TES Dispatch #2: EU Digital Sovereignty and A Politicized Eurovision

Topic Roundup:
A Digitally Sovereign Europe

You may have heard a lot about EU ‘Digital Sovereignty’ lately. I never gave it much thought beyond when I was helping EU-based clients set up their privacy policies, or when a 2022 Munich court ruling about Google Fonts sent a lot of us in the digital provider space scrambling.

Then Greenland happened.

The EU began openly speaking about using the ‘Trade Bazooka’, aka the ACI—which I applauded. Finally! The Europeans are growing a spine! Among other things, this could have potentially blocked some of America’s access to EU markets or imposed export controls, and that included digital services.

A digital services tax or license restriction would have made it economically unfeasible for 'smaller' platforms (e.g., Squarespace) to serve small European-based businesses like mine.

I thought about the SaaS tech stack I use to run my business and realized just about all of it is based in America: Gmail, my CRM, Squarespace, Notion, Dropbox, Stripe, PayPal. The two exceptions are Canva (Australia) and a very cool site mapping tool from a Riga, Latvia-based web shop.

If the trade war went digital, the day-to-day of my business and livelihood could come to a screeching halt.

That’s when I realized that, in this new chaotic world order, it wasn’t just me who was vulnerable, but all of Europe.

From Tenzer Strategies:

Much of Europeans’ sensitive data (health, taxation, industry, defense) is now stored or processed on infrastructure controlled by American companies, subject to American law, even when operating from data centers located in Europe. In practical terms, this means that a unilateral decision by Washington can affect access, use, or confidentiality of this data, regardless of the decisions of Member States, to the point of potentially paralyzing the entire European Union.

Unfortunately, Friedrich Merz is trying to nickel and dime the EU MFF budget for 2028 onwards. FFS Fred, this is not the time to be sparsam and pinch pennies.

Why?

The EU is attempting to build a sovereign digital cloud infrastructure for an EU-controlled cloud, data center, and AI capacity.

Omri Preiss, from the This Time Tomorrow podcast, explains why cutting funding for this is a disaster in salty and refreshingly blunt terms:

“I’m just mind blown…that we don’t have European CEOs blowing up the mobile phones of all their prime ministers, going like, show me the money, motherfucker…if I was a German CEO, in pretty much any sector, whether I'm doing car parts or car seats or advanced machine tools or whatever, or construction, I would be fucking outraged that Friedrich Merz is not telling the commission, actually, we need to build a lot more…we need to get our data centers in order. I find it unacceptable that I'm having to send my data over to the US where, you know, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk in a ketamine hole is just going to fucking sit on a red button and turn off my business data and shut down my emails. That's a business risk for me…now that we live in a crazy lawless world where Donald Trump can just do anything to anyone, American companies can also just look at your business data and then steal your shit basically, which, you know, why not? … if I was a German CEO, I would be genuinely concerned”

F-bombs justified.

Open Future echoes the point:

By integrating and streamlining funding for digital infrastructure, the Commission has laid down a promising structure. However, this structure must genuinely reflect political priorities if those ambitions are to be realized. Digital sovereignty isn’t about slogans. It’s about supporting systems Europe can trust and rely on, no matter what a tech-bro or a foreign government decides to do.

There are some encouraging starts.

For example SOOFI, which stands for Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models (don't worry, the acronym works in German). It’s an effort to de-couple European dependence on AI technologies from the US and China, creating both a large open source AI model and the necessary infrastructure to support it.

As part of this effort Telekom and Nvidia just built what they are calling an ‘AI Factory’ in my hometown of Munich. It’s an underground data center, re-purposed from an old Hypovereinsbank server facility. It's ‘powered entirely by renewable energy...designed for maximum energy efficiency.’

The heat it generates is used to warm the office buildings above it, and is cooled by one of the offshoot canals from the Isar river. And of course, it’s totally sovereign and EU-based.

That’s how you do it.

And nineteen more of these facilities are operational or planned in Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Bulgaria, France, Poland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Netherlands, Romania.

Cultural Artefact:
United by Music? Eurovision 2026 and Global Politics

Thanks to the assholes running the world we can’t have nice things anymore. Things like jet fuel and a non-political Eurovision contest. The reasons for this are a bit byzantine but the long and short of it is: last year Israel gamed the system to use the contest as a way to try and prop up it’s cratering image after the atrocities in Gaza. Five European countries, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, The Netherlands and Iceland - pulled out of the contest in protest. Eurovision has changed the voting rules as a result.

This dust-up is unfortunate for 10,000 reasons, one of which is that Eurovision is one of, if not the most powerful soft-power tools Europe has. Weakening it could empower it's Russian-sponsored counter contest, Intervision. But the truth is, the contest has always been political.

Meme/Mental Health Break

Speaking of Eurovision. The two most dedicated Eurovision watchers I know are good friends. An American and Australian respectively, who also live in Europe. The American friend turned me on to Windows95man and this song, for which I will be eternally grateful.

It became a kind of running gag when our kids asked for dessert even though they already had ice cream or wanted to order Fanta on vacation. If we allowed it, instead of saying yes, we'd just respond in a deep voice: 'No Rules!'