Cecilia Rikap, Cédric Durand, Edemilson Paraná, Paolo Gerbaudo and Paris Marx, Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty: A roadmap to build a digital stack for people and the planet, Democratic and Ecological Digital Sovereignty Coalition, 2024, 20 pp.
Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty is a collective policy paper that approaches digital sovereignty not simply as the technological independence of states, but as the capacity of societies to exercise democratic control over the production, infrastructure, and operation of the digital technologies they use. The study takes as its starting point the growing concentration of the digital economy under the control of a small number of large technology companies. This concentration of cloud infrastructure, data centres, platforms, artificial intelligence, software, data, and knowledge is making societies and public institutions increasingly dependent on Big Tech companies.
At the centre of the document is the concept of the “digital stack.” This refers to the different interconnected layers that make the provision of digital services possible, ranging from material infrastructure such as undersea cables, data centres, and computer hardware to software, code, data, and digital platforms. The authors argue that democratic digital sovereignty can be achieved not merely by developing alternative platforms, but by publicly and democratically reorganising the different layers of digital infrastructure. To this end, they propose public data centres and cloud infrastructures, public search engines and other universal platforms, free software, open protocols, and a public ecosystem of digital services.
An important dimension of the study concerns the control of data and knowledge. The power of large technology companies derives not only from corporate ownership or market share, but also from their concentration under their own control of socially produced data, knowledge, and scientific resources. The document addresses this through the problem of “intellectual monopolies” and advocates the use of collectively produced data for the public good, guaranteed access to the results of publicly funded research, and measures to prevent data generated through public services from remaining under the ownership of private companies.
The document also directly connects the debate on digital sovereignty with the question of labour. Emphasising that the development of digital services and artificial intelligence relies not only on programmers but also on the labour of data and platform workers on a large scale, the authors propose prohibiting forms of algorithmic management that violate workers’ fundamental rights, holding lead companies accountable for the working conditions of data workers, and developing international collective bargaining mechanisms in the field of digital labour. The democratisation of digital technologies is thus considered not only in relation to users’ data rights, but also together with the rights and autonomy of the workers involved in the production and use of technology.
The authors also reject the idea of digital sovereignty as a project of national technological competition. Instead, they advocate developing public digital infrastructures through international cooperation and combining digital sovereignty with ecological internationalism. Taking into account the energy, water, mineral, and hardware requirements of AI models, data centres, and other digital infrastructures, they argue that technological development should be evaluated in terms of its ecological impacts as well as its social benefits. This approach promotes the development of international and non-commercial public digital infrastructures as an alternative to technological competition between US- and China-based corporations.
In these respects, Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty extends the search for alternatives to the digital economy beyond the ownership structures of individual platforms to the question of democratic control over data, software, cloud systems, data centres, and digital infrastructure as a whole. By bringing public infrastructure, free software, collective data, labour rights, ecological sustainability, and international cooperation into a common framework, the document constitutes an important contemporary resource for debates on digital solidarity economies and democratic digital sovereignty.