Regain Digital Power
Our increasing dependency on monopolistic digital solutions is putting our democracy and economy at risk: data collection, manipulation of information, anti-competitive practices, technological dependencies, uncontrolled costs: more than 80% of European digital infrastructures and technologies are imported, creating systemic vulnerabilities.
And yet, free and open-source software accounts for 76% of all software code and continues to grow to become the backbone of global digital infrastructures. But while open-source is commoditizing the software market, we all live in digital oligopolies.
An alliance of the people
We European can consolidate a sovereign digital model based on open, interoperable and decentralized systems, aligned with our democratic values.
The public sector can play a critical role as orchestrator of open-source ecosystems, creating a robust foundation for innovation and collaboration in both the public and private sectors.
Yet success is not solely dependent on investment or regulation, but also on adopting a product-driven approach, in which every euro of public money must contribute to more Europeans satisfied of sovereign solutions.
A unique path is thus offered to Europe, that of freely reusable Digital Commons, which, from Linux to Wikipedia, outline the path of a "Open Internet Stack", a shared technological stack for the benefit of our economy.
An allliance already ongoing
Since 2023, France, Germany and Netherlands have engaged in a concrete partnership to produce a complete collaborative workplace, already used by more than half a million users everyday. And now, the European tech industry integrates these high-end components to strengthen their own offerings, creating business value for Europe.
But we need to go broader and adress all critical digital dependencies. Today our phones, our computers, our online services rely on technologies whose access could be joepardized at anytime. We must address these dependencies the same way, by building concrete alternatives based on open source commoditized components, and notably in the field of cloud computing, AI, cyber security, geomatics, or social networks.
An European public company to build and deploy the Open Internet Stack
With the strong support of the European Commission, the Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC) brings together France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Luxembourg as full members, and Poland, Austria, Hungary, Danemark and Slovenia as observers.
All the EU member states are welcome to join as full members. Beyond, the EDIC will partner with every country sharing the same ambition and method.
The EDIC will act as an accelerator of European digital services boosted by digital commons and will chanel funding and talent into ambitious bets made by public and private bodies in Europe.
Hence, it will be accountable for the number of European citizens switched to these alternatives, that we expect to be hundreds of millions.