Welcome to the The EuroStack Potential cos who doesn't have enough newsletter subscriptions these days?

I'm excited and hopeful about the emerging EuroStack discussions occurring, aimed at encouraging European governments and businesses to build true digital alternatives (from hardware and cloud up to the application and potentially AI layers) alongside shifting reliance onto digital public infrastructure — European-originated, where possible, but at least truly open source and independent where not). There are research teams, policy thinktanks and thought leaders, government departments, practitioners, non-profits, makers, startups, scale-ups, enterprises, and others working on bringing these goals to reality.

A range of EuroStack thought leaders and actors seem to publish and advocate somewhat independently, although many know each other obviously, but there doesn't seem a single place to map everything that is happening and to gauge the impact it is having on European policy-making. That is the goal of this newsletter: to share some of the current efforts and publications (and give my opinions), and to share when I notice the EuroStack policy goals gaining traction. I aim to publish semi-regularly, probably twice a month. I have more ambitious goals for this work, but I will save that for a future newsletter discussion.

Let's start!

Vital signs

Policy and legislative movements and new tooling that incorporate the ideas of the EuroStack

Perhaps one of the most interesting democracy-related EuroStack news items in the last couple of weeks was the Dutch Parliament doubling down on rejection of US-made tech by passing eight motions that urge "the government to ditch US-made tech for homegrown alternatives", according to The Register.

Amongst the motions proposed, Parliamentarians proposed re-examining the decision to host Dutch government websites on Amazon's web services. I would love to see Amazon be refused from providing a range of services to European governments for a range of reasons: they have ignored requests to meet with European Parliament multiple times to resolve their abysmal workplace health environment (at one stage having their lobbying rights blocked because of their constant refusal to respond to European Commission requests), and from a Conway's Law perspective (that posits you can only create software that reflects the structure of the organisation creating it) I don't see how Amazon can offer health or social care systems technologies to governments that are meant to (at least as one goal) reduce inequalities when there is such wide wage and workforce inequality within the Amazon organisational structure.

But in a bizarre, and very European to my Australian-mind, twist, the same Dutch Parliamentarians also rejected a policy aimed at funding rearmament of Europe in light of US betrayal around Ukraine (more on EU defence strategy in a below section). So the Parliamentarians see the big tech oligarchy as a security threat but not a Russia emboldened by US and their increasingly influential big tech oligarchy?

For now these are non-binding Parliamentary motions. I'll try and keep watching whether the Dutch government accepts them and how, if at all, they influence policy and procurement. If you are a reader from the Netherlands, please reach out so we can discuss what you are seeing and what sources I should keep an eye on if they are not already on my radar.

It also follows several articles by Dutch technologist, Bert Hubert, who recently wrote the post "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds".

The Dutch Parliament's move comes after an open letter by over 100 EU-based tech companies encouraging the European Commission to unplug from the reliance on US-made tech and to invest instead in European alternatives.

As DigtalSME summarises:

Aside: To my mind, this also requires European tech to investigate alternative models of financing. One of my biggest concerns about the Draghi competitiveness agenda which has influenced the European Parliament's work program for the next five years, is that it frames competitiveness in some sort of way that proposes shifting investment models to replicate US-style. I get that there have been a migration of some European startups to the US so they could follow those investment/equity models, but to me that is in part a reflection of the willingness of those European tech startups to abandon European values in favour of neoliberal approaches in which the founders and managers can earn exorbitant wages and own shares over an unequally salaried workforce. The Draghi competitiveness and productivity comparisons seem to ignore that wage disparities are out of control and leads to authoritarianism, that the tech being created often has limited societal value, that investment is decided by what a small group of white men think is of value, that US competitiveness doesn't add up if you also factor in healthcare and housing affordability, and so on.

I'd like to see the signatories to this letter be open to new investment models where founders and CEOs accept that their wages are not going to be 290X higher than the average wage of their employees, as occurs in the US:

I'm in a challenging position with this: my business is bootstrapped and taxes have been a killer. This year I have had to downsize because I can't keep up with the taxes and a year of clients holding back on spend due in part to wanting to see how AI played out. That's a lot for new businesses that are committed to hiring permanent employees (as I did) rather than contractors to manage when cashflow and client invoice payments can lag, so I personally could have used new types of financing! All the same, I don't believe in the need for seeing tech as in some sort of winner-takes-all scalability competition or to follow the VC-to-acquisition-or-IPO financing model. I just want to run a digital-focused business where I am offering clients value and can pay my team a decent wage.

