16 January 2023

Fondation Robert Schuman: Digital Sovereignty: for a Schuman Data Plan

If, in the digital field, Europe faces issues of sovereignty, it is because it has left the sector open for over twenty years to the American Tech giants, who have imposed a game whose rules that have never been understood here.

On 9 January, the European Commission launched the first cooperation and monitoring cycle for the achievement of the European Union's digital decade by 2030. If, in the digital field, Europe faces issues of sovereignty, it is because it has left the sector open for over twenty years to the American Tech giants, who have imposed a game whose rules that have never been understood here. Either because these rules were inaccessible to the European Union (Moore and Metcalfe laws), or because we accepted that there were no rules of the game (code is law).

Substituting our laws for digital laws

It all started with Moore's Law (the technological capacity of microprocessors doubles every two years), which explains the American technological lead. They understood the potential of this law for the computer market and invested massively, making it almost impossible for Europe to catch up. Later, in the 2000s, Metcalfe's law came into play (the value of a network is equal to the square of its number of users), which led to Web 2.0 and the birth of giant platforms attracting internet users to their networks to monetise their data. Since Europe is a heterogeneous market, Europeans have unfortunately not been able to benefit from network effects like the Americans and the Chinese who, because of their domestic size, have been able to build global communities (Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc.).

Unable to compete with these two digital laws, Europe is finally waking up and has decided to impose the only law it can control: that of the States. By avoiding the "code is law" trap into which Europeans have collectively fallen, it is reverting to a "state is law" model, which is admittedly less disruptive, but which has proved its worth on our old continent and elsewhere. As the economic asymmetry between Americans and Europeans is constantly amplified by legal asynchronicity, current regulations such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Data Governance Act (DGA) are marking the end of the era of "laissez-faire" and of voluntary digital servitude. This is what European Commissioner Thierry Breton sums up so well in the formula "Everything that is forbidden in the physical world will also be forbidden in the online world".

Preference for the Europeanisation of digital technology to the "Siliconization" of Europe

By opting for regulation, the European Union is not only making a defensive choice to protect its interests (fight against abuse of rights, power and dominant position), it is also opting for an offensive strategy aimed at promoting its values via the extra-territoriality of its law. Europe exports its fundamental values through regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the Data Governance Act (DGA). It therefore aiming to Europeanise the digital world, i.e. to impose its humanist values via the creation of a "digital Enlightenment" as an alternative model to the libertarian vision in the West and the authoritarian one in the East....

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