Digital sovereignty is becoming an evermore present issue, and a potent idea in the global techno-political discourse. There are different understandings and current applications of digital sovereignty, from sectoral data sovereignty, to infrastructural digital sovereignty to total network sovereignty, as we see in RuNet or NIN. The digital and the political realms are converging, and an early impact point is taking the shape of digital sovereignty. 

Digital sovereignty, I argue, is a nation-state reaction to the intensification of the materiality of data in today’s world. Data is increasingly holding material qualities that fundamentally alter the political and economic role of digital technologies. It has become less a proxy and more a mirror; an increasingly more accurate referent to the data subject – whether an individual, a structure, or a system; from people to power grids. In this sense, data has moved from description to simulation, and it is this shift that grounds the growing materiality of the digital itself. However, underrepresented groups risk to be exluded not only by the nation-state plan but also from the possible alternatives to it: not all the faces are reflected in that mirror.

As this intensifies, data will thus be legally bound by national politics within a nation-state international system. At the level of everyday life, this transformation is already visible. Individuals are rendered legible through tens of thousands of data points generated through routine digital interaction. We are no longer a society of humans, but a society of data points. As stacked data points approach functional equivalence with natural persons, the infrastructures that collect, process, and circulate them become legally and politically consequential. Data materiality here is not metaphorical: it is infrastructural, economic, and jurisdictional. But, how did the digital realm come to be characterized by such pervasive and asymmetric control?

Early digital imaginaries resisted this outcome. The early internet was envisioned as a horizontal space of free movement, immune to hierarchy and centralized authority. Yet even at that moment, it was already clear that infrastructure  -not content or culture – is the decisive encoder of power. Control over networks, cables, standards, and financialized data systems was already consolidating in the hands of existing corporations. The failure to challenge these infrastructural foundations allowed a techno-utopian vision of the internet to coexist with, and ultimately give way to, the technofeudalism that followed.

The result has been a reconfiguration of capitalism rather than its transcendence. The open and under-regulated internet enabled the corporation to become the dominant unit of social organization, accelerating a regression toward feudal dynamics. At the moment, 5 corporations essentially own and operate the digital commons, extracting rents from individuals, companies, and states alike. 

Here, is the inflection point which digital sovereignty emerged from: techno-nationalization as the reaction of the nation-state project to the corporate globalism project. Digital sovereignty is emerging as the state’s response to this globalized concentration of power. After all, the nation-state project was conceived as an antithesis to feudalism. We can see history rhyming again now, as Mark Twain would say. 

Why sovereignty in the digital? Because sovereignty is the spatial demarcation of struggles for legitimacy and control. In a battle of control with global actors, national actors enforce the national as a jurisdiction. This reaction is not merely ideological or protectionist; it reflects a structural contradiction between territorially bounded authority and globally scaled digital infrastructures. Digital sovereignty reflects the tensions between the national and the planetary scales.

This shift is observable worldwide. Models of digital sovereignty increasingly move from sectoral data protection toward comprehensive network control, ranging from state-managed internets to tightly regulated information flows. While authoritarian systems drive fragmentation through overt network control, the European Union also contributes to fragmentation through its emphasis on personal data protection and competition law. The difference lies less in the fact of fragmentation than in the political rationale and institutional form through which it is pursued.

The United States digital project illustrates a contrasting model: build infrastructure first, lobby aggressively, and consolidate power through scale. A handful of firms now operate cables, clouds, platforms, and applications while simultaneously deploying the largest digital lobbying apparatus in Brussels. Europe, by contrast, has specialized in regulation rather than construction. Its primary digital export has not been a product or service but law. Yet the regulatory “Brussels Effect” weakens when confronted with the lobbying-driven “DC Effect,” as regulatory ambition collides with infrastructural dependence.

This asymmetry exposes a structural limit. Regulation codifies power relations, but infrastructure produces them. A conception of digital sovereignty grounded solely in legal authority cannot rebalance a landscape in which the material foundations of the digital remain externally owned and opaque. What is required instead is an understanding of sovereignty as the capacity to build, govern, and safeguard interoperable and publicly accountable digital infrastructure.

Such a project requires federation not as a technical preference, but as a political strategy: a way of reconciling sovereignty with openness, and democratic control with cross-border interoperability. Such a model implies a layered approach. At its base, law must be translated into technical baselines, compliance mechanisms, and enforceable standards embedded directly into infrastructure. This requires coordinated action by European institutions, cybersecurity agencies, and data protection authorities, using regulatory instruments to anchor rights within technical systems. Above this legal foundation, governance must become participatory. A European Digital Infrastructure Board could coordinate public authorities, private operators, and civil society to manage standards, oversee certification, resolve disputes transparently, and publish audit data in publicly accessible registries.

Operationally, this framework depends on federated and interoperable technical systems. Data spaces must rely on shared connectors, common security baselines, and open architectures that allow secure cross-border data movement without central control. Open software plays a critical role here—not as an ideological preference but as a practical governance tool. Open reference implementations, digital identity wallets, and automated compliance systems ensure that public institutions, SMEs, and civic actors can inspect, modify, and collectively improve the infrastructure on which sovereignty depends.

Recent EU initiatives suggest that this infrastructural turn is beginning, albeit unevenly. Semiconductor policy, sovereign cloud procurement, and digital public infrastructure resolutions signal a shift from pure regulation toward limited construction. Yet democratic institutions remain weakly positioned within this process. The risk is that Europe attempts to certify or regulate sovereignty into existence rather than materially building it, reproducing dependence under the guise of compliance.

At its core, this is not a technical failure but an imaginative one. Techno-solutionism cannot resolve techno-feudalism or techno-nationalization. What is lacking is a socio-technical imaginary in which public interest, collective governance, and democratic accountability shape infrastructure itself. Such imaginaries are not spontaneous; they are institutionally stabilized and publicly performed. As long as Europe’s digital project remains primarily regulatory, corporate imaginaries will continue to be infrastructurally reinforced.

The historical analogy is instructive. The digital economy developed alongside neoliberal governance models that hollowed out public innovation capacity and outsourced platform functions to private firms. Reversing this trajectory requires infrastructural ambition comparable to past public works projects—treating digital systems as networks of networks governed by shared rules and democratic oversight.

Ultimately, digital governance cannot be democratized without being politicized. As data becomes increasingly material, it necessarily enters the political realm. Without public ownership or stewardship of core digital infrastructure, democratic governance of the digital remains structurally impossible. For Europe’s digital layer to be governed democratically, it must be problematized, materialized, and openly contested. Only then can digital sovereignty function not as isolation, but as a shared, federated project rooted in public institutions and accountable infrastructure.