Cultivating digital sovereignty

Faced with our growing dependence on tech giants, digital sovereignty is becoming a major democratic challenge. It’s time to act collectively.

The foundations of digital sovereignty

Digital sovereignty refers to the ability of a State, community, organization or individual to exercise autonomous control over their technological choices, data and digital infrastructure. It also encompasses the political independence necessary to freely organize access to fundamental resources: heritage, history, accounting, currency, communication networks and other elements constituting their identity and operation.

This sovereignty is structured around five major challenges:

First challenge: Data control
This involves ensuring that citizen and company data is stored and processed in accordance with national legislation and internal organizational regulations, without creating excessive dependence on private actors, who are often capitalist multinationals. This approach does not exclude the use of third-party services, but requires the implementation of safeguard mechanisms, particularly through data duplication on servers under national or local control. When partnerships are established with actors with potentially divergent interests, the confidentiality of exchanges must be rigorously guaranteed.

Second challenge: Technological independence
States, communities, organizations, families and individuals must ensure they minimize their dependence on technologies, software and equipment from capitalist monopolies. This vigilance must be exercised in all sectors: administration, health, economy, arts and culture, etc. The hegemony of Microsoft’s Windows operating system perfectly illustrates this issue. Even more concerning is the massive migration of institutional and administrative data to Microsoft’s cloud services, which constitutes a deliberate choice of technological dependence, whose political consequences are undoubtedly not measured.

Third challenge: Control of critical infrastructure
Whether for a country, an organization or an individual, control of communication networks, telecommunications and data storage spaces (data centers) is fundamental. In the pre-digital era, family archives were kept in filing cabinets in the attic. Today, this precious data is scattered between personal hard drives and cloud services like Dropbox.

Another crucial challenge lies in our ability to control our means of communication. A question arises: can citizens of a country or employees of a company communicate with each other without depending on an American multinational, even for basic local exchanges like email or telephone?

Fourth challenge: Legal and regulatory framework
It is primarily at the national level that the ability to apply one’s own laws to one’s digital territory must be exercised. This involves legal instruments for data protection like the GDPR, effective taxation on digital services used in the territory, and in-depth critical thinking training for all public agents.

Unfortunately, many people, even in positions of high responsibility such as Chief Information Officers in administrations, favor pragmatic choices that sacrifice sovereignty. They believe they are gaining agility and achieving budget savings, without realizing that this short-term approach inevitably prepares a democratic disaster in the medium term.

Vulnerabilities induced by the loss of digital sovereignty

The excessive dependence on Microsoft shown by a multitude of public services, businesses and associations places the State, communities and public and private organizations in a position of extreme vulnerability. This situation is all the more problematic as Microsoft’s philosophy, since its creation in 1978, has been based on appropriating common goods to patent them and legally compel their purchase. This logic is reminiscent of Monsanto’s strategy of patenting living organisms to commercialize what should belong to everyone, going so far as to genetically modify plants to prevent them from producing seeds, thus guaranteeing a perpetual captive market.

Beyond this political dimension, let’s imagine a scenario where Microsoft would be forced to abruptly cease its activities. Bill Gates being notoriously opposed to the current power in the United States, an American court decision could theoretically force Microsoft to interrupt its services for abuse of dominant position. This precedent exists: on January 20, 2012, the Megaupload site was closed without notice by the FBI. Although used by hackers, this service also hosted legitimate data from many companies for their large files. Overnight, no one in the world could recover their data.

This dependence on a single industrialist, particularly radical in its capitalist practices, exposes us to considerable risks, far beyond what we imagine. The impression of technological magic, perfectly embodied by the term “cloud”, cultivates magical thinking where everything seems fluid and instantaneous. This illusion masks reality: these services can disappear at any time. I focus on Microsoft because the choice to use or not use this company’s services constitutes a political decision accessible at our level.

