On Digital Sovereignty, a way forward

Although what is below might sound boring, I will have some good stories to tell.

Current technological development cannot bypass the Sovereignty debate. It is loudest in Europe which makes sense as in the defining digital architectural moments the politicians and civil servants were looking inwards towards the creation of ‘Europe’ and treated the digital as analogue plus. In China which had engineers as Presidents since 1993 the ontological change of the pass on the packet protocol was seen for what it was, a hybrid system and they brought it under their control.

The Made in Europe Movement aims to have all capabilities on analogue territorial European soil. Not only will this take too long, as will procurement, it is also impossible as companies can get bought by foreign actors. The 6G open device architecture is generic and the value driven architecture on chip that can be tailored to the region’s regulatory framework, ethical drivers and choices in applications.

In this way Made in Europe means to have vital and decisive components in the hands of European legislators, and fruitful cooperation with the US and China on other components. In India, for example, that has made strong choices on identity (Adhaar), payment and data, our device centric architecture would enable India to strategically position its investments that otherwise would be monetized by foreign actors.

This approach is aligned with a relatively new concept ‘hedging’: “Hedging is the practice of avoiding exclusive dependence in a world of unreliable partners. It involves cultivating competing relationships across different domains so that no crisis or betrayal will leave a state (or company, RvK) out of options. ”
Hedging is aligned with the notion of Intercentrality. Intercentrality describes a situation in which extreme centralization and extreme decentralization can work together in an organizational structure that can be alternated within the system as a whole and within specific components: infrastructure and applications. The concept extrapolates traditional governance, open source, privacy and literacy activists, and the foundation of today’s hