An Open Internet Stack: What to Build, in What Order, and Why¶

Stefane Fermigier (Abilian) · sf@abilian.com

Draft working paper v0.7, 2026-09-07. Measurement and policy analysis on the programme's published instruments; every computed number is reproduced by the verification suite from the repository's data, and every market and macro figure carries a fetched public source with URL, access date, and confidence flag (data/market-anchors-v1.csv); the taxonomy carries one revision by its author, and every tally is reported with and without it (Block 15, Section 4.4); the classes rest on reach coverage, with the other measured quantities reported as description (Section 5); the per-euro intervention ranking is anchored at instrument-family level from public cost records, and the block-level ranking awaits per-block cost data.

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Abstract¶

Building-block lists for European digital infrastructure name what the stack needs; they cannot say which block to fund first, or with which instrument. This paper converts one such list, the fourteen Technological Building Blocks (TBBs) of Fermigier (2025), into a criterion that discriminates block by block, composing measured structure with sourced market economics: each block is scored on a 52-category dependency graph with typed jurisdictional-reach edges, an exact cut calculus, service-level exit-friction scores, and a four-class rule (adequate, thin, captured, absent) frozen before any number was computed. Under the floor the rule reduces to one discriminating input: whether every category in a block carries a US or China jurisdictional-reach edge, with worst-level concentration a second trigger for two blocks. The option and coercion numbers, the exit-friction scores, and forkability are reported per block and read by the variants, and they decide no class. Each block also carries its economic rationale and, where public data exists, a sourced European market size and EU-provider share (45 anchor rows, each with source, URL, access date, and confidence flag; eight of thirteen scored blocks have a published market size, ten of thirteen a share or proxy, and the remaining cells say "no published figure found").

Four results. First, the classification separates the blocks: on the published fourteen, five classify captured (identity, cybersecurity supply, operations tooling, development tooling, market platforms) and seven thin, and the revision's fifteenth block makes it six captured. The market table is a second reading, independent of the first: it prices what rides on each block, and it does not track the classes. Non-EU shares at or above the captured blocks' sit among the thin blocks as well (cloud at 70 percent for the three US hyperscalers against 15 percent for EU providers, no EU browser-engine share, 73 to 80 percent of EU public-sector productivity software, more than 85 percent of GenAI value-chain funding to US firms), because the captured boundary is set by whether every category in a block carries a jurisdictional-reach edge, which is unrelated to market share. Exactly two captured verdicts rest entirely on jurisdictional reach into forkable open-source substrate: stewardship gaps, priced per component by public cost anchors three orders of magnitude below a build-or-buy programme envelope.

Second, contracting the dependency graph onto the blocks gives the stack an economic geometry, computed and cross-checked in the suite: seven blocks are net suppliers, with dependencies concentrated on four of them, the silicon chain, the development toolchain, network infrastructure, and operations tooling (raw in-degrees 15, 11, 10, 10 against out-degrees of 1 to 4). The application and AI blocks are pure consumers (in-degree 0), cloud is the hinge (in 9, out 18), and the platform block's supplier position is market access (6 of its 7 inbound edges are distribution edges), locating the rent at the door to users. The demand layer's measured edges concentrate on cloud and applications, touch identity exactly once (one enterprise-demand edge), and never land on AI foundations, operations, or development tooling, so procurement sees the top of a cone whose exposure arrives by composition.

Third, the downstream stake is macroeconomic and sourced: 80 percent of European business cloud and software spending flows to US vendors (EUR 265bn per year; Asterès for Cigref, a study commissioned by a buyer association and flagged as such), and open-source software carries a Commission-estimated EUR 65 to 95bn of economy-wide EU GDP impact (Blind et al. 2021), drawn into the stack through the unpriced substrate of the two stewardship-gap blocks.

Fourth, the verdicts are stable under a 500-draw perturbation of every ordinal coding the rule reads, and a pre-stated reach-edge perturbation locates the residual weight: four of the six captured verdicts ride on one or two single-coder reach edges and track edge survival.

Beneath all of this sits a uniform floor: every block has option number $N = 1$ and coercion number $\kappa = 1$, and five blocs (the United States, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) are each solo cutters for every block, because the unique minimal trace crosses the semiconductor floor. No block can be adequate in isolation, per-block checklists cannot certify the stack, and the pre-stated above-floor variant shows the five-bloc structure is the floor's contribution, with the United States the sole residual solo cutter everywhere except the end-user block, which China also cuts. The classes map onto instrument families (build-or-buy, substrate stewardship, demand aggregation and maintenance, floor capacity), each mapping conditional on compute-floor policy; public cost records give the per-euro criterion coarse family-level anchors in pairwise disjoint ranges (from about EUR 10^5 per stewardship engagement to over 10^10 for floor capacity), and the block-level ranking awaits per-block cost data.

Keywords: digital sovereignty, open internet stack, technological building blocks, dependency networks, market structure, option sets, open-source software, public procurement.

JEL: F52, L86, O25, D85.

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Cite this paper¶

Fermigier, S. (2026). An Open Internet Stack: What to Build, in What Order, and Why.
Draft working paper v0.7, Abilian Econ Lab.
https://econ.lab.abilian.com/papers/tbb-criterion/