For most of the past decade, Europe approached digital transformation through a legal lens rather than an innovation one. EU leaders, driven by the belief that regulatory strength alone could shape the global internet, largely focused their energy on drafting laws designed to control dominant foreign platforms. This regulatory-first approach became the cornerstone of Europe’s digital strategy and gave rise to legislative frameworks that influenced worldwide debates on privacy, data governance, competition, and platform accountability.
Yet, as Europe reaches the midpoint of the 2020s, that decades-long paradigm is undergoing a dramatic shift. A new reality—shaped by geopolitical tensions, technological dependencies, and a rapidly changing global internet ecosystem—has forced European politicians, regulators, and scholars to confront a truth that had long been obscured by optimism: regulation alone cannot secure Europe’s digital future. Increasingly, the European Union is embracing a different, far more ambitious objective—one that transcends rulemaking and aims for genuine technological self-reliance. This shift marks the beginning of Europe’s decisive pivot toward digital sovereignty.
This transformation is not merely rhetorical. It signals a fundamental reorientation of priorities, moving the political center of gravity from Brussels’ regulatory instruments to large-scale investment in digital infrastructure, cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, and homegrown platforms. The race to reclaim technological agency is no longer framed as a philosophical debate but as an urgent strategic necessity.
A Decade of Regulatory Faith—and the Limits That Emerged
Europe’s earlier approach was shaped by a belief in its ability to steer global internet governance through regulation. Leaders and legal scholars embraced an increasingly influential narrative that depicted the EU as a global standard-setter, a “rule-making superpower” capable of bending multinational platforms to European values. This era was defined by groundbreaking legislation—the GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act—that seemed to prove Europe’s capacity to enforce its constitutional principles on global technology giants.
But beneath this confidence lay a paradox. While Europe was exporting legal norms, it was simultaneously importing the vast majority of the digital technologies its citizens used. Search engines, mobile ecosystems, social media platforms, cloud services, e-commerce systems, digital advertising networks, and even foundational artificial intelligence tools—almost all came from outside Europe. The political classes continued drafting rules, convinced their regulatory muscle made them global leaders, even as Europe’s technological dependency deepened.
The belief in legal dominance was reinforced by academic frameworks such as “The Brussels Effect,” popularized by Columbia University law professor Anu Bradford. Bradford’s theory became a cornerstone of digital governance thinking in Brussels and beyond. She argued that because Europe’s internal market is so large and so strictly regulated, global firms inevitably harmonize their operations to EU standards. In her view, the EU did not need to directly control global platforms; it needed only to regulate itself, and the world would follow.
While this view captured a real phenomenon, it also obscured vulnerabilities. It assumed that compliance decisions made by US platforms reflected enduring deference to EU authority rather than temporary corporate pragmatism. If platforms ever found European rules too costly, too restrictive, or politically disadvantageous, they could choose not to comply—or shift operations elsewhere.
This conditional dynamic went largely unnoticed for years. But by the mid-2020s, cracks had begun to show.
The Turning Point: Politics, Power, and the Return of Geopolitical Uncertainty
The catalyst for Europe’s strategic awakening came from a series of political and economic developments. Among them, none was more significant than the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, which reshaped the contours of transatlantic tech governance almost overnight.
Within weeks of Trump’s victory, Meta began rolling back content moderation partnerships with external fact-checkers and aligned more closely with US deregulatory rhetoric. Silicon Valley executives appeared prominently at political events in Washington, signaling a clear shift in tech-state relations. The symmetry that had once defined EU-US regulatory cooperation began to fracture.
Suddenly, the assumption that US platforms would voluntarily comply with EU norms looked dangerously outdated.
Trump’s return underscored something European policymakers had long underestimated: Europe’s influence over foreign platforms was only as strong as the platforms’ willingness to accept it. When political winds in the United States shifted, so did corporate behavior. This exposed a critical vulnerability: Europe had outsourced too much of its digital infrastructure and knowledge ecosystem to companies whose priorities were shaped primarily by non-European political and commercial dynamics.
The wake-up call was amplified by another force: the Mario Draghi report on European competitiveness, released shortly before the US election. Draghi delivered a blunt assessment that cut through years of complacency. According to his analysis, Europe relies on foreign actors for more than 80% of its digital products, infrastructure, and intellectual property. His message was unequivocal: Europe is not merely lagging in digital innovation; it is structurally dependent in ways that threaten its long-term political and economic autonomy.
