I wrote about this in my article. Here, US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg warns Europe about falling into 'The Digital Sovereignty Trap'. I will quote:
'These days, few words flatter a government like “digital sovereignty.” It carries the music of independence, the dignity of self-rule, the promise that a nation holds its own destiny in its hands. So it is no surprise that the expression has been pressed into the service of a fashionable, fast-spreading policy debate.
Many countries have looked to the United Nations to be the great evangelist of that idea. Through its Global Digital Compact and the funds and machinery that some are trying to assemble around it, the organization presses toward a world in which every country commands what the Secretary-General’s own reports call an “irreducible minimum” of artificial intelligence—its own computers, its own data, its own models, raised at home and owned at home. A secretariat-proposed multibillion-dollar fund would help pay for the building. And a growing number of governments, persuaded that independence requires duplication, are drafting national AI strategies to match—each resolved to rebuild, inside its own borders, a stack that already exists somewhere else.
It is a seductive vision. It is also backward and counterproductive.'
'Now apply the heresy to nations. Picture the conference—there is always a conference—where forty governments rise in turn to pledge a sovereign cloud, a sovereign model, a national champion of their very own. They will applaud one another’s independence. Then they will go home and pour billions into companies built to do precisely what thirty-nine others are doing, in markets too small to sustain even one of them, chasing margins that thin asymptotically toward nothing the moment the next champion is announced. They will have achieved not so-called “digital sovereignty” but a kind of synchronized mediocrity—a planet of subscale clones, each heroically reconstructing last year’s breakthrough while the breakthrough itself moves on without them.
While others rebuild the present, American firms will be inventing the future. They will not be defending yesterday’s platform; they will be shipping tomorrow’s—the products that do not yet exist, that no committee in Geneva has thought to subsidize, that will define the coming decade before the clones have finished cloning the last one. And because they will stand alone at the frontier, they will keep what the frontier pays: the fat margins, the soaring valuations, the commanding heights of the global economy. That is not an accident of American luck. It is the iron arithmetic of zero to one.'
A nation is not digitally sovereign because it can reproduce yesterday’s breakthroughs—half the world can do that.
It is digitally sovereign because it can contribute to tomorrow’s. Call it innovation sovereignty: the power not to copy what exists, but to create what does not.
The autarkist measures his strength by how much he can wall off and rebuild. The innovator measures his by how much he can invent that which no one else can. One ends the decade with a museum. The other ends it owning the future.
