Ramjan? Is Ramjan here? No? Okay. I’ve been informed that there is a strict rule. If you don’t respond within seven seconds, I am to remove you from the record.

So we will now move to Fidan Ahmadi. No? Okay. Then we go to Aduna Netsomulatu. Online. Online. There will be an opportunity for people who are not on the list to intervene afterwards. Please. Bear that in mind. But I would like to go through the three questions before we do that. Okay? So Ana Neves. Yes. Ana oh no that’s not I don’t know but Ana is there Ana please turn on your mic thank you

Ana Neves: thank you very much I’m Ana Neves I’m from Portugal I work for the government but of course this is my own comments in 2003 it would have been impossible to have such a session with such a name it’s incredible so after 30 years we are talking about maybe not close but to really to live in a world where we as European Union we have to have this theme on sovereignty it’s really weird I don’t like it I think we are talking about strategic autonomy I think we are talking about strategic autonomy it’s really weird I think we are talking about it’s really weird I think it’s a very strong word for a Europe that is open to digital cooperation, to international cooperation, to the digital world, to the world itself without being only digital.

So for Portuguese, it’s a very, well, it’s a strong name because we talk about sovereignty when we are talking about a nation, about its own values, about its flag, about what is a nation and what it makes a nation. So here I think that we are not really talking about sovereignty because it really puts us apart from the others. And I totally agree with what Fabricio said. It’s about who does the choice and who controls and to whom. And we know that, well, in France and in Germany, so you already have. your own software and for the public administration, so as far as I understood. And I think it’s very interesting, and we have to invest a lot on that, and we have to have a really strong industry.

And so it’s a pity that we are in digital sovereignty nowadays, and we should be discussing about autonomy. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you. Thank you for addressing the question, which I did not actually vocalize, but I hope everybody can see it on the screen. Is digital sovereignty the right term for Europe’s goals? So thanks for that contribution that brings that together. Panelists, I will go through all of the speakers who are listed, and then we can have a chance to respond. Francesco Vecchi, the floor is yours.

Francesco Vecchi: Okay. Hello. Hi. Francesco Vecchi, Civic Care Coordinator at Humans. I do agree that it should not be that term. It’s digital autonomy, but I also think that we have to agree on what it means. And we at Humans believe that digital autonomy is not about isolation. It’s about identifying and leveraging Europe’s strengths. And we believe that democracy is definitely one of them and should not be overlooked. In fact, autonomy is not only technological, but it’s also cognitive. And I didn’t hear many people speaking about that today. And we believe that true autonomy means protecting citizens from manipulative algorithms and ensuring that digital spaces serve the public interest and not the other way around. This is why digital autonomies must pass through the creation of a truly European digital public sphere, one that empowers citizens and fosters civic agency.

There are already non -extractive alternatives to big tech, like open source and free software and interoperable platforms such as the Fediverse. let’s use them and I’m speaking first and foremost to representatives from public authorities. Finally, we believe that Europe’s sovereignty or autonomy, if we want to call it that way, will be measured by how well we build a new infrastructure for democracy, an infrastructure that is based first and foremost on open, resilient and fair digital ecosystems. We believe that this only will be the true foundation of a citizen -centered digital future and these points have been widely addressed by the Cannes Declaration on the Sovereignty of Mind and we would like that to be mentioned in the messages if possible.

Thank you very much.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Francesco. A very valuable contribution there, referring to the issue, the definitional nature of the topic, but also then echoing some of the conversation points here that we had on democracy and on awareness, which we’ll get to, I think, in the second round of questions as well. Plenty of food for thought and thanks for the link. Thank you. which I guess the message takers have noted. Okay, perfect. Kamal El -Hilali from UNESCO. No. Six, seven. There you go. Vincent Taddei. Vincent, the

Vincent Tadday: Thank you very much. I believe that an important part is how much are we willing to underline the Europe in European digital sovereignty. Europe is in some ways the most schizophrenic power on the global stage. It is powerful when it wants to be powerful, and it is weak when it does not want to act like a power. So I think in the debate of European digital sovereignty, we often talk about it. It’s used. It’s used historically a lot. But when it comes to the hard decisions, when it comes to the allocation of financial resources, for example, Germans want to found… German research and Italians want in the end to buy Italian infrastructure and it’s so important to link it back to the idea of European integration and really to stress the Europe in European digital sovereignty when we talk about it here like this thank you very much