The conjunction of these events forced Europe’s political establishment to confront a reality that had long been obscured by the glow of regulatory triumphs. If the bloc was serious about digital sovereignty, it needed more than laws—it needed technology.
From Regulation to Creation: The Rise of the Sovereignty Paradigm
Around 2024–2025, the tone in Brussels began to change. Politicians who had spent years championing strict regulatory frameworks started shifting toward strategies centered on ownership, infrastructure, and innovation.
Members of the European Parliament such as Alexandra Geese, Axel Voss, and Aura Salla became vocal champions of a new sovereignty-oriented approach. Their proposals represented a departure from the legalistic orthodoxy of the previous decade. Instead of relying solely on norms and statutes, they emphasized the need for investment, public-private collaboration, and infrastructure development.
Two flagship ideas emerged as symbols of this new direction:
1. An AI-Powered European News Streaming Platform
Envisioned as an alternative to content ecosystems dominated by Silicon Valley, this initiative aims to create a publicly accountable interface for European journalism, combining AI-assisted curation with transparency safeguards. Though early in development, it symbolizes the EU’s ambition to reclaim informational autonomy.
2. The EuroStack Initiative
The EuroStack represents Europe’s most ambitious attempt in decades to reshape its technological destiny. It proposes a vertically integrated digital ecosystem—from cloud infrastructure to application development—rooted entirely in European standards, data governance principles, and operational control.
By mid-2025, EuroStack had moved from theoretical proposal to a politically endorsed project. EU commissioner for technological sovereignty Henna Virkunnen delivered a high-profile speech in June outlining the strategic necessity of such infrastructure, arguing that Europe’s continued dependence on US cloud providers and AI platforms was incompatible with long-term democratic stability.
Why Europe Misjudged the Power of Regulation
To understand why Europe is now pivoting, it is essential to examine the intellectual environment that shaped EU digital policy from 2010 to 2022. Much of the optimism surrounding digital constitutionalism stemmed from a belief that principles, values, and rules—rather than hardware, software, and platforms—were the core determinants of digital power.
Digital constitutionalists emphasized privacy, transparency, and the rule of law. They saw legal norms as an engine for shaping the digital world. But this interpretive framework had a blind spot: it abstracted away the material foundations of digital power.
Rules matter. But servers, chips, algorithms, and platforms matter more.
By overlooking this, European scholars unintentionally encouraged a complacent view of digital governance. They mistook symbolic power for structural power, and normative influence for technological capacity.
With Trump’s re-election and the Draghi report’s alarming conclusions, this illusion collapsed. Even the leading voices within the digital constitutionalism movement began acknowledging the enforcement crisis and the inadequacy of relying solely on regulation.
The EU’s New Dilemma: Breaking Old Habits Without Erasing Hard-Won Protections
Europe’s pivot toward digital sovereignty comes with complex challenges. The EU has long been described as a “regulatory state,” a political system that primarily influences outcomes through law rather than industrial strategy. Shifting from this paradigm requires not just new policies, but new political instincts.
At the same time, Europe must avoid a dangerous pitfall: in the rush to simplify regulations and accelerate technological development, it risks weakening the very protections—privacy, consumer rights, platform accountability—that define its digital identity.
The goal is not deregulation. It is rebalancing.
Europe must preserve its constitutional principles while recognizing that lofty legislation is insufficient without the technological capacity to enforce it.
The Road Ahead: A Continental Challenge With Global Stakes
Europe’s push for digital sovereignty is more than an economic initiative—it is a geopolitical repositioning. As the world fractures into competing technological blocs, the EU faces a stark choice: evolve into a producer of core digital technologies or remain permanently dependent on foreign platforms.
The shift is profound. It signals a new willingness to fund disruptive infrastructure, support domestic alternatives, and challenge Silicon Valley’s structural dominance not through legal threats but through competitive capability.
If successful, Europe’s transformation could redefine global digital power dynamics, offering an alternative to the US-China duopoly.
But success will require persistence, vision, and investment on a scale Europe has not attempted in decades.
The era of regulatory optimism is over. The era of technological sovereignty has begun.