Welcome back to the EuroStack Potential newsletter.

There has been a lot of movement across Europe recently in supporting digital sovereignty, a key element in the overall EuroStack ideology/concept. So much so, that sovereign-washing has increased. This is a tactic often employed by incumbents who are threatened by new market entrants or changing policy goals and they don’t want to share the market or substantially change their business operations. So they just say they are already doing the thing.

In the last month or so, both Oracle and Microsoft have launched "European-sovereign cloud" approaches, suggesting that because their data centres are located in Europe with data stored in Europe, they are a sovereign solution. However, there have also been a number of articles published where Microsoft, for example, has admitted that data on a sovereign cloud could still be shared with the authoritarian¹ US Administration.²

Cities and governments aren't necessarily buying it, especially in the wake of the Microsoft shutting down the International Criminal Court Director's email access. (Microsoft have since danced around this, saying the ICC was in no way disrupted while also not confirming or denying any blocks to the Director’s email). So far, the Netherlands, Germany and⁶ France, city governments in Denmark, and independent initiatives in Germany and Finland are all looking for ways to unshackle from bigtech. Meanwhile, Reuters noted a shift away from US bigtech and growing interest amongst European citizens in new social media alternatives based in Europe.⁷  

In any case, recent discussions with the European Commissioner suggest that the EuroStack potential³ is being considered seriously. Others note the importance of digital sovereignty to democracy. And initiatives like the European-led Fact8ra to develop a European sovereign AI platform, are progressing.

EuroStack as a decolonisation project

How we structure society around the EuroStack potential will create the type of EuroStack we eventually get. This is also why we mustn't separate tech policy from context. They are interdependent. When analysts talk about the perfection of Amazon marketplaces, they are having to exclude the workplace health impacts for drivers and warehouse workers, the dark patterns and encouragement of over-consumption, the stolen ideas from successful marketplace vendors, the bullying tactics on retailers, the lack of fair tax payments, the unpaid use of urban infrastructure, and so on. In the US, this separation has led to the current state where bigtech, mostly white male founders and investors, are now writing fascist manifestos, using tech for surveillance and control, and supporting and funding authoritarianism.

EuroStack emerged in part out of a refocus on the European competitiveness agenda proposed by Draghi. Recently, Europe's lagging in competitiveness was lamented when looking at Meta, Amazon and other tech companies: but do we really want a homegrown Meta that most recently was found to send beauty ads to any teenage girl after they deleted a selfie? When competitiveness is compared, it often discounts the benefits of universal healthcare, the regularly declining child mortality rates across the US, the tips-as-payment economy of the US, the vast inequality between CEO pays and regular workers, the lack of consumer and business regulatory safeguards and encouragement of interoperability that allows new market entrants to participate, the rebates paid to make certain markets and businesses competitive, the VC-investor model which focuses on profit opportunities from unnecessary products while real needs go unmet, and the tax avoidance of million- and billionaires. Is Europe really that lagging in competitiveness or is the competitiveness agenda focused on comparing Europe to a US now entering a steep decline on any range of social, environmental and economic indicators?

Problems in framing bigtech as digital colonialism

So when we think of supporting a EuroStack agenda, it is partly about a vision of the type of European society we want to create with technology.

And framing the current challenges as digital colonialism makes me cringe. Using language like unequal power dynamics, over-reliance on technology out of local control, digital and data extractavism, and future-proofing our critical IT infrastructure in a world facing greater trade barriers are all framings that I can acknowledge. But digital leaders have not sought to address the impacts of European colonisation in Europe (let alone in the countries they have previously colonised and still benefit from). So it smacks as highly insensitive that tech leaders who were previously less-focused on leveraging tech to decolonise European society are now worried about facing the impacts from a new type of digital colonialism.

On the face of it, there is nothing intrinsically incorrect with labeling bigtech's impact on Europe as neocolonialist and describing the risk of bigtech supremacy resulting in Europe becoming a digital colony. Analysts in low and middle income countries are also concerned at the new wave of digital colonialism, particularly around AI, that is occurring.

The UN University's IIGH describes colonialism as a term to describe "the control, occupation, and exploitation by states of foreign lands and peoples", pointing in particular to the "colonisation of Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific by European nation states over the course of several centuries". They do note some thinkers, including the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, reference neocolonialism as any form of domination and exploitation that might not involve direct occupation and control.

In any case, bigtech's influence in Europe — also recently calculated as the biggest investor in lobbying in Europe — could be considered a type of neocolonialism, which makes the argument of Europe as as digital colony in some ways valid. It certainly adds to the sense of urgency to act.

Our colonialism is a worry but yours not so much

But the challenge is that those who are continuing to face the ongoing impacts of European colonisation are still trying to get acknowledgement that Europe's history of colonisation has not been adequately addressed and that reparations have not been adequately made. As recent as November 2024, legal experts from across Africa presented a list of ten demands to address the ongoing disparities faced by colonised nations and migrants now living in (or trying to enter into) Europe.⁸

Some proponents of the EuroStack agenda argue that funding for policy goals could come from digital taxes on bigtech and other imported digital service providers. To appease Trump however, Europe abandoned a digital tax. This further entrenches colonisation in two ways.

