The Path to a Sovereign Tech Stack is Via a Commodified Tech Stack
canopic jug writes:
Associate professor, David Eaves, writes about the essential role of the commodification of services in digital sovereignty. The questions to ask on the way to digital sovereignty are not as much about owning the stack but about the ability to move workloads. In other words, open standards for protocols, file formats, and more are the prerequisites. The same applies to the software supply chain. However, as we recently discussed here, PHK recently pointed out that Free and Open Source reference implementations would be of great benefit. Associate professor Eaves writes:
There is growing and valid concern among policymakers about tech sovereignty and cloud infrastructure. A handful of American hyperscalers - AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud - control the digital substrate on which modern economies run. This concentration is compounded by a US government increasingly willing to wield its digital industries as leverage. As French President Emmanuel Macron quipped: "There is no such thing as happy vassalage."
While some countries appear ready to concede market dominance in exchange for improved trade relations, others are exploring massive investments in public sector alternatives to the hyperscalers, advocating that billions, and possibly many many billions, be spent to on sovereign stack plans, and/or positioning local telecoms as alternatives to the hyperscalers.
Ironically, both strategies may increase dependency, limit government agency and increase economic and geopolitical risks - the very problems sovereignty seeks to solve. As Mike Bracken and I wrote earlier this year: "Domination by a local champion, free to extract rents, may be a path to greater autonomy, but it is unlikely to lead to increased competitiveness or greater global influence."
Any realistic path to increased agency will be expensive and take years. To be sustainable, it must focus on commoditizing existing solutions through interoperability and de facto standards that will broaden the market (and enable effective) national champions. This should be our north star and direction of travel. The metric for success should focus on making it as simple as possible to move data and applications across suppliers. Critically, this cannot be achieved by regulation alone, it will also require deft procurement and a willingness to accept de facto as opposed to ideal standards. The good news is governments have done this before. However, to succeed, it will require building the capacity to become market shapers and not market takers - thinking like electricity grids and railway gauges, not digital empires.
The essential role of commodities has been widely known and acknowledged for decades. We are in this situation because key companies and/or monopolies saw that long ago and were allowed to fight so hard all this time against ICT remaining as commodities. Sadly, the discussion about commodification probably peaked in the years just after the infamous Halloween Documents, particularly the first one. Eric S Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and early FOSS developer, published these leaked documents which covered potential strategies relating to M$ fight against free and open source software and, in particular, against Linux back in 1998. In retrospect these documents have turned out to be blueprints, used against FOSS and open standards by other companies as well.
Previously:
(2026) Sorry, Eh
(2026) Poul-Henning Kamp's Feedback to the EU on Digital Sovereignty
(2026) A Post-American, Enshittification-Resistant Internet
(2025) This German State Decides to Save 15 Million Each Year By Kicking Out Microsoft for Open Source
(2025) Why People Keep Flocking to Linux in 2025 (and It's Not Just to Escape Windows)
(2025) Microsoft Can't Guarantee Data Sovereignty - OVHcloud Says 'We Told You So'
(2014) US Offering Cash For Pro-TAFTA/TTIP Propaganda
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