Jamal Shahin: thank you very much Vincent for highlighting the the European focus on European approaches to digital sovereignty which which leads to a number of questions obviously about the way in which we think about European digital sovereignty I think many of our panelists would be able to react to some of the issues about legal constructs or non -legal constructs that actually build you already mentioned the edict for example telecoms regulation in the past is also a field that might help us respond to that Mikita Danilov okay right so um i think we’re through the first set of guiding questions lots of food for thought right but what i would like to do is maybe i’ll go to the next set of questions just to make sure that we do get all the interventions in before we turn to making the messages so can we go to the second question and closely related can european regulation alone for example the dma deliver digital sovereignty or parallel investments in infrastructure innovation and industrial capacity essential to avoid falling short it’s a leading question but i think that there’s quite a lot we can talk about in this field from the brussels municipality okay i’ve seen giacomo mazzone in the room

Giacomo Mazzone: Yes, thank you. My more than a question is a reflection. Of course, we are fully supportive of the regulation that the EU has built over the years to make the digital world a safer place and as Eurodigma board member, as Edmo advisory board member and my personal capacity try to contribute to its implementation in day -by -day activities. But regulation has a limit as has been told very correctly by the German representative. In order to fully implement the regulation, we need to complement it with active industrial policies. Let’s think about some delimited regulations. BSA and DMA sanctions to internet platform when they create systemic risk to society cannot change the business model of the platform and their activity.

The EMFA introduced the freedom of choice about the information individual diet from the next year. But platform and device manufacturers are not preparing them for making this possible. The portability rights has been introduced by EU regulation, but if I want to migrate my data, let’s say from Meta or Alphabet or TikTok or LinkedIn, what does change? We need an alternative that is respectful of the European values. The only viable alternative that could create a EU alternative to the non -EU -based platforms and AI application is, in my opinion, the concept of TEP, the Trusted European Platform, that has been mentioned in the Berlin Digital Sovereignty Summit in November last year. Creating EU champions that are respectful of EU principles and human rights that are not an addictive and not toxic business model based on open sources is inevitable.

This is an essential part of the EU strategy for digital transition. I hope that the support for the TEPs in the announced next week’s Sovereignty Tech Package will not be symbolic but substantial. We need long -term investment and three criteria need to apply to recognize what will be at that. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you very much, Giacomo. Interesting, actually, then really looking at the practical implications of what does a move beyond European regulation mean. Valentina Stadnik from the ITU. Valentina, the floor is yours.

Valentina Stadnic: Thank you. Make it work? Okay. Now I’m connected. So, yeah, thank you so much. I believe my answer will be more indirect to the question than direct, but I feel like our speakers have done the same, actually, in all of their interventions. They did answer this question already. So, representing the ITU, which is the UN specialized agency for the ICTs, and having this multi -stakeholder approach as the core, in all of our operations and values, at the same time being driven by the goal of connecting the whole world and ensuring the meaningful connectivity for the whole world. I think I would like to step a little bit aside and provide a little bit more of the reflections on the global stage and the global commitments that were mentioned before and a little bit of a management of the interdependencies that were also referenced.

So as you probably know, ITU has been always committed to create the common technical language, enabling countries to connect across borders. So we are strong believers in the fact that the open and internationally agreed standards are an enabler of sovereignty. So from that perspective, we can take this point as a whole separate conversation, but I believe we already heard some of the voices from the stage that I can echo from their perspective. But also the other angle, that I would like to bring is… also the resilience angle. And here, the cross -border coordination in our perspective is indispensable. And whether we look at the angles of the spectrum management, of the disaster management, of the cybersecurity incident response, all of those aspects have no borders, and it requires the cooperation.

And, yeah, and I believe when it comes to the spectrum management, it perhaps is one of the clearest demonstrations of the sovereignty and cooperation, which are not contradictory to the cooperation scopes, as well as the early warning response and the cybersecurity national capabilities strengthening while ensuring the cooperation. So, yeah, I’ll stop here, but I would be happy to continue the conversation further. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Valentina. I think many of us would be happy to continue that conversation that covers issues. The global nature of the Internet, the requirements for… global coordination and the way that europe actually positions itself in that um in that debate so hopefully we can have some discussion about that later on in the in the panel uh andrea mihailovich who is mentioned as the president of civil society but uh uh is probably busy um solving some problem somewhere uh lilith yes who is the ceo of civil society no not ceo of civil society ceo lilith neither probably solving the same problem um sandra patige no okay you see this topic um evokes many emotions and gets lots of people to want to react um and then leads to a kind of uh tip.

