Policy papers¶
These are filings and briefs addressed to a live policy process. They carry the same evidence discipline as the rest of the programme, and they are written to a deadline and a reader: a consultation, a call for evidence, a funding decision under preparation. Where a draft working paper proves a result, these argue for an instrument, and they say where the argument runs out.
Interoperability as an instrument: what the EIF review has to change¶
The paper was prepared by the lab for CNLL, the French open-source business association, and the EuroStack Initiative Foundation e.V., and published as their joint response to the European Commission's Call for Evidence on the review of the European Interoperability Framework, submitted in July 2026. The text filed under the two organisations' branding is frozen as submitted; this is the lab's own edition, which carries the provenance and may be revised as the file develops. The Call for Evidence calls interoperability "a strategic enabler of Europe's digital sovereignty, competitiveness and innovation capacity", and the response takes that sentence as its organising principle: interoperability buys the goals, through what it does to switching costs. The framework has no shortage of principles and no way to tell a supplier who delivers interoperability from one who declares it. Both face the same commercial payoff, so the market supplies the cheaper of the two, and twenty years of principle have produced apparent compliance and a public sector that can pass a test at every layer while being unable to move. Ten recommendations follow, beginning with the restoration of the EIFv1 (2004) definition of an open standard, formalised, implementation-independent, freely implementable and royalty-free, and extending to verification a buyer can use and consequences a supplier will feel. The paper also documents the record of how the 2010 reversal was lobbied. Status: the underlying response is submitted; this edition is a draft working paper and may be revised.
The Weakest Link and the Final Say: an economic commentary on the Franco-German Joint Paper on Digital Sovereignty¶
Download the PDF Version française (PDF)
On 17 June 2026 France and Germany published a joint paper defining digital sovereignty as a graded capability in six dimensions and three categories, with a risk-based application logic intended to feed the EU's Tech Sovereignty Package. A definition with dimensions becomes a mechanism the moment anyone scores against it, so this commentary reads it as one and asks what behaviour each design choice induces. The architecture holds up: sovereignty appears as relative and context-scoped, substitutability is a first-class dimension defined in switching-cost terms, open source is named in two dimensions of six, and the paper carries a real measurement ambition. Four choices carry economic risk. The aggregation rule is compensatory where dependency is weakest-link, so on a measured 52-category graph a captured category on every path cuts them all and per-layer certification does not compose. The headquarters criterion reads one channel of control while the certain channels are economic, and no dimension prices rent on the installed base. Substitutability is defined correctly and left unmeasured, in a game where exit is priced by the seller. And a voluntary, self-assessed, compensatory framework is the configuration most exposed to sovereignty-washing. A closing section maps each dimension onto measurable objects that existing instruments already compute. Status: draft working paper (v0.1); the commentary computes no new numbers, and every imported quantity carries a public source or the verification suite of the corpus paper it comes from.
The EU's AI money is aimed one layer too low¶
The brief reads two assessments published in the summer of 2026 against each other: Mozilla's State of Open Source AI and the Commission's own AI technology-area annex to the study on critical digital capacities beyond 2027. EU investment for the 2028-2034 period is being planned against a diagnosis of scarce compute, scarce capital and scarce skills, while both documents locate the failure at deployment, where pilots do not become production systems. Between a third and a half of teams stall short of production whichever way they buy, including those buying the best available models, so model quality does not bind. The layer where value is moving has no cell in the eight-segment value chain the annex reproduces: no segment for orchestration, memory, tool access or agent permissions, a gap the annex names twice without carrying into a recommendation. Two further mismatches follow. The instrument works in actions by 2028 and 2036-2040 while the layer vertically integrates now, and European public money backs open supply while Western Europe is one of only two regions where closed-model adoption exceeds open. Status: draft working paper. The Mozilla regional figures are reported without sample sizes and are treated throughout as indicative only.