Editorial

This week, Europe once again loudly proclaimed ‘Digital Sovereignty!’—only to often do the opposite in practice. Austria delivers, Germany holds conferences, Bavaria capitulates to Microsoft, and the EU tries to simplify regulation while opening new gray areas in critical spots. Meanwhile, a U.S. sanctions case shows how quickly a European judge can be digitally disempowered. None of this is coincidental. It reflects the state of a region that preaches sovereignty but still fails to make decisive choices. It’s high time to clear the fog.

The Tech News of the Week

EU Digital Package

The EU is attempting to sort out its legal patchwork—a sensible step, as companies today spend more time interpreting laws than developing software. However, the sought-after harmonization touches areas where vigilance is crucial. If personal data is suddenly deemed ’non-critical’ once identification requires ‘unreasonable effort,’ it opens an interpretive space for Big Tech that has nothing to do with modernization. And if AI training based on ’legitimate interests’ is to be allowed without clear guidelines, it creates exactly the gray areas that give large platforms strategic advantages.

The idea of replacing cookie banners with technical preference signals sounds appealing—until you ask who defines these standards. Browser manufacturers? Platform corporations? Europe? Spoiler: Probably not Europe.

Less bureaucracy is good. Less fundamental rights are not. The digital package is not an administrative update but an intervention in the architecture of digital self-determination. The details will determine whether simplification or dilution results.

🔗 https://heise.de/-11085595

Austria Cuts Microsoft Dependency

Austria’s Ministry of Economic Affairs has done what many administrations could have done for years—but didn’t dare: migrated 1,200 employees away from Microsoft to Nextcloud. Four months. No political drama, no ‘We’ll look into it.’ Simply implemented. Why? Because Microsoft still fails to meet key data protection and security requirements, neither under DSGVO nor under NIS2. And because at some point, one must accept that sovereign IT cannot tolerate a U.S. cloud supplicant role.

The approach is refreshingly pragmatic. Teams remains for external conversations, internally they work sovereignly. That it worked with minimal friction losses is not due to luck but to clean management. While Bavaria explains why Open Source is supposedly not reliable enough, Austria shows that the opposite is true—if taken seriously.

🔗 https://itsfoss.com/news/austrian-ministry-kicks-out-microsoft/

U.S. Sanctions Disempower European Judge

The case of Nicolas Guillou shows how thin Europe’s digital sovereignty really is. A French judge of the International Criminal Court is sanctioned by the U.S.—and loses access to his digital services within minutes. Not through European decisions, but through U.S. companies providing European infrastructure. Accounts gone. Bookings gone. Payment functions gone. One click in Washington, and a European official is digitally incapacitated.

It is the logical consequence of an architecture in which Europe has outsourced central digital and financial infrastructure. That the EU even has an instrument like the blocking regulation but does not use it out of political convenience exacerbates the dependency. The judge puts it succinctly: Without its own infrastructure, no sovereignty. And without sovereignty, no functioning rule of law.

🔗 https://www.heise.de/news/Wie-ein-franzoesischer-Richter-von-den-USA-digital-abgeklemmt-wurde-11087453.html

Bavaria’s Digital Strategy: Confidently Dependent

Bavaria announces its digital strategy—and manages to show high ambitions and a remarkable willingness to self-disempower simultaneously. ‘No reliance solely on Open Source,’ it says. Translated: We don’t trust European technologies and prefer to hand over state IT to Microsoft & Co. The backbone of the future infrastructure will be Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

The economic comparison between OpenDesk (€30) and Microsoft (€50) is dismissed as ‘hardly relevant,’ while the long-term lock-in costs are generously ignored. That Bavaria is simultaneously building its own AI—which then runs on Azure—makes it almost comical. Millions are invested to reduce dependencies, only to end up in the same old pattern.

The strategy reads like a manual on how to rhetorically demand sovereignty but technically cancel it.

🔗 https://www.heise.de/news/Digitalstrategie-Bayern-setzt-auf-zentrale-Infrastruktur-Microsoft-Bayern-KI-11088687.html

Central EU Reporting Office

NIS2, DSGVO, DORA: Three reporting obligations, three processes, three authorities—a bureaucratic nightmare lived daily. ENISA is now supposed to create a central point of contact, which at first glance looks like relief. In reality, it is an admission of how dysfunctional the current situation is. A unified portal only helps if the underlying obligations are also harmonized. Otherwise, it’s just a nice gateway to three contradictory rooms.

Europe has a real chance here: a transparent, open, auditable platform that doesn’t punish but supports. But for that, regulation must be thought of as architecture—not as a collection point.

🔗 https://www.golem.de/

Blogpost Recommendations

ayedo: Resilience Means Freedom of Choice

The blog post clearly shows what Europe systematically ignores: Our digital economy depends on global infrastructures, whose failure affects not just individual services but supply chains, government portals, payment processes, healthcare—everything. Large platforms are scalable, but they are also single points of failure. Resilience only arises when infrastructures become interchangeable and standards, rather than provider-centricity, prevail.

ayedo addresses exactly this: as a sovereign operational layer over any infrastructure. Kubernetes, not as a buzzword, but as a technical foundation for true provider independence.

🔗 </posts/ayedo-zeigt-wie-resiliente-infrastruktur-aussehen-muss/>

Axel Gillert: Sovereignty Doesn’t Start in the Cloud Interface

Gillert’s mini data center is not a homelab but a counter-design to the convenient platform economy. His approach is radically simple: To understand how systems work, you have to build them—with latency, heat, storage, real boot processes, and multi-arch setups, not with marketing slides. Europe likes to discuss sovereignty abstractly; Gillert shows it in hardware.

🔗 https://www.pandolin.io/project-rebel-homebase-teil-1/

Comment of the Week

Sebastian Himstedt brilliantly sums it up: In Berlin, digital sovereignty is philosophized about, while the Ministry of Economic Affairs simultaneously publishes a tender to purchase AWS as the basis for Germany’s funding center. Including AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Digital sovereignty, made by Amazon. It could hardly be more ironic.

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sebastian-himstedt-84aa58197_mittwoch-in-berlin-digitale-souver%C3%A4nit%C3%A4t-share-7398778746364653568-MGNj

Recommendation

The Digital Summit shows how vulnerable Europe still is. And why providers like Zendis don’t talk about sovereignty—they implement it. 160,000 licenses are not an experiment but proof that alternatives work.

🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIF4TnakAL4

Meme of the Week