Amath, NDA. Nope, not yet. Okay. Moyo soro ro reula adiemi. Online. Okay. But I think Jeremy was also in the last session, right? So Jeremy Jaffe. No, he’s not here either. Okay. Now I’m pretty certain that Lea is in the room. Hi, Lea. Lea Ravchanin. The floor is

Lea Rovcanin: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lea, and I have to say that it’s a pleasure to be here and, of course, to be part of the UTIG. So the European Union has become a global leader in digital regulation through initiatives like the GDPR, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act. Yet an important question remains. Can digital sovereignty exist if not all European countries are equally included in digital transition? I’m from Antenengro, a candidate country observing Europe’s digital ambition from the outside, hoping one day to be fully part of them. From this perspective, digital sovereignty cannot rely on regulation alone. Without infrastructure, investment, innovation capacity, and digital skills, smaller countries risk remaining only consumers of technologies developed elsewhere.

If candidate countries are not included in Europe’s digital investment and innovation ecosystem now, not after association, we risk creating a two -speed digital Europe. We risk creating a two -speed digital Europe where some countries shape the future while others struggle to keep up. So digital sovereignty should not only mean like reducing dependence outside of Europe, but also ensuring that no part of Europe is left behind the digital transition. And I would like to close with a question. How can Europe claim digital sovereignty if parts of Europe remain digitally dependent with Europe itself? Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you for the question, Leah. Very stimulating. And thank you also for reminding us Eurodig is bigger than just the EU itself. Even though we’re being graciously hosted by the European Commission right now as one of the partners, Eurodig does go broader. Dennis, you are online. Thank you. The screen is yours.

Denis Nazarenko: Yeah, apologies for not being in person due to recent attacks. So on the point of question, from our perspective, the honest, balanced evaluation is necessary. And then our experience suggests it works best alongside capability and resilience. So sovereignty in our practical experience is less a status than a capacity. The capacity of public institutions to continue operating, to protect data, to communicate to residents, and to make decisions under pressure. So it is shaped not only by who owns the infrastructure, but where the government has real governance capacity of the systems that it depends on. And with that in mind, I would suggest three leaders, which are worth holding together. First, obviously the government. Second, the government.

on a competition, rights, interoperability, transparency, and accountability. So, DMA, DSA, Forced Common Clause and the AI Development Act, all that sits in this layer. Second, capability of sovereign and trust infrastructure, including what was mentioned several times, sovereignty over semiconductors and cheap supply chains, which sits upstream of almost every other digital sovereignty question. So, alongside public sector data capacity, cybersecurity, procurement, the European public authorities collectively procure tens of billions in digital services each year. When that procurement will converge on shared standard supply chain instruments, have more work to do with digital public infrastructure framing as useful. And a third one. Resilience. System design for disruption, not only for efficiency. So, Ukraine recent experience offers one data point.

Dependence tends to become visible. when systems are attacked and supply chains are interrupted or public communication contested. And last point, super briefly, of all the layers of sovereignty under discussion, the most important is data sovereignty, and in our reading, it’s the final destination, and it is more strong to exercise the level close to residence. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Denis. I have to say, maybe it’s on this part of the stage it was a bit difficult to hear, but we’ll try and touch base on many of your points. I mean, we heard you referring to resilience, data sovereignty, and interoperability as some of the key concerns, I think. But thank you very much for your contribution. João. João Gomes, University of Minho, and UD.

Joao Gomes: Europe is the world’s most sophisticated regulator of security. If an infrastructure, it is not on. We have spent two days discussing sovereignty on laptops we did not build, in software we did not write, connected to servers we cannot find. This is Europe I will inherit. We have the DSA, the DMA, the EACT, the GDPR, but we do not have the cloud, we do not have the models, we do not have the fabs. 70 % of the European cloud market belongs to Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This is not an accident, this is a habit. Europe has stopped imagining itself as a place where things are actually built. We have started to imagine ourselves as a place whose job is to govern things created by people who will never come to a conference like this one.

