‘Digital sovereignty’ has become one of the most-used phrases in Brussels and one of the more debated ones. At its core, it refers to Europe’s ability to control the technologies, data, and infrastructure it depends on, reducing dependency on non-European providers and strengthening the EU’s capacity to set its own technological course. But views diverge on how to get there. For some, it’s mainly about rules: requiring that certain data stay on European servers, that public administrations buy European software, or that companies favour European vendors by law. For others, it’s about something a little different: giving Europeans—as users, developers, and businesses—real, viable technology alternatives, and letting them choose.

We find the second framing more compelling. Sovereignty that rests on genuine competitiveness tends to last, while sovereignty that rests mainly on rules can be harder to sustain once the rules are the main reason anyone’s using the alternative. And when it works, it doesn’t look like a regulation; it looks like a founder building something good enough that people choose it on the merits.

Our member, TelemetryDeck, a privacy-first app analytics platform based in Augsburg, Germany, is already doing this. TelemetryDeck hosts its infrastructure entirely within the EU, currently on servers in Helsinki, and processes only anonymised usage data, meaning it isn’t even subject to many of the GDPR’s restrictions in the first place. Even so, the company has chosen to meet European data protection standards as though it were, keeping all data within the EU and being transparent about every third-party relationship along the way.

Telemetry Deck cofounder Lisa Figas and her team didn’t wait for Brussels to mandate the use of a European provider. They built one, and it won customers on trust and product quality. That’s the kind of digital sovereignty worth having.

If the goal is more founders like Lisa building or using competitive European offerings, as opposed to third-country options, the most useful role for the EU isn’t writing rules that favour European vendors by default. It’s removing the obstacles that make building and scaling those alternatives harder than it needs to be by:

  • Investing in the underlying capability, like cloud infrastructure, compute capacity, and funding for the startups building on top of it so that European options exist and are good enough to compete on quality, not just on origin.
  • Providing legal predictability, so companies like TelemetryDeck can make credible long-term promises to their customers and focus on building their products and not just compliance.
  • Reducing the regulatory burden that lands hardest on smaller companies, since compliance costs that a large platform absorbs easily can instead be the difference between scaling and shutting down for a startup.

For the startups, scaleups, and SMEs we represent, this is the distinction that matters most. Investment, predictability, and a level playing field are what let more founders do what Telemetry Deck did: build and use something that wins because it’s good, not because it’s mandated. Digital sovereignty, in other words, shouldn’t be something governments declare. It should be something users decide, one good product at a time.