I'm not yet seeing the EuroStack concretely influence European Commission level policy and strategy, or even being fully acknowledged as a policy alternative, as yet, especially during policy development cycles (see below for more of a discussion on this).

So possibly the most exciting step forward this week was seeing the collaboration between German and French governments to release a Google Docs/Microsoft Word open source alternative. This also happened in the week that former US 18F alum John Skiles Skinner noted that, under 18F's leadership "government almost learnt how to make software":

(The entire thread above is worth reading.)

When i skeeted about the Docs release, it was my most popular Bluesky post ever (could I go viral? Narrator: he could not), although one commenter did query whether "governments should be doing this kind of thing." I don't see this as a big issue with government building software internally, releasing it as open source, and then even maybe shifting maintenance to the open source community after they build it. This idea that government would be better off doing other things or funding externals to build software is one approach. The French DINUM already encourage external building quite well with how they are managing their API developer portal to allow third parties to build with government APIs (even sharing APIs across all levels of government on the one portal, not just those from Federal government, and by investing in a quality developer portal and API documentation to boot). I believe during these early days of implementing the EuroStack, we need more hybrid approaches: sometimes with government itself building so they understand what is involved, but also because government may be able to do it more efficiently than for-profit businesses. Also, no one else has done a decent docs open source alternative, have they? (Don't tell me LibreOffice, i dont need a clunky Microsoft interface alternative thanks).

New thinking

Publications, presentations and work related to the EuroStack

Recent weeks have seen a number of new publications. I’m trying to keep up with reading all of them if I can. Here are a few:

Robin Berjon’s most recent blog post on digital sovereignty is a couple of weeks old now but I keep going back to it, because so much of it can inform how I think about open digital ecosystems for my work. His pragmatism leads him to list what I would call 'necessary but insufficient' strategies. Many of the areas we focus on at my work, Platformable (particularly interoperability and regulations), are on this list. So Berjon’s call to focus on more impactful strategies is making me rethink (or expand) how we should be supporting the development of open digital ecosystems (which is our business’ purpose-focused mission). The strategies that most align with my work that I will focus more effort on include:

• framing complex problems and managing problems in chunks (which we do through our ecosystem design approach)

• supporting the deployment of open transaction networks (new-ish for us)

• encouraging industry cooperation including internationally (a key way we already work)

• encouraging adoption (a buy vs build mindset which again we already do a lot)

• regulating user agents (new for us)

• encouraging building for real products (part of our design thinking, complex problem solving, and user segment needs approach), and

• working on a post-voluntary standards approach (which we have done occasionally but need to focus on more).

Berjon suggests other strategies more aimed at financing which we support and acknowledge in our mapping but are not core levers we can influence in our work to support open digital ecosystems. We are currently updating our ecosystem models to ensure these all have a place in our ecosystem design thinking.

There is so much in this post, like much of Berjon’s work. One future initiative I would love to try would be a mini book club format where we take a piece like this and discuss it over a virtual lunch hour. This piece would be an excellent candidate for kicking that off. Anyone interested in joining me at the end of April in a zoom hour to discuss how we are reading and thinking about this piece? Email if you are interested in trying this out with me.

It is interesting to read Berjon's piece alongside the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) paper released this month: "Building the European Digital Public Infrastructure: Rationale, Options, and Roadmap". The first half is an admirable summary explaining some European and global initiatives and describing the current context for Europe to be more focused on a sovereign digital public infrastructure, although it does limit the definition of digital public infrastructure as being identity, data exchange and payments, which is a limited view of DPI.

