The Package Is Either Not Yet Ready or Bumping Up Against American Objections
The European Commission for the third time delayed presenting its long-awaited Tech Sovereignty Package, legislation aimed at weaning the continent off American technology – or to at least ensure that it can, if necessary, go without it.
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The bill is expected to contain a stimulation package for on-shoring semiconductor manufacturing, and language pushing public administrations to patronize European data centers – as well as a strategic roadmap for digitalization and artificial intelligence in energy. Henna Virkkunen, the commission’s top tech official, said on Tuesday that the package will also seek to protect open-source digital infrastructure against the threat of AI-powered hacking (see: Europe Prepares to Hunker Down Against Bug Finding AI Models).
The legislative bundle was first supposed to appear in March, then April and then this coming Wednesday, but a commission agenda published this week said the package’s presentation is now provisionally scheduled for June 3.
The commission has not explained the reasoning behind this latest delay, but possible motivations are being discussed in Brussels.
The first, flagged up by Alexandra Geese, a German Green member of the European Parliament, is that the delay has something to do with the fragile trade agreement that the United States and the European Union struck last August.
The EU managed to avoid this framework including any mention of digital rules, but the Trump administration has continued to express its displeasure with regulations such as the Digital Services Act. Earlier this month, U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told Euractive the imminent Tech Sovereignty Package “doesn’t sound very consistent with the EU-U.S. trade framework agreement.” He suggested that efforts to “try and improve the competitiveness of European entities by limiting the competitiveness of U.S. entities in Europe” would constitute a red line for the Trump administration.
As it happens, the European Parliament and member states on Wednesday reached a provisional agreement on implementing tariff-related elements of the EU-U.S. trade agreement – a development that the commission, which is the U.S.’s trade negotiating counterpart, welcomed warmly.
“In Europe, we should be building better AI, AI that serves the many and not the few. And the Tech Sovereignty Package would have been an important first step to do that. But once again, the U.S. ambassador resorts to blackmail,” Geese said in a parliamentary address. “Once again, the European Commission kowtows, postponing the Sovereignty Package. You don’t build sovereignty by kissing the ring.”
Not everyone reckons that the package’s delay is trade-related. According to a Politico report on Friday, some European officials did make that connection. Some said the 400-page effort was simply not ready for the commissioners to sign off on just yet.
A commission spokesperson told ISMG on Friday that the EU’s executive body was merely “finalizing the details to present a solid and mature initiative.”
Whenever it does appear, the package will need to strike a fine balance in how strongly it calls for EU-first public procurement. The goal, the commission spokesperson said, is to “clarify what sovereignty means for cloud and AI computing services across the single market.”
There is widespread concern across EU countries about the Trump administration’s antagonistic attitude towards Europe, the still-live possibility that the U.S. might try to take over Denmark-owned Greenland and the idea that Washington might flip some kind of “kill switch” on U.S. digital services if Europe proves too troublesome.
But the EU’s biggest players have diverging attitudes towards the question of whether sovereignty demands opting for European rather than American providers or a scenario where foreign providers are acceptable, as long as the keys remain in European hands. France generally opts for a protectionist approach while the German government shies doing anything that could trigger retaliation against the country’s hallowed automotive exports. The two European powerhouses established a working group on digital sovereignty at a summit last November, and Paris is currently consulting with private industry.
The EU already has a Cloud Sovereignty Framework that was introduced just last year, although it will reportedly already be revised as part of the looming package. The existing framework was central to the way the commission chose the providers – all European, albeit with one being a Google partner – that it named last month when awarding a cloud contract worth over $200 million (see: Europe Spurs Digital Sovereignty With $213M Cloud Contract).
Sovereignty initiatives are also plowing ahead at the national level. Last week, Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund awarded nearly $1.5 million to the KDE Project, which stewards the development of KDE Linux and the Plasma desktop environment.
“We have long invested in desktop technologies for a reason: they are the primary way people access and use digital services in everyday life,” said Sovereign Tech Agency technical director Fiona Krakenbürger. “The desktop holds personal data and mediates nearly every service we depend on, from booking the next medical appointment, to education, to the way we work… Strengthening KDE’s testing infrastructure, security architecture, and communication frameworks is how we invest in the resilience and reliability of the core digital infrastructure that modern society depends on.”
France is steadily switching its public sector from U.S. proprietary services to locally provided, open-source alternatives, with its Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs going so far as to plan a Windows-to-Linux migration for itself. Other departments have to present sovereignty plans later this year (see: France Tees Up Big Public Sector Move Away From US Tech).
According to a Wired report on Thursday, the French government-developed Tchap secure messaging service is now being used by 420,000 French civil servants, with another 20,000 hopping on board each month.