I am in my 20s, in 10, maybe 20 years I will probably be the age many of you are. So I do have one request, not for these panels, but for everyone in this room. Me. stop telling my generation that you are protecting us from American technology and start telling us how we actually build our own technology because we can write a hundred more regulations hold a hundred more erotics and Europe will eventually become a museum of its own ambition my generation does not need protection we need an actual chance thank you

Jamal Shahin: thank you thank you very much Yao I see we have a sort of different applause policy around the room but anyway I think that there were some very important points that you’ve raised there that also touch on many of the things that our speakers have said about implementation, development, awareness and actual the role then of and scope of regulation and what needs to be done beyond that so these are the things that I would like to say and these are the really interesting and important points that I hope will be brought out in the messages we will go to the third Next question, I will read out the baseline of the question. So how can Europe assert its digital sovereignty against the U .S.

and China without fragmenting the open Internet? And what technical and political solutions are most urgently needed now? If I may, I think this also relates to many of the themes we’ve been discussing in the previous two questions as well. So provides us with an opportunity to think about how we fit that round peg in that square hole or how we move beyond that. We have Axel Mazolo, who will not be raising their question, but maybe we have Kamran Karimov. Or Eric Poll. Thank you. Thank you. sorry eric yes

Eric Pol: concepts of digital sovereignty or privacy. What they want are better services, easier management of their lives, and a sense of safety, much like we don’t need to understand anti -lock braking systems to trust a car. Citizens shouldn’t need to be experts in data infrastructure to feel secure in their digital lives. The main point is this. Personal digital sovereignty at scale strengthens the entire ecosystem. It builds the systemic trust necessary for markets to thrive and empower digital citizens. It is technically feasible, politically sound, and the only way to ensure a resilient digital future. Since it is also a universal concept, as we experience with our membership spanning 45 countries on all continents, by applying it, the EU can give birth to a strong global alternative to the US and Chinese model, thus strengthening the Brussels effect.

Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Eric, for re -emphasizing the role of the personal, but also then emphasizing that this does not mean that we all need to become our own developers in that way. Padi Esfandiari. Padi is online, right?

Pari Esfandiari: Thank you very much. Yes, I’m online. So I will be very short on this. What I want to emphasize is that I see some contradiction. I think that digital sovereignty already reveals a kind of contradiction because sovereignty implies control, borders, while the Internet was built on openness and interdependence. So perhaps the real question is not how Europe becomes sovereign, but how it becomes resilient without contributing to fragmentation. I also think that regulation alone is not enough. Europe is becoming very powerful at regulating technologies largely developed elsewhere. The DMA and AI Act matter, but regulation without infrastructure, innovation, and industrial capacity risks becoming a form of managed dependency. I also believe that Europe should avoid simply reproducing either the U .S.

platform model or the Chinese state -centric model. Its real contribution could be strategic resilience without digital nationalism. But if every major power increasingly frames digital policy through security and geopolitical competition, then perhaps the deeper question is this. Are we still trying to preserve a global Internet or are we already moving towards competing geopolitical Internet? So I stop here and thank you again for the opportunity. Thank you

Jamal Shahin: very much, Paddy, also for raising many points that I think will come up in the following discussion. Thinking about whether the geopolitical moves are actually justifying a different type of Internet than the one we have, but also focusing on the role of Europe’s citizens and users of these services. We move now to Vittorio Bertola. Hi, Vittorio. okay so

Vittorio Bertola: hi i’m vittorio bertola from open exchange which is one of the open source partners of the german open desk project and first let me say that it’s 2026 and we’re still splitting hairs on which words to use whether it’s sovereignty or autonomy or well i i mean this thing is vital it’s vital for the survival of europe not just in the digital sector but as an independent and sovereign power so let’s stop arguing on words and let’s start acting immediately and which solutions would we need i mean we need all of them we need the investments we need regulation we need public procurement policies and industrial policy we need regulation that puts the european solutions first and open source first and is not afraid to require european suppliers at least when key key sectors like defense and european citizens processing data processing and we need a solution to this problem and we need a solution to this problem and we need a solution to this problem and we need a solution to this problem and we need a solution to this problem and we need to think that public administrations and public money is spent to us European solutions.

It’s not that hard, but we have to do it, not just talk about it. And I thank the German government for leading this. I see movement in France, in Denmark, but most European states are still not doing anything. And what is the Commission doing to push them and the other institutions? What are they waiting for? At the same time, I’m also a bit fed up that every time we try to do something, there’s someone complaining about fragmenting the Internet or protectionism. And I honestly don’t care. I don’t know if protecting Europe and developing the European sector is fragmenting the Internet or is it protectionism. But I know that if we don’t do it, we are doing ourselves harm.