Firstly, the prime beneficiaries of the avoidance of a digital tax will not be consumers of digital services in Europe. The reduced business costs will simply benefit the billionaires who own bigtech and the millionaire shareholders and C-suite leaders who receive unequal salaries over the workforce that actually creates the value for the bigtech. Recent reports from Oxfam show that billionaire wealth is increasingly fueled by "inheritance, cronyism and monopoly power" which were gained through historical colonialist practices.

Secondly, by Europe removing digital taxes it makes it harder for low and middle income countries to advocate and force digital taxes against digital service providers importing into their countries. Indonesia and India have already postponed or dropped digital taxation plans, no doubt in part because of the lack of support from potential alliances Europe could have offered.

ASIDE: We map some of this neocolonialism in my work at Platformable when we look at the evolution of open digital ecosystems in banking and finance. At the fintech products and services level (not so much the infrastructure level), we show the proportion of fintech apps in each region that are home-grown versus imported:

As at Q2 2024, roughly 30% of fintech providers in any market are imported. But what is hidden here is that most of those imported fintech are payments rails: a core service enabling other banking and finance services. The problem we are trying to highlight here is that once those foreign providers offer digital services to local populations, they start to collect data on their users' preferences and behaviours, which they can then exploit to create newer services and products (or use dark patterns to lock in users) which further extends the advantage of these foreign providers. What's more, it is often not an even-playing field to start with: local providers are more likely to need to pay local taxes, whereas international companies without a local physical presence may avoid digital taxes.

Colonialism in digital health

Our digital and data systems in Europe are still very much designed with colonialism baked in. This became further evident during COVID: race and ethnicity data is not regularly reported across Europe, so identifying migrant populations at greater risk from COVID was not possible. While the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control did highlight the need to collect race and ethnicity data this has still not be adopted, some five years later.

The colonialism that continues in public digital health occurs via multiple intersecting dimensions. I saw this in our research for the World Health Organization looking at health data governance maturity globally. One issue that researchers raised in low and middle income countries was that the research data they share is then used by academics in high income countries to advance their professional careers, without the researchers being invited to participate or fully acknowledged and credited for their contributions. This is a crucial issue as researchers in low and middle income countries need to demonstrate impact in order to advance in their careers. It led us to include professional prestige as a benefit/value that should be generated in digital health ecosystems, and to further prioritise data justice principles as a key foundation in our health (and other) data governance models.

Tech companies benefit from colonialism

Tech companies across Europe do have a share of issues around exploitation of migrant populations, especially from nations previously colonised: whether that be low paid or contracted workers hired as delivery couriers, rideshare drivers, or cheaper developer/engineer labour by tech companies in general. Data shows that migrant workers in any sector, including tech, are paid at much lower rates than European-born employees.

One of the biggest challenges is that because data on business and company registration does not record race and ethnicity data or country of birth, it is not possible to measure whether founders from colonised countries are able to start tech businesses or access investment funding as much as European-born founders. (Data on women founders in Europe is equally as invisible.)

Tech companies in Europe have also led initiatives to address some of these disparities: in the past I have hired staff via MigraCode, a non-profit bootcamp that provides tech workforce training to disenfranchised — often migrant, women, and non-binary —populations so that they may enter the tech industry. Notable European tech companies have helped fund these initiatives and hired from this same student pool.

Enlisting EuroStack as a decolonisation project

We need better disaggregated population data looking at race and ethnicity, languages spoken, and country of birth. Labour participation, income, workplace health and safety, business ownership, and access to financing should all be able to be assessed by race and ethnicity in Europe. As the EuroStack advances and European tech procurement increases, the distribution of these benefits amongst businesses with women and migrant leadership and ownership needs to be measured and the ratio of CEO and director-level wages to average worker rates needs to be monitored. Pay rates between men and women and disaggregated by race/ethnicity also need to be collected and reported systemically, not as one-off studies.

Events, research collaborations, and industry partnerships need to welcome in migrant populations, as well as increase the participation of women founders. Initiatives promoting EuroStack need to diversify participation and leadership. Understanding how colonialism plays out and identifying opportunities to align with EuroStack could emerge from projects like the RedressHub digital mapping project currently started.

New efforts to form alliances with colonised countries to build new procurement partnerships, strengthen open source technology use in digital public infrastructures, and share learnings also needs to occur. In fact, Europe can learn a lot from India and Brazil, for example, in building digital public infrastructure and can form alliances to better support global digital taxes, a current agenda of the OECD that keeps dying because of US opposition. European support is essential when working with previously colonised nations. There are signs that the US is introducing trade agreements aimed at impacting Brazil's successful Pix instant payment processing infra. Europe can learn from Pix while also bolstering Brazil's independence against US-led payment processors which are keen to dismantle the digital public infrastructure for their competitive advantage. As Dr Alberto Martí points out, this level of collaboration can also be one of the most professionally rewarding elements of work (and life). Recent experiences of digital and socio-economic extractivism in South America, as discussed by Cecilia Rikap in OpenDemocracy, also demonstrate the need for greater alliances.

