The Open Internet Stack¶
The build-criterion project: Europe's digital build list converted from an enumeration into a ranking, by scoring it on the programme's measured instruments.
An Open Internet Stack: What to Build, in What Order, and Why¶
Building-block lists name what a sovereign stack requires and cannot rank it, because lists score blocks one by one while dependence accrues along paths. This paper converts the fifteen Technological Building Blocks of a European Open Internet Stack into a ranking by composing the measured 52-category dependency graph with sourced market economics per block, under a four-class rule (adequate, thin, captured, absent) frozen before any number was computed. The criterion discriminates, and the discrimination lines up with market structure: six blocks classify captured where non-EU providers hold the market nearly outright (a 99.97 percent mobile OS and app-store duopoly; about 61 percent of euro-area card payments on international schemes), seven classify thin where Europe's largest measured positions sit (telecom services EUR 407bn; cloud EUR 61bn at a 15 percent EU-provider share against 70 percent for the three US hyperscalers; chip demand USD 54.1bn against roughly 10 percent EU production). The block-level contraction of the graph locates the leverage: the net suppliers are the silicon chain, the toolchains, and the platforms, while European demand lands on cloud and applications and never directly on the tooling blocks the exposure arrives through. Procurement therefore consumes by composition what it never directly sees. Two captured verdicts (operations and development tooling) rest entirely on US jurisdictional reach into forkable open-source commons: stewardship problems once forkability is priced. Traced far enough upstream, every block crosses the semiconductor floor, where each of five blocs alone holds a veto, so floor policy and block policy are complements. Instrument families are matched to the measured gaps with family-level cost anchors from public records; no instrument is credited with delivering sovereignty. Status: draft working paper (v0.6) on the programme's published instruments. All classifications hold under a 500-draw ordinal perturbation, a pre-stated reach-edge perturbation shows four of the six captured verdicts resting on single-coder reach edges, and the independent re-code of those edges is the outstanding item. The block-level per-euro ranking awaits per-block cost data. Companion explainer: The stack behind the invoice.