We are self -harm. So, I mean, I don’t want to be self -harm. I think there are actors outside of Europe that would like us to be self -harmful, other countries, other companies. But we should not be continuing to harm ourselves by not acting and just talking about it and being afraid of doing what is

Jamal Shahin: the policy is working but thanks Vittorio for telling us to move on and get to the next speaker very important points that I think we can cover later on Adriana Rodriguez -Novo perfect Elona Hickok hi can you hear me?

Elonnai Hickok: in the context of this question I would want to agree with a lot of what I’ve heard in terms of the importance of interoperability when we’re thinking about how Europe can assert its digital sovereignty against the US and China without fragmenting the open internet and that includes open standards shared protocols portability, interconnection so it’s really important to look for spaces to build this interoperability including oversight, certification procurement guidelines etc and i also think that it’s important when implementing this to resist the temptation for a race to the bottom to not take a state control approach or a state -centric approach to avoid government overreach undermining of the multi -stakeholder model this means centering international human rights frameworks and legislation and regulation focusing on user control limiting surveillance powers by judicial oversight and the principles and necessity proportionality and legality but i think it also really means thinking carefully about what it what the translation of paper to practice looks like if you look at the terms and the values put forward by countries like china they also talk about multi -stakeholderism the national cyber security standard committee in china just issued non -minding ethics guidelines which are very important to us and i think that’s a very important part of the process that emphasizes user control so we’re all starting to talk about and use the same bag but how we actually get there, I think is very different and needs to be paid attention to.

I also wanted to pick up on what was said in the opening panel about the need to focus on how the EU is showing up in international spaces that have implications for sovereignty. The UN Cybercrime Treaty is an example of this, where provisions can potentially allow foreign governments to gain access to national data with weaker protections. Yet this proposal was supported by the EU based on arguments that an alternative could be worse. So all to say, I think when we’re thinking about sovereignty, it’s very important to take a holistic approach and avoid a race to the bottom. Thank you. Thank

Jamal Shahin: you. Thank you, Elona, for the holistic approach. Parvin, Jim, should do online. Parvin, I see you online, but please unmute yourself. Thank you. 6, 7 that’s where it comes from actually 6, counting up the seconds until we move to the next speaker Maciek yeah I see Maciek online so I would ask him to unmute 5, 6 7, I feel cruel but we have time limitations Arnaud Arnaud which is home please hello

Arnaud Wittersheim: hello well I’m not sure if it’s relevant what I’m going to say I represent a sovereign corporate registrar and DNS provider that develops proprietary solutions for its clients so we’re happy to be here in this space for dialogue And we welcome the European legislative efforts in the fields of data protection and cybersecurity. But what we notice is that regulations such as GDPR or NISTU and even others are pushing our ecosystem into significant policy changes. And on a local perspective, as a European provider, we see that transpositions of EU regulations into national laws result in as many disparities as there are member states, especially in the case of the NISTU directive regarding the expected operational measures and impacts.

And so, if I could make a wish. in terms of sovereignty is that these aspects be taken into account by the legislators to push for a convergent operational framework. Because legislation should bring benefits for users, but not create excessive disparities between European and non -European operators, as this could be detrimental for European operators. And this also requires more dialogue, and maybe there could be also more certification champs to help businesses stand out and showcase compliance and expertise. So bring improvements to users and also business value for stakeholders.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Agno, for this contribution. which I’m sure we will be able to respond to in the chat, in the conversation. Nadia Simeon. No. Or Katalin Marinescu. Thank you. Sorry. There’s a big poll in the way. Katalin?

Catalin Marinescu: Okay, I think I can speak now. Hello, thank you. And parts of what I wanted to say have already been mentioned, so I’ll try not to repeat too much. As someone who works in the private sector, I can see that business models are changing faster than ever, and companies need to adapt if they want to survive. AI is the focus to increase productivity, and everyone in the software world has on their mind two things. The EU Cyber Resilience Act and asking themselves, is my application platform independent? Never before was this question more relevant than it is now. And it is to date. Unfortunately, public administrations look slower in adapting and implementing the latest trends and technologies.

