Lhe digital decline is so obvious that the terms “periphery” and “dependence”, formerly reserved for poor countries, now apply to the Old Continent. Subordination to large US companies concerns almost all the infrastructural, software and service layers behind powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Of course, Europe can be proud of a few flagships: Mistral, the French AI gem, or SAP, the German leader in business management software. In the sky, the satellite infrastructure, with the Galileo navigation system, the Copernicus observation program and the Iris communications constellation2 [pour infrastructure de résilience et d’interconnexion sécurisée par satellite]whose launch has just been announced [le 16 décembre 2024]is still a point of support.
But digital sovereignty cannot be measured on the scale of this or that segment. It is played out in terms of the systemic mastery of what the technology theorist Benjamin Bratton calls the stackstacking. Big Tech establishes its hegemony by playing on complementarities between data centers, data flows, AI talent, marketplace (marketplace) and digital services for organizations and the general public…
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However, on this scale, Europe is out of the game. Like all countries in the world with the exception of the United States and, to a lesser extent, China, its destiny is in the hands of Big Tech. To escape European dependence on Big Tech, we need a non-aligned digital policy.
Knowledge infrastructure shaped remotely
The question is not only that of the surveillance of individuals for marketing purposes, nor that of the dislocation of the public sphere due to algorithmic reinforcement loops which erode collective mediations and are the joy of the far right. With the generalization of the cloud, the economic fabric and the political institutions themselves are caught in the net of the digital giants.
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