The economics of European digital sovereignty¶

A research programme in two threads, with working papers, plain-language explainers, and two interactive explorers, all generated from one verified codebase.

Two puzzles¶

Europe's cloud providers are cheaper and keep losing. They win price-performance benchmarks; their share of their own market has roughly halved since 2017, while three US firms hold about 70 percent. Price is the lever everyone reaches for, and it demonstrably has not worked.

Europe keeps writing sovereignty rules that miss their object. Certifications check the provider's incorporation, the data's location, an operational audit, one supplier and one layer at a time, while the capacity they are meant to protect, choosing your technology and being able to choose again, lives in whole supply chains and in the option sets they leave open.

What the programme does¶

It measures the object. A sourced, category-level map of the entire European digital stack, from raw-material refining to app stores, with control, funding, influence, and legal reach on every edge, and a measured deep dive pricing the actual options at three layers (cloud, productivity software, AI accelerators).

It builds the theory. A formal calculus of coercion and diversification on production networks: how many actors must act together to cut a buyer off, how many genuinely independent ways of operating exist, and a theorem showing why per-layer supplier tests, the form regulation actually takes, cannot certify the system-level answer. Plus a complete taxonomy of the fifteen channels through which one actor in a technology network can move another, including the quiet ones: analyst quadrants, standards pens, keynotes, curricula, maintainer seats, lobbying.

It measures the architecture. A service-by-service, auditable exit-tax model of cloud lock-in, locating where dependence is actually created (the interface) and which interventions reach it.

It models the mechanisms. Game-theoretic analyses of the policy instruments themselves: when procurement screens can and cannot separate genuinely European suppliers from well-lawyered subsidiaries, why portability mandates and ownership screens are complements, why the layered structure of the cloud market defeats subsidies, and why the EU wrote opposite screens for Huawei and for the hyperscalers.

Where to start¶

• Start here: nine plain-language explainers, one per paper. No economics background needed.
• The interactive explorers: walk the measured graph of the European stack, or play the market and screening models live.
• The papers: nine working drafts as PDFs.
• Methods and verification: how the numbers are produced, checked, and labeled.