New guidelines for digital sovereignty
By laying down common criteria, Germany and France want to reduce Europe’s dependence on foreign tech providers.
Paris (d.de) – Germany and France have presented a joint definition of digital sovereignty. The goal is to reduce Europe’s technological dependencies and strengthen European solutions. The criteria will inform the EU’s digital policy in future.
“Strengthening our digital sovereignty and reducing technological dependencies is a geopolitical imperative,” said Germany’s Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger. He said that Europe needed to pool its strengths to boost domestic start-ups and establish globally competitive companies.
Specifically, Germany and France are prioritising, among other things, digital services from providers from the EU or trustworthy partner countries and greater use of open-source solutions and modular architectures to reduce dependence on individual providers. In addition, homegrown computing capacities for artificial intelligence and cloud services are to be expanded and critical digital dependencies systematically assessed.
The first examples already exist: “The partnership between SAP and Mistral AI shows that a sovereign European artificial intelligence can meet the needs of governments and companies,” said France’s Digital Minister Anne Le Hénanff. She said that Franco-German cooperation was essential if Europe was to make progress with digitisation and artificial intelligence.