Tech products and digital services need to include colonised and migrant populations as potential target segments for products and features. Digital services (apart from remittance services) are often not built with the needs of migrant populations as a target segment in mind.

Europe needs to participate in global discussions to introduce digital taxes. Europe's abandonment of digital tax to appease an authoritarian leader in the US is an abdication of global responsibility and was an unsuccessful strategy in any case as mere days later, the US introduced blanket 30% tariffs for the EU. It is also unconscionable that Europe, as a richer nation that can (shortsightedly) "afford" this as a bargaining tactic throws low and middle income countries under the bus to defend themselves in arguing for level-playing field digital taxes in other parts of the world. It is an agenda that has united the whole world for the past ten to fifteen years and has only been stalled because the US keeps blocking it.

The contributions of diversity and the benefits from prioritising decolonisation in fostering innovation also need to be better measured and shared.

As AI is adopted (or shoehorned in), we need better transparency on the bias of datasets being used and the participation of populations from colonised countries in how data about them is used. The ethical use of AI and the negative impacts of AI and the potential impacts of AI in further entrenching the impacts of colonisation need to be discussed and monitored. The recent regulations around transparency of training models could be helpful in this regard, but Europe's recent equivocating around enforcing its strong digital regulatory environment is a concern.⁴

If we think digital colonialism is bad, let’s address existing colonialism at the same time

One of the key reasons why EuroStack advocates frame US big tech power imbalances in terms of colonisation is because it implicitly recognises that colonisation is detrimental and has long-lasting impacts. It is a framing that calls for new ways of instituting industrial policy that do not amplify neocolonialist risks. So if proponents of the EuroStack are serious about the risks of digital colonisation, I feel we should all rise to truly address the existing colonialist-created inequalities that Europe has enabled and benefited from as we forge a new way forward that focuses on greater participation, reduced monopolisation, future-proofed infrastructure, and healthy, dynamic societies.

In recent weeks, European tech CEOs have proved that just moving to increase their power and influence will simply replace one set of white guys with a penchant for authoritarianism with another. Irish-based tech giant Intercom’s CEO declared that immigration was destroying the country. Swedish-founded Spotify pays the lowest royalty rates to artists, yet overpays transphobic, rightwing podcasters like Joe Rogan. The number of European tech companies who used the recent AI Continent Plan consultation plan to argue for a “simplification” in regulations, across areas including workforce data reporting and sustainability also suggests decision-making power in their hands will not benefit European society (although to be fair, many of the European tech companies did restrict comments on oversimplification to areas that are genuinely confusing, for example, Siemens Healthcare noted the AI Act could not be simultaneously applied with the medical devices and in vitro devices regulations).

Ratbags we love

Finally, this edition’s lovable ratbag (a ratbag is an Australian term of endearment for someone who is not afraid to call out power imbalances and structural and systemic inequalities) is Maria Farrell, for much of her work, but this edition, we wanted to highlight her straight talking about the role of bigtech in generating an authoritarian agenda, as she discusses in the Ripe Labs podcast. (Why is it always women who are willing to risk their tech policy careers by calling this out while the guys ignore these risks and keep posting about how best to use exploitative genAI tools on LinkedIn?)

1  Let’s just call it what it is. You don’t need further proof, but if you must: concentration camps, ICE as private militia, lack of due process in kidnapping and deporting people, closure of public broadcasting and instalment of censors answerable to US government at CBS, cancellation of travel rights for African, Caribbean and other predominantly black countries, science research being stripped, chaotic tariff arrangements with no Congressional oversight, Black women being summarily expelled from public services, removal of any women from leadership positions in military, scrubbing of women’s success histories in NASA, burning of HIV meds and food rather than provide them as the intended allocated aid they were provisioned for, the destruction of universities and reduction by 30-40% in international student populations, destruction of climate crisis science and monitoring, come on.

2  Here’s another one: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/microsoft-tells-french-lawmakers-it-cant-protect-user-data-from-us-demands/

3  Hey, thats the name of this newsletter! - with apologies to Pitch Meeting

4  See also: https://euobserver.com/green-economy/ardd9b913e

5  I only reference Politico to point out where they are wrong — they are seemingly influential in Europe as a news source, but I recommend Euractiv as a better source — as Politico come up with these weird attempts to re-establish the status quo quite often, and their US sister company is quite rightwing and apologetic to authoritarianism and is attempting to shift to AI for everything which is not going well.

6  Also: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/det-tyske-forsvar-vender-ryggen-til-microsoft , https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250613-we-re-done-with-teams-german-state-hits-uninstall-on-microsoft ,

7  Also: https://www.uni-europa.org/news/as-us-eu-trade-war-escalates-uni-calls-for-ending-amazons-access-to-eu-public-contracts/ , https://www.sciencenorway.no/social-media-technology/should-europe-build-its-own-social-media/2487650

8  See also: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/14/europe-has-yet-address-colonial-legacies-0