Aside: I want to share a quick aside here to point out one example of why this view of DPI is limited here. Over the second half of 2024 and into this year, I have been working with sustainability standards schemes and supply chain actors on preparing data systems for the European Union Deforestation Regulation. Other similar "due diligence" regulations including Ecodesign, Forced Labour, and Corporate Sustainability Reporting are also being introduced. These regulations have the potential for transforming some aspects of agrifood and supply chain industry sectors to be much more digital and could be mapped to understand the digital public infrastructure needs of actors and support them in this process. In fact, that is what some global bodies like the DIASCA, led by German government departments are doing, but why wasn't this an opportunity seized by the European Commission? DIASCA has gotten involved because they see the gaps impacting German retailers and businesses as well as their low and middle income country producer-suppliers who need support to prepare for these data-heavy regulatory systems. These require digital public infrastructure beyond identity and payments to include mapping software, GIS, trust frameworks, and business and producer registration systems. The open source AgStack Foundation, for example, aims to provide the DPI (tools, frameworks, and models) that would support software creation covering asset management, crop protection, equipment management, food and farm waste management, lending and insurance, and so on. Instead, the European Commission has released a really poor API aimed at allowing integration of EUDR due diligence reporting into official systems that does not align with any best practices, for example.

The majority of the CEPS report's roadmap recommendations fall into what Berjon cautions as being necessary but insufficient: mostly focused on committing to open source, and advancing regulation. One of the biggest concerns I have with their suggested roadmap is their proposed support for Gaia-X. While their roadmap recommendation is more generic "Consolidate and upgrade the European federated cloud," they do follow this by noting "Gaia-X has progressed too slowly yet has given life to a myriad of initiatives that need to be brought into a coherent framework, oriented towards European values and policy goals – not least those nested in the Digital Decade communication."

I think they should be bold enough to say that Gaia-X should be thrown out and a new effort commenced, or a decoupling between cloud and data spaces be made where open source cloud providers like OVHCloud and NextCloud are supported and encouraged to grow (partly by having them adopted by governments and European Commission initiatives) and data sharing catalogues (clearinghouses, such as those described here) be managed via APIs and trust frameworks and data provenance and attribution tooling that can help with revenue and value sharing back to the data providers (please not blockchain based, is it really necessary? What is the energy efficiency of these systems like? What is the adoption rate? How complex are they? What problems are they uniquely solving?).

The turning point for Gaia-X was when bigtech were invited to join its foundation and since then it has shifted to the fringes in a slow bureaucratic death spiral. One of the upcoming events to be hosted by Gaia-X is a good example: a close read of the event to be held in Hamburg speaks fairly consistently in terms of vapourware. One example: "As part of the International Open Forum on Data Society, T-Systems, NTT DATA, and Fujitsu are collaborating with various stakeholders to develop a platform that connects European and Japanese Trust Anchors. Utilising Gaia-X Digital Clearing Houses, these companies are prototyping solutions that facilitate seamless and secure data exchange across borders. (*emphasis added)" So the signature demo at the event doesn't even exist yet. When you click through their platform to look at the various data ecosystems that have been created so far, they are all blockchain-based (why?) and have, like, 4 subscribers to datasets at most. Users go through multiple sign up screens and the whole look and feel is Windows ‘95-esque.

It's not just this recommendation: the data sharing recommendations made by CEPS similarly focuses on the data sharing spaces/clearinghouses that align with Gaia-X. Some of these have been true industry collaborations, Catena-X and CAMARA have potential for example. The agricultural data space missed the boat completely on being relevant for the EUDR use cases I mention above and they don't even seem interested in the new wave of due diligence regulations. The financial data space is a PDF one pager of a letter agreeing that it should be formed last time I looked a month or so ago, and their relevance has diminished further since then with delays expected to the European financial data standardisation efforts outlined under the Third Payments Services Directive and FIDA regulations.

In contrast to the CEPS paper is the report on Algorithmic Pluralism: Towards Competitive & Innovative Information Ecosystems from the Future of Technology Institute.

This is what a policy briefing paper should look like in my opinion: less than 20 pages, describing the current state of monopolisation and control of the information economy, and describing alternatives that would allow for a more open network economy to emerge, and a simple roadmap of four recommendations:

Ratbags we love

(In Australian slang, a ratbag is a troublemaker (complimentary), and we need to make good trouble around the EuroStack!)

If you are not already following Cristina Caffarra on LinkedIn or via her website, Co-Founder and Vice Chair of the Competition Research Policy Network at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, I highly recommend you start! (Sad trombone: no Bluesky account.)

She brings a sense of urgency and demand for action to her posts and writing, and embodies one of the features I have appreciated most about the thought leaders often advocating for the EuroStack: they aren't interested in bullshit anymore. The excitement and relief for me is tangible.

