Digital sovereignty is going mainstream; the tech and policy circles of Europe are debating cloud sovereignty, chip factories and AI rules. But meanwhile the most personal computer of all sits in 350 to 400 million EU pockets, and fewer than a million of those phones are European-made.
Every layer of that device is in practice influenced or controlled from somewhere outside the Union. The companies that design the chips, run the operating systems, host the cloud and publish the major apps all answer to a government outside the EU, and pressure on these elements does not need to be public, announced, or even legal to work.
We have wired our societies into the same hardware. The national digital identity solutions live on a device that Europe neither builds nor controls.
It was not always like this. Europe once made the world's phones. And for a brief while, there was even a fully European phone. We had one, and we let it go.
Read about the installed base and the alternative phones that do exist, the seven layers of the dependency, the cases where Europe already wins, the device replacement problem (spoiler: it's not easy) and five futures; and who would have to act.
The full deep dive, It's time to pick up the smartphone, is out now for nupath.eu members (PDF edition included). Sign up to read all of it.
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