I think we have quite a way to go to achieve digital sovereignty, but the regulation is taking shape with the tech sovereignty package, and we are moving in the right direction. We need European alternatives, and I think we have the technical capabilities to build them, or if those alternatives are already available, we need to make them popular and use them. About incorporating open source, we have to keep in mind that it could be privatized in the future. My final statement is that we need to build a stronger relationship between the private sector and the policy makers if we want to achieve our goals. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Katalin. Okay, we’ve gone through all the questions. there are many points that need to be raised but it would be remiss of me if I please don’t warn the speakers that we do not have that much time because we need to agree on some minutes and the food will get cold so first maybe just a quick summary from my side I hear people talking about achieving a specific form of digital sovereignty I hear people talking about digital sovereignty as a process as a transformation in a broader sense I also hear people talking about rules the challenges around implementing or developing rules but then also the norms and the global values that go around that I hear people talking about what would be Europe’s specific advantage in this space and many others and other of the issues that have been raised by our interventions.

Before we open up the floor to other interventions, I would like to just go back. Are there comments that you would have on certain points for Fabrizio? I see you’ve been desperately writing things down. Maybe you have some specific comments.

Fabrizia Benini: Thank you, Jamal. I’ve been desperately writing down the names of the people that intervene and making sure that I remember what it is the points that they raise. So on the three questions, on the sovereignty question, is sovereignty the right word? My personal opinion is that, yes, it is the right word. I was struck by Ana Neve’s relation of the word sovereign to being specific to nation building and reflecting a territorial national approach. And I was also taken by Vicente Day’s emphasis on the word European. And in fact, European digital sovereignty encapsulates all of that. why does it need to be sovereignty because it touches on the very choices as regards the way we elect our leaders i .e it touches on democracy which is the underpinning of our nation states in europe and without that we can’t have the other and again european because it is a collective effort so i don’t think all the other words make the cut the the the situation is serious enough to say that if we don’t get it right we might not have european democracies to protect next time around on the um is it regulation sufficient of course not regulation is never sufficient in anything we do it’s not only digital it needs to be implemented it needs to be funded it needs to be followed believed and adopted by the people that are its direct beneficiaries so we all agree that it is not um Yes, it is not the only solution.

However, I would say, I would argue, it is an indispensable solution because given that it’s a long -term process, if we don’t have regulation, it gives you the path over decades of what is it that you want to achieve. Building on the values and principles you share, you might lose your way. And so, therefore, that is why it is important to have it. Now, on the last point, of course, on this regulation, there were several important points made by Valentina on the cross -border cooperation essential layer mentioned. How is it that we can claim digital sovereignty? And Joan Gomes was very good at listing the dependencies we have. Thank you. And calling us to stand on our toes in relation to the next generation.

Yes, we hope. to be able to deliver to your expectations, or at least to try and do so. On the last point, are we trying to do something versus China and the U .S., or are we what we’re doing? Well, I don’t think if you’re thinking about self -determination, you should start thinking about others. You should start thinking about what is it that you want yourself? What are your values? What are your principles? What do you want to do? We do know one thing. We do not want and we do not support a fragmented Internet. We are for and we combat very much Internet shutdowns. This is a principle throughout our Internet governance policy, and so therefore it is very clear for us that it must remain open and it must remain interoperable.

We even have a regulation that’s called the Interoperability Act, so I hope you believe me. I hope you follow that score. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Please, Peter.

Peter Janssen: Okay. I’ll try to be brief. I would just like to point out one thing that was also pointed out by many of you, which is awareness or maybe lack of awareness or rather the consequences of not caring. And I’m sorry, I forgot your name. The person from Uthik who is right in front of me, I’m like, yes, you. Thank you. Sorry to mispronounce your name. Maybe a cheeky question to you would be, are you a user of Gmail? Yes. Do you realize the consequences of that choice? That, I think, would be the major important aspect, that people that now take a convenience choice, Gmail is easy, Gmail is free of charge. Gmail is everywhere. So, you know, if Google is good at one thing, and I’m not picking on Google here just by itself, but Google is good at making it convenient for you, and that is what people then at that moment in time take as their decision power.

You were talking about younger people versus older people. I would say myself maybe in the older group then, but I do have a daughter who is 25, so I guess that is more or less in the neighborhood that you were thinking about. She is using an email address that sits on a European TLD that is hosted in a European data center by a European entity, and that is completely European. Why is that? Because I enforced it up in her. I tried to explain that to her, and then her response is, yeah, but Gmail is being used by everybody else I know, and it’s easy, and I’m using WhatsApp, and it’s easy, and so on and so on.