For years, I have been arguing against concentration of power in the digital world, which is what led me to creating Platformable as I do believe we need to foster open digital ecosystems that we can all leap to when bigtech's dominance destroys any last real value they currently eke out. But in my work I was often seen as too radical: for example, when working for the World Bank I refused to use Uber as an example of a company that was doing "APIs" right (honestly, it was a very common example. I couldn't see how we could laud an organisation that actively misused consumer data, stole revenue from drivers, made insurance and accident reimbursements impossible, used their imbalance of power to influence driver decisions, and took a revenue cut of car loans they forced on their drivers). I was seen by some as being too radical, by others as being quirky. At times I felt crazy for being so opinionated. I'm going through a similar disconnect at the moment as I see colleagues in my industry discussing how they use OpenAI tooling, with no discussion of the fact that OpenAI cheated Kenyan workers out of fair wages (Kenyan workers even wrote to the US President at the time asking for support calling OpenAI’s approach ‘modern day slavery’), have stolen copyrighted materials, abandoned any governance and safety processes, removed commitments to use for weapons development, and so on.

Caffarra has been a substantial actor in getting European policymakers to take notice. She doesn't take shit. One of her more recent refrains is calling out when European leaders say "we are already doing all of that" in regards to the EuroStack, instead, pushing forward on the real differences that can be made. Her most recent piece in Project Syndicate gives a good introduction to the EuroStack and the urgent need for it to be a priority across Europe.

EuroStack in EU policy

I think the two we need to watch at the moment are whether the EuroStack ideals could make their way into the current European defence strategy discussions, and in the Clean Industrial Policy. Here is the current state of play of these two signature regulatory pieces:

Next edition, I think I'll focus on where EuroStack could be recognised in these policy initiatives and look for signs that EuroStack thinking is making its way into these areas. For example, in the recent European defence policies. The current white paper released this week recognises:

The white paper suggests new joint procurement processes for European member states, and discusses the need for European-based technology innovation, the role of SMEs and startups based in Europe, and that "Member States need the European defence industry to be able to design, develop, manufacture and deliver these products and technologies faster and at scale." But from my initial read, there still feels like the white paper is fairly non-committal on whether this means it would be using Starlink satellites, and while it mentions the importance of cloud and AI and provides funds for European-based businesses, it is kind of silent on whether it would be shifting the tech stack and critical infrastructure for defence to a more sovereign footing.

Similarly, the flagship European Clean Industrial Deal would be an ideal policy environment to adopt many of the strategies proposed by EuroStack policy leaders. A forthcoming Public Procurement Framework, for example, could align with many of the principles and strategies recommended under the EuroStack.

‘Til next time

The length of this newsletter is already getting far too much so I think in future I might wind back a little on my opinions (although I hope it gave you a chance to get to know me a little this time around), and maybe I will alternate between policy opportunities and analysis in one newsletter and a roundup of reports and activities in the alternate each month.

In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed this roundup and will subscribe or share with your colleagues. If you have any links or suggestions, please email me at [email protected] or connect with me on Bluesky or LinkedIn.

A note about the links I use

While I do not ideologically oppose news websites that charge for access, i don't think it's useful in a newsletter to link to those sites cos i am just leading you somewhere you can't read. If a site uses cookies, I will only link to the site if it is a one-click reject cookie popup. If it is that bizarre cookie permission popup where you have to go in and unclick the 63 "legitimate interest vendors" for each of the possible uses of your data, I will not link to those sites, as I don't personally trust or read any sites that use that service to collect user data. I'm unlikely to link to many youtube or podcasts just cos I am not an audiovisual learner. Of course, we are a no X or Meta zone, which reflects my personal life anyway. Bluesky will probably make a more regular appearance. I'm not keen to amplify Politico either. Even though Politico EU isn't as bad as Politico in the US, I don’t trust the brand. Euractiv makes some missteps but is generally more reliable in my opinion. I also won't link to The Guardian. I feel personally (!) let down by them (as an ex-paid subscriber)and how often they report what tech oligarchs like Altman and Musk say as if it is news without requiring further investigation or any caveats. (They were also shocking in their US election coverage.) Their opinion pieces over the last several years have also thrown trans people under the bus repeatedly. And, of course, no Substack links either. That still leaves a ton of information sources, let's widen our net together!