TL;DR: Digital sovereignty is a call for old views about countries where nationalist movements thrive, and you are just calling to replace one set of tech monopolies with another. Digital self-determination can be applied from individuals to countries, fostering competition and innovation by promoting interoperability, breaking market entry barriers and monopolies, ending rent-seeking behaviors, and forcing companies to compete on product quality, features, support services, and not on lock-in effects. There is no digital self-determination without free software, open hardware, open protocols, open data, adversarial interoperability, open file formats, and even open manufacturing.

It is a strange new world we live in. Our collective memory can simultaneously find an obscure tweet, post, or interview from years or decades ago, but we seem to never remember the path that took us here—all the fights we fought and challenges we had to face.

I’m old enough to remember, even before the dawn of the internet, how tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Autodesk, Oracle, Intel, Nvidia, etc., always tried to control the way we used technology to serve their own interests, either by restricting it or even by counterintuitively promoting what most of you now know as “digital piracy.”

It was from these days that the first big tech monopolies were created. It was from these days that the first walled tech gardens were raised.

The dawn of the internet was disruptive—suddenly new players were on the playing field, new opportunities, new wars to maintain the monopolies. I still remember the first browser wars, I still remember when Macromedia Flash was around. The recipes were the same: offer services or software for free, buy out competition, grow your audience and ecosystem, make it very costly to leave.

Social media, natural monopolies fueled by targeted ads, made people addicted and made matters far worse. We are constantly feeling the consequences: political shifts and polarization, wars and genocide, or simply mental health issues in our children and the distancing of our loved family members.

Smartphones made it easy for tech monopolies to become the gatekeepers of our lives. There is hardly any distinction between hardware and software; kids these days have trouble with the folders and files paradigm, with emails and even with understanding that an app is just a program running on an operating system. Any app can only come from the walled gardens that they control, and that they insist are there for our own safety, but in reality, are there for their profit. The Internet of Things (IoT) became the Internet of lock-ins and expanded the control of technological companies beyond our computers and smartphones.

In an ever-increasing technology-dependent society, technological monopolies grew larger and larger, from hype to hype, or even from bribe to bribe, profiting from gullible societies, politicians, and decision makers.

This technology interconnectivity, prevalence, and dependency is too tempting for state surveillance organizations to pass up. Edward Snowden and others showed us just that.

It is becoming increasingly evident, even for non-tech people, the dependence of countries, governments, and public services on these tech giants. Office software, cybersecurity, cloud services, network services, API management services, identity management cloud services…. If smartphones made it easy for tech monopolies to become the gatekeepers of our lives, cloud services and Software as a Service (SaaS) made it easy for them to become gatekeepers of our governments, public services, and businesses. They control our tech stack and have access to all our data. In a changing world, where old alliances break and new ones form, calls for digital sovereignty have become commonplace.

I get it! Most of these monopolies and tech giants are from the US. Suddenly we realized we are too dependent on US tech companies (some of us realized long ago—better late than never, I guess). And no, it is not the result of the current political zeitgeist. Long ago, the US has shown us that they are not a trusting partner. In reality, if you give someone—even your best friend—that amount of power over you, most likely he will use it for his own gain. So, the simple answer to this problem is: our countries are sovereign, so we should extend that to our digital infrastructure, thus digital sovereignty!

For me, the problem with digital sovereignty is twofold: sovereignty is a call for old views about countries where nationalist movements thrive, and you are just calling to replace one set of tech monopolies with another, like switching drug dealers. None of this should be acceptable.

Instead, we should be calling for digital self-determination.

Not because we don’t trust big tech companies or countries, but because with the adequate level of digital self-determination we are free not to trust them or even to think about them in terms of trust.

The beauty of the concept of digital self-determination is that you can apply it to every scale of our lives, from individuals to countries. We need to simply ask ourselves if we are in control of our data and the technology we are using—in our smartphones, our homes, our cars, our gadgets, our infrastructures, etc.—or are we dependent on some third party to keep these devices and services going and operational?

Are you truly free to use your smartphone as you want, to install or uninstall the apps you want how you want? Is it easy for you to change your email provider or your cloud backup provider? Can you update the software on your TV? Can you use ink cartridges from any other supplier on your printer? Can you just buy your professional software or must you subscribe for a fee? Are the files interchangeable with competitor software? Did your PC become obsolete from a software update?

Our digital self-determination is compromised in many ways, and I’m sure you can find a specific way in which you are personally affected.

Digital self-determination fosters competition and innovation, as it promotes interoperability, breaking market entry barriers and monopolies, forcing companies to compete on product quality, features, support services, and not on lock-in effects. Calling for our digital self-determination is also a call for the end of rent-seeking behavior and its pernicious effects on economies. Companies should also be calling for their digital self-determination, as they are also the victims of tech monopolies, lock-in effects, and rent-seeking behavior from technology products and services suppliers. And so, making digital self-determination-promoting products becomes self-serving, as companies also benefit from digital self-determination-friendly products and services.

Digital self-determination is also about calling for the right to repair.

Countries benefit from digital self-determination at every level of our societies and achieve their digital sovereignty. However, they have a very important role to play by promoting regulations and research directed at maximizing the digital self-determination of their citizens, communities, and economies.

I hope that by now, if you have read until this part of the text, you have reached the same conclusion as I have. There is no digital self-determination without free software, open hardware, open protocols, open data, adversarial interoperability, open file formats, and even open manufacturing.

So, please support digital self-determination, make software and products that promote digital self-determination, and in the end you will be contributing to a better society.