“The EU has been funding W as its in-house proprietary propaganda network.” Despite several fact-checkers and EU officials debunking this claim, it is still being held on to and repeatedly put forward in claims on X and in attacks on digital sovereignty. Unfortunately, like most attacks on digital sovereignty, these claims hold little water. Unfortunately, it seems that in business and politics, everything goes. With the push for digital independence touching both areas, the attacks seem to intensify.
Thus, it is time for us to look at some of the most common attacks and determine whether or not they can stand on their own or should be thoroughly debunked.
Digital Sovereignty, Digital Isolation, Digital Dictatorship
One of the earliest complaints about digital sovereignty is that it drives a wedge between the US and its global allies. Some commentators, especially Elon Musk, go so far as to compare the drive for independence with the Russian Digital Dictatorship. Yet, under closer inspection, the claim doesn’t hold true. After all, digital sovereignty is about giving control back to the individual and organizations, not transferring it from one entity to another.
Thus, if you look at today’s big tech companies and their influence on social media, e-commerce, and news, you find that their power is often on par with that of digital dictatorships. Moving the power down to the individual would threaten their profit margins. Likewise, empowering individuals would threaten dictators’ power. Consequently, pursuing digital sovereignty does the exact opposite of moving us to a digital dictatorship. Instead, it brings power closer to each of us.
Likewise, the claim of digital isolationism doesn’t hold up. Most initiatives are built on Open Source software and open standards. These enhance international collaboration by their very nature. In contrast, proprietary big tech centralizes power and puts you at the mercy of a single company in a single country. The real-world equivalent would be to claim that colonial empires were better than the UN, because countries needed to maintain fewer diplomatic relations, making diplomacy more efficient.
Digital Sovereignty Is Expensive
The claim that investments in digital sovereignty and Open Source are particularly expensive is another often repeated line. It’s far more interesting because it is true. Funding Open Source software takes money and gives it to the various Open Source projects and to some companies that offer support and development services around Open Source. Thus, the claim that it costs money is true and easily verifiable.
Yet, it is also incomplete. What most of these claims miss is how much money is spent on proprietary license fees to big tech companies. Said differently, Open Source must be free as in free beer to be better, but it is absolutely fine to pay millions of dollars to big tech companies. Yet, without mentioning the second part, it seems that any financing for Open Source is just an additional expense rather than simply a matter of redirecting money between two vendors.
On top of that, most claims don’t consider the wider impact an investment in Open Source has. If you finance Open Source software, the benefits go beyond your own organization. They become available to the community and all of humanity. Instead, proprietary license fees generally remain with a single company. Thus, not only is it often cheaper to improve Open Source, but you also help improve the lives of more people.
Open Source Is Different
This is undoubtedly the bane of anyone ever trying to sell a competitor product to a big tech product. It looks different. It cannot open the most convoluted and proprietary file formats. In many cases, it’s the user being afraid of changing their habits or learning something new. Even if the user has never used a feature, they fear they might miss it one day. It’s like being against millionaires’ taxes because you might become a millionaire one day. In both cases, the chances are slim.
If you want to refute the claim, you can easily look to proprietary software updates. Despite overwhelming user dissatisfaction, most companies moved from Windows 7 to Windows 8 to Windows 10. That is despite the radical design changes of every version jump. Users adapted their workflows twice in a very short period. The world did not end. The economy survived, and even most tech support engineers barely spent extra time on the drastic interface changes. Everyone just bashed Microsoft. Even so, research shows that the Windows 8 interface was more user-friendly, yet it was also different.
Yet unless an Open Source tool is 100% identical, there will be complaints as if the world were ending tomorrow. Let us be honest. IT is complicated. In many cases, it might be even overly complicated. We likely have many features that we never use or miss. What happens if we are missing a feature? Open Source allows you to get it added for often significantly less than the license cost of proprietary software.
Don’t Let Marketing Stop Digital Sovereignty
Ultimately, we have to admit that most of these stories warning us about the dangers of Digital Sovereignty are nothing more than native advertising. These are “thought leader” articles placed in magazines and publications. We should stop listening to all the experts who are paid to talk something down and instead talk to fellow IT leaders.
If we do so, we will all be surprised that, most of the time, a migration to Open Source and support for Digital Sovereignty aren’t more complicated than a major update to proprietary software. Thus, let us stop focusing on the Negative “What Ifs” and instead focus on building a world where we control our IT.
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