The article I couldn't write
I tried to write about digital sovereignty. The piece kept splitting into three. That splitting, I think, is the actual story.
I read a news article last week about Amsterdam asking data centres to reserve space for European clients. Something bothered me about it. I opened a new document and started writing.
Three days later I had notes for three separate pieces, none of them finished, and a growing suspicion that the thing bothering me was not what I thought it was.
The split
The first article was about category errors. The piece conflated continuity, confidentiality and security, three distinct problems that require different interventions. I wrote that one fairly quickly. It felt satisfying in the way that corrections always feel satisfying, precise, a little superior. I set it aside.
The second article was about Amsterdam specifically. The city at the centre of European internet infrastructure, home to one of the world's largest internet exchange points, that spent years fighting data centres and now finds itself asking the ones it allowed to hold space for European clients. The irony was clean. Too clean, maybe. I set that one aside too.
The third article was the one I actually wanted to write. It was about the NIMBY problem. How the cities most anxious about digital sovereignty are the ones most aggressively preventing the infrastructure sovereignty requires. How we export our data centres the same way we export our waste: to somewhere poorer, somewhere with weaker rules, somewhere that lacks the political capital to refuse. And how the people who campaigned against the incinerator keep producing rubbish, just without having to look at it.
That one felt true. But it also felt incomplete. Because the NIMBY argument is still a solutions argument. It still assumes we know where we are going and just need to remove the obstacles. And I am no longer sure we know where we are going.
The habit underneath
Here is what I kept circling back to. Digital dependency on American infrastructure is not a procurement failure. It formed the way habits form: for real reasons, over time, because it kept making sense. The services were good. The prices were low. The integration was seamless. You did not end up here through weakness or inattention. You ended up here because it worked, and kept working, until the geopolitics shifted and suddenly the habit was visible in a way it had not been before.
The recovery metaphor is useful up to a point. You make a policy. You change the default at each renewal. You take some things in-house. You support European alternatives even when they are not quite as good. I have done some of this in my own practice. Not the hard parts yet. The core productivity stack is still there. I tell myself I am waiting for the right moment, which is probably true and probably also a rationalisation.
But recovery assumes you know what you are recovering toward. What does a healthy relationship with digital infrastructure look like? What does a European digital society actually feel like, cost, require? Those questions do not have clean answers. And the conversation keeps avoiding them, because solutions are easier to talk about than destinations.
Where we were going
We built the digital world we built because we were optimising for something. Speed. Convenience. Scale. Price. The platforms that won were the ones that removed friction fastest and charged least. We did not ask, collectively, what we were giving up or where we were heading. We just went. Individuals, companies, governments, all of us, at different speeds, in the same direction.
Now the direction is contested. And the response, ten-year strategies, cloud alliances, rack space negotiations, is still being framed as a logistics problem. How do we get from here to sovereignty? What are the steps, the phases, the milestones?
I keep wanting to ask a prior question. Sovereignty for what? A European digital society organised around what values, what trade-offs, what vision of what we owe each other and what we want to keep private and what we are willing to share? That conversation is not happening at the policy level. It is barely happening at the cultural level. And without it, the logistics question has no real answer, because you cannot plot a route to a destination you have not named.
The unfinished document
So I have three unfinished articles and this one, which is about why I could not finish them.
I think the honest position is this. The sovereignty conversation is real and urgent and I take it seriously. I am also not sure the vocabulary we have for it is adequate to the actual problem, which is less about infrastructure than about intention. Less about where the servers are than about what kind of digital life we are trying to build, and for whom, and under whose rules, and whether we are willing to pay what it costs.
I do not have an answer to that. I am not sure anyone does right now. But I think it is the question sitting underneath all the other questions, and I wanted to at least put it on the page.
The three articles will probably get written eventually. This one needed to come first.
Rob Hoeijmakers
Rob Hoeijmakers