Sign the Manifesto ↓

We Demand a Europe That Obeys Itself

Europe can decide whom it obeys.

Europe’s digital infrastructure is controlled by a country whose institutional self-interest is structurally opposed to European sovereignty.

The Emperor’s New Cloud, by Matthew Breen, diagnoses Europe’s digital dependency across twenty-eight papers and prescribes how to escape it.

The case rests on legal facts European institutions have already established: Schrems I and II under the Court of Justice, the European Essential Guarantees under the European Data Protection Board, and the rights written into GDPR, DORA, NIS2, MiCA, the AI Act and the Cyber Resilience Act.

Europe wrote the laws without building the infrastructure they assume.

Every dependency that produces a public good has three outcomes.

We build and own the European equivalent. Or we become the product. Or the infrastructure becomes a weapon against us.

If our infrastructure is compellable by another country, that country has to wake up every day and decide not to weaponise it against us.

The eight demands below close the path back to outcome two and outcome three. Without them, the decision belongs to someone else.

We sign to demand the compliance that enables sovereignty.

We demand:

One. That Europe define sovereignty as its own courts have already defined it: sole jurisdictional control, with no foreign legal compulsion. The binary test under Schrems II, encoded in the Cloud and AI Development Act. No scoring system that grades any foreign exposure as sovereignty.

Two. That Europe comply with the laws it has already written. Regulated workloads under DORA, NIS2, GDPR, MiCA, the AI Act and the Cyber Resilience Act, operating at Position 1, 2 or 3 by 2030. Compliance is the demand that lets European companies grow.

Three. That European equity, not grants, capitalise European deeptech. Investment-style state capital recycling into self-sustaining commercial entities, anchored by customer demand from regulated sectors. The model the United States used to build SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril. We must build it.

Four. That European cryptography be validated by European authorities. The ENISA register of assessed cryptographic architectures. Post-quantum migration on the 2033 clock. The Dual_EC_DRBG precedent (an NSA backdoor smuggled into a NIST cryptographic standard) cannot be allowed to happen again. We cannot let NIST or any foreign standards body be the sole authority over European cryptographic standards.

Five. That state aid for sovereign digital infrastructure be made lawful. A treaty-level carve-out modelled on EURATOM, removing TFEU 107 as the obstacle to strategic European investment in cloud, semiconductors, AI, cables, identity, custody and defence-critical software.

Six. That foreign acquisitions of critical European digital infrastructure be screened and, where critical, blocked. Binding FDI screening on the CFIUS-equivalent threshold for sensitive sectors, with mandatory golden share. ARM, Skype, DeepMind, Sophos, VMware, Mynaric. We demand the next European success stays European.

Seven. That algorithms governing European public life be transparent to the citizens they shape. Citizens have the right to see how recommendation systems, ranking algorithms and moderation decisions affect them, and the tools to act on what they see. Statutory audit access for European authorities behind the citizen layer. Set up a European Information Sovereignty Agency to enforce.

Eight. That citizen tools be funded as a public option, running on a sovereign open-source platform layer. State-sponsored, free at point of use, governed on the public-broadcasting model. Identity wallets, search alternatives, algorithmic-transparency interfaces, and the open-source platform they run on.

Europe can decide whom it obeys. We sign to make that decision.