So I think awareness and, most importantly, the consequence of what people are saying is that they are not using Gmail. The choice you make is the most important aspect here, and I think we need to get better in… showing to the world what the consequence is of taking the easy choice, which is what the Americans in this case are very good at. I’ll stop there. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Peter. Frank?

Frank Krüger: Yes, I would like to pick out one question, which was raised by several of you, and that was how do we come to European alternatives? And how, yes, to become active and to build whatever is needed to have European solutions. And I think we have a lot of young people ahead of us and a lot of talents, young talents. And I think we have a very good landscape in research across Europe, a very good research landscape, very good innovative people. And I think… I think that’s where innovation comes from, from the young people, from the young innovators. of people and once you scale your business and I think that’s something which is lacking in Europe to scale and when it comes to whatever billions of euro you need, then often American investors jump in.

But I think that’s something we need to scale ideas of young talents of universities and such. I think we have a lot of very good startups in Europe already in the AI landscape. I don’t want to mention one of this but we have some in Germany, we have some in France, we have some in all the other countries across Europe and I think that’s what we need to scale our business and to have competitive enterprises at the end because people will buy what is cheap and what is convenient to use. And I think that we must strengthen our efforts to come to more European solutions but we have the talents, we have the potential, we have the good people here.

anywhere else and I think yes we need to strengthen our efforts to scale this and then it’s not only in Italian service or not only in German service or in France service but then it can become a European provider that is competitive

Jamal Shahin: okay thank you very much Frank the organizers are looking at me very nervously because the salad is getting cold but but I did have just and I and I know there were people that wanted to raise their voice but unfortunately we have to go through the messages so please do use the lunch space to actually vote vocalize your opinions and maybe talk to the people who are writing the messages as well for that just one from my side because I’m the moderator and I can just to say that you know we’ve been covering a lot of different issues here I think that some of the things we’ve talked about show that European digital sovereignty is not about a legal form of digital sovereignty what we often think about in terms but it’s about mindsets it’s about thinking about sovereignty as a set of relations as well as a form of determinacy right self -determination in that sense i think there are a lot of other european values that we need to allocate to this um i would have loved to have had a broader discussion on those kinds of things but this discussion was happening in euridic previously will happen in euridic uh in the future and will be continue to be a part of the global internet governance discourses for a long time at least i hope so because i’ve a career on it um so but now i would like to pass the floor to paulo who’s going to read the messages and then we can have a fight over the food uh about whether we agree with them or not thanks paulo

Paulo Glowacki: yes thank you jamal um and thank you also to izan who worked with me in this effort so it’s not an individual effort but a collective effort we have four messages for you to reflect on this discussion um to briefly give you a rationale behind it in the first one it’s kind of an opening paragraph the second one is what digital sovereignty is for us the third one looks at what we need to achieve this and then the last one reflects a little bit on the meaning of digital sovereignty let me read them out to you so everybody gets an understanding first one eurodig recognizes that europe’s dependencies on external digital technologies and infrastructures have created strategic vulnerabilities including for democratic values Europe must shape and self -determine its human -centric digital future while maintaining internet openness, preserving choice of technologies and providers that adhere to open standards and interoperability, while remaining grounded in multi -stakeholder values and human rights.

Somewhat lengthy statement, but we wanted to reflect everything in there. Secondly, digital sovereignty is a cumulative transformative process that requires action by all stakeholders. This effort should consist of active industrial policies such as investment in and the development and scaling up of trusted European players in chips, semiconductors, cloud, AI, open data, supporting the maintenance of open source infrastructure, interoperability, and alignment of values. This should encourage innovation while retaining balanced regulatory approaches to key issues like procurement, competition, privacy, and cybersecurity. Lastly, digital sovereignty is a cumulative transformative process that requires action by all stakeholders. To achieve European digital sovereignty, we must take a holistic approach, bringing together national policy, multi -stakeholder efforts under a common European dimension to empower citizens, especially youth.

