Exit or Own? Portability Mandates and Ownership Screens in Sovereign Procurement¶

Stefane Fermigier (Abilian) · sf@abilian.com

Draft working paper v0.7, 2026-09-16. Superseded. The exposure decomposition, Lemma 1, Proposition 1 and Remarks 1 to 4 now live in Screening for Sovereignty (v0.16, section 9). The lock-in rent this paper posits is derived in Exit, Pursued by a Bill (v0.12, titled The Price of Staying until 2026-09-17), where the reading of the instruments also moved. Proposition 2 was not carried over, since its buyer objective was never written. The page stays for citation, with no further revisions. Earlier banner: theory, priced inside the companion screening framework and numerically verified; the magnitude of lock-in rents was the open empirical task.

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Abstract¶

European policy relies on two instruments against dependence on foreign-controlled digital infrastructure: ownership screens, which verify who controls the supplier, and exit-capability mandates (portability, reversibility, switching rights), which lower the cost of leaving. We price both in a single screening framework. An exit mandate carries no information about the supplier's hidden type, and it insures only the observable harms of denial and holdup, leaving compelled and covert access uninsured. It nonetheless changes what screening can achieve: by destroying the lock-in rents that make winning valuable to a non-sovereign mimic, it lowers the verification accuracy an ownership screen requires. We characterize an accuracy band in which ownership screening is feasible only in combination with an exit mandate, so that the two instruments are strict complements, and a denial-dominated region in which exit alone suffices. Exit mandates and price premia emerge as dual instruments: one aids selection and weakens discipline, the other the reverse.

Keywords: procurement, switching costs, portability, data act, screening, digital sovereignty, lock-in.

JEL: D82, D86, H57, L51, L86.

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Fermigier, S. (2026). Exit or Own? Portability Mandates and Ownership Screens in Sovereign Procurement.
Draft working paper v0.7, Abilian Econ Lab.
https://econ.lab.abilian.com/papers/exit-or-own/