More control over data, services and decisions.

Digital sovereignty was long a topic for debates about principle. The geopolitical situation has turned it into a very practical question: a large share of the services used every day – cloud storage, office software, video conferencing, identity management – sits with a handful of providers outside Europe.

That is not bad in itself, but it creates dependencies that can shift at short notice: pricing and licensing models are changed, features disappear, export controls and sanctions reach into contractual relationships, and foreign law can permit access to data that physically resides in Europe. Anyone who has built their entire operation on top of that is no longer at the negotiating table when such a moment arrives.

So this is not about technology ideology but about the ability to act: knowing which services are business-critical, having a realistic fallback for those, being able to export data in open formats, and running at least the most important building blocks on infrastructure whose rules you know. None of this has to happen at once – but it should be a deliberate decision rather than an accident.