Further, the importance of cognitive sovereignty and ensuring that European residents are afforded the ability to have a digital public sphere should be encompassed by this topic. We note the Cannes Declaration on the Sovereignty of the Mind in this regard. And lastly, the last paragraph about meaning. Digital sovereignty should ultimately be interpreted to mean resilient openness and strategic autonomy, leveraging Europe’s strengths. Digital sovereignty should not mean isolation, stepping away from global digital cooperation, protectionism, or the creation of walls. That leads to fragmentation. You see, we have a fifth point, but we wanted to keep it brief and action -oriented. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you very much. I would now open up the floor to ask if there are any violent, vicious, strong disagreements with that. Bear in mind that the conversation can continue for the next few days on the document. So if people have comments that they really would like to make right now, maybe we can just take note of who you are and what your comment is. I’m going to go in the order that I saw the hands being raised. Okay, so the gentleman there, Michiel at the front, then Giacomo at the back, and then yourself.

Alexander Pitch: Hello, everyone. Very quick. Alexander Pitch from the Internet Society, the Switzerland chapter. One aspect which has been totally absent in the discussion is the importance of analog solutions from the perspective of a cyber resilience point of view and a democratic point of view. We as democratic societies cannot force digitalization upon…

Jamal Shahin: Sorry, excuse me. The point that we have to do here is just do you have an agreement or a disagreement with the messages?

Alexander Pitch: It’s a severe missing point.

Jamal Shahin: Michiel? No? Yes.

Miguel Vidal: So the point I was making that when open source is seen as the thing that you need to maintain and you invest in champions, you’re doing it exactly the wrong way around. So you need to invest in the open source and then tolerate champions in that sense. Because if we’re doing ourselves short… So the prioritization of saying we need… We need to invest in lots of startups and those will save the day. No, it’s the commons that will save the day. So the relationship between champions and open source.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you. We’ll note and think about that. Jack, come at the back. Mike. No, I cannot hear you. Yes. Now, yes.

Giacomo Mazzone: Sorry. On point two, we are mentioning things that need to be promoted. And I think that the concept of trusted European platforms need to be included. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Okay. Thank you. Good. Wait until you read. There you go. Okay, thank you.

Audience: I’m Caroline from Germany, and I’m talking for the fact -checking community because we’re talking about open source, which is very much in our mind. But, Mr. Krüger, you were also talking about repositories, and especially when it comes to AI development, repositories are super important because we need data to develop tools. But what is important also from our perspective, we are often victim to scraping from a lot of different corners. And when we’re building repositories or when you’re incentivizing to build repositories, I would be very happy if there was also a sustainability model behind that.

Giacomo Mazzone: I cannot hear you. Yes. Now, yes. Sorry. On point two, we are mentioning things that need to be promoted, and I think that the concept of trusted European platforms need to be included. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Okay. Thank you. Good. Wait until you read. There you go. Okay. Thank you.

Audience: I’m Caroline from Germany, and I’m talking for the fact -checking community because we’re talking about open source, which is very much in our mind. But, Mr. Krüger, you were also talking about repositories, and especially when it comes to AI development, repositories are super important because we need data to develop tools. But what is important also from our perspective, we are often victim to scraping from a lot of different corners. And when we’re building repositories or when you’re incentivizing to build repositories, I would be very happy. I would be very happy if there was also a sustainability model behind that because the organizations that are feeding data into these repositories need to be funded to do their work and to generate the very data.

Jamal Shahin: Okay, thank you very much. We will see how we are able to integrate that into the messages that come out. I must say that I’m quite satisfied and very pleased with the way that these messages have come out. This is thanks to the contributions that have come from the panel, from you, and from the org team that organized this debate. Oh, we have, is that one hand or two? We have one more contribution. Belen Luna.

Belen Luna: I want to add also that when we are talking about digital sovereignty, for sure we need to be questioning what are the business models that we are supporting. Do we really want to have European big tech that is going to harvest our data, violate our privacy, and that is going to put the wrong principles and values in our society? And also I want to raise a very important point, is that we need to be very careful Okay. in this conversation because we are very, very close to far -right rhetoric. Thank you very much.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you so much. Right. The dialogue, as I said, will continue over lunch. the dialogue will continue over the next weeks and we look forward to continuing this i would like to say thank you to our panelists and thank you to everybody in the room for a constructive debate thanks a lot

Florence Ranson: thank you very much tamal and thank you all before we break for lunch somebody lost their bag at the party last night so if anybody saw a bag found the bag gave it to whoever was uh at the train world please let us know you can let me know you can let sandra know or any of our colleagues uh joan or nadia at the front desk here um that would be very helpful for that person now let’s break for lunch back here at two o ‘clock thank you

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