Another challenge, more complex for the ordinary citizen to grasp, concerns the very architecture of the Internet. Ophélie Coelho explains it brilliantly in her book Geopolitics of Digital, Imperialism with Giant Steps (2023): the network has gradually been built by private rather than public actors. This evolution has profound consequences: States themselves now depend on these industrial giants to dialogue with each other and build international politics. Yet communication and exchange constitute the very foundation of human community life. Coelho traces the origin of this dependence to the mid-19^th century, during the laying of the first underwater transatlantic telegraph cables.

Rebuilding our sovereignty: a collective imperative

Levers for action exist at all levels: family, friendship, association, business, state, territorial and municipal. Digital sovereignty, largely compromised today, must be lucidly acknowledged, and must be patiently rebuilt, stone by stone, with humility and pragmatism. The goal is not to instantly revolutionize our practices, but to develop an enlightened awareness of our choices, to understand their motivations and anticipate their consequences.

Denmark’s pioneering example
Denmark has just adopted a courageous decision that will be gradually implemented from July 2025. Danish Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen announced that her ministry, gradually followed by others, will stop using Microsoft tools. Exit the Office 365 cloud that replaces local data centers, exit Word and Excel which will be replaced by LibreOffice, a free office suite, developed and improved by an international community, belonging to no one.
This transition illustrates a groundswell that cannot be accomplished abruptly, but requires collective awareness and courageous political decisions that most do not even perceive as political.

Regarding operating systems, Denmark is gradually migrating to Linux, which is free software of remarkable maturity and contrary to popular belief, often easier to use than Windows. Its lack of aggressive marketing is simply explained: belonging to no one, no company profits from its commercialization.

Linux’s exceptional reliability, reinforced precisely by its status as a common good maintained by the global community, explains why 95% of Internet infrastructure and data centers run on it. Multinationals themselves rely on this free software to deliver their services, thus recognizing that no proprietary software can match its reliability for critical applications.

This situation potentially benefits everyone. Certainly, the change in habits and the lack of public investment, with administrations preferring to fund Microsoft rather than contribute to the development of free software, explain their lesser notoriety and sometimes their perfectible ergonomics compared to commercial solutions.

The potential of the contributive approach
This software could quickly surpass its commercial equivalents if political choices favored contribution to the common good. Take the example of a municipality adopting Linux and LibreOffice: it could create a service dedicated to improving tools, thus benefiting its agents and citizens, but also the entire global community through sharing improvements. If every city adopted this contributive enrichment strategy, individual effort would remain modest while collective improvement would reach unparalleled levels. These tools would quickly become superior to commercial solutions. But this requires an initial political will to invest in the collective.

The infrastructure already exists: the backbone of our digital systems relies on free software. The transition to their widespread use in civil society and by non-IT users is therefore perfectly achievable.

Caroline Stage Olsen expresses it accurately: “We will never move towards our goal if we don’t start somewhere”. This lucid humility must guide our action. Without a first step, no change will occur, and we will progressively become, at all levels of humanity, increasingly vulnerable and dependent on actors whose primary motivation remains financial profit, never the common good.

Microsoft is in no way a public service, even if it cultivates this appearance. It will never become one, except through nationalization, and even in this unlikely case, it would be an American public service creating a new form of international dependence.

The evolution of interoperability

The question of format compatibility has long been problematic. OpenOffice ODT documents (LibreOffice’s predecessor) were sometimes unreadable for users of other software. These blockages, deliberately orchestrated by industrialists to lock in their users, stem from a commercial strategy, not a technical limitation of free software.

The situation has considerably evolved: exchanging documents in DOCX format is now transparent or almost between different software. Microsoft has understood that opening its formats serves its business model and interoperability needs, even if its software and services remain closed.

The development of digital sovereignty, in my view, involves creating spaces of digital autonomy. Rather than entrusting documents to Google Docs, one can install at home a NAS (compact device connected to the internet box allowing remote access to files). One then has functionality equivalent to Google Docs or Google Photos, but with control over the storage location. This autonomy does not exclude complementarity: one can duplicate data on Google Cloud to secure it and have an external backup. One thus benefits from the services of large industrialists while avoiding dependence. The reverse approach also works: continue using Google Cloud out of habit while implementing a local duplication strategy to preserve sovereignty. These solutions, apparently complex, are becoming increasingly accessible to novices.

But will a multitude of autonomous systems provide services as fluid and simple as what Google, Microsoft and others do? This is indeed a crucial subject: the possibility of interoperability between diverse systems. The answer is yes, dialogue between diverse systems is increasingly easy (the old incompatibilities so numerous that digital users have known so much, due to industrialists’ commercial strategies, fortunately belong more and more to the past).

Rethinking our relationship to digital effort

Let’s reflect: wanting the storage of our digital data to require no effort and be entirely delegated to others reveals our acceptance of dependence. Consider the analogy with a physical library: we buy or build shelves, we install them, we transport our books in boxes, we arrange them. We concretely assume this responsibility, we live it, see it, implement it with effort.

Why should digital exempt us from all effort? This absence of effort signals our dependence: someone else assumes this effort in our place, making us dependent on their decisions.

The objective of sharing this reflection is to demonstrate the gravity of this situation and the importance of consenting to this effort to preserve our sovereignty, our freedom and our capacity for existence, not in autarchy, but in free and respectful dialogue of our diversities, which existing computer systems today allow, we just have to choose them!

The web, paradigm of the common good

The phenomenal rise of the web is explained by its status as a common good. The fundamental concepts, web pages, formatting, hyperlinks, were invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 to facilitate document sharing between researchers. CERN renounced patenting these innovations, placing them under free license. Everyone could thus freely create pages and web servers, promoting their universal accessibility and sharing.

This open architecture allowed continuous improvement by the community. The web was thus able to experience ultra-rapid, massive and truly international development, because its base constitutes a global common good that the international community has an interest in enriching and preserving as heritage belonging to everyone and no one. This common good embodies the engine of human development.

These fundamental principles may seem obvious to some readers, less so to others who perceive the functioning of the web as magical, without questioning the technical and legal foundations that enable it.

Path to building our sovereignty together

I propose to initiate this movement by creating, in all our collective bodies, whether intimate (our inner dialogue), family, organizational (small, medium or large) or territorial, spaces for dialogue and collective reflection whose objective would be to cultivate, without dogmatism, a shared awareness of digital sovereignty through our choice of tools and digital practices, regardless of our technical level.

These awareness moments would constitute an essential first step. They must be part of a democratic approach, avoiding expert speeches claiming to hold superior knowledge. In an authentic democratic society, each person makes an essential contribution from their own position. No contribution is minor; they are simply exercised at different levels.

Digital sovereignty transcends technological choices alone. It engages cultures, ways of thinking, dialogue and exchange. Its construction therefore benefits from the contribution of each person, regardless of their technical competence. It is in this diversity that our collective strength lies.

So there’s a lot of tension about these issues at the heart of local authorities and the French state, which has nonetheless built a digital service a priori sovereign for public service, which works rather well: La Suite numérique. If we use it, it must also go hand in hand with collaborative appropriation approaches such as I suggest.

City of Lyon Press Release - June 23, 2025

The City of Lyon Strengthens Its Digital Sovereignty

To no longer be dependent on American software solutions and acquire true digital sovereignty, the City of Lyon has embarked on a major transformation of its digital tools.
Two projects structure this desire for emancipation:

• the creation of a free and interoperable collaborative suite, named Open Digital Territory
• the progressive deployment of free office software, replacing the Microsoft Office suite, in municipal services.

The Open Digital Territory Suite
Developed with SITIV and the Lyon Metropolis, the Open Digital Territory suite is based on open source tools enabling videoconferencing and office productivity with co-editing.

Hosted in regional datacenters, it has benefited from a 2 million euro grant from the ANCT. More than 50% of public contracts have been awarded to companies from Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, 100% to French companies.

Several thousand agents from 9 local authorities are already using this solution, which can be shared at the national level.

Free Alternatives to Microsoft
In parallel, the City of Lyon is gradually replacing Microsoft software with free alternatives, notably OnlyOffice for office productivity, as well as Linux and PostgreSQL for systems and databases.

This transition aims to:

• Strengthen the technological sovereignty of public service
• Extend the lifespan of IT equipment and thus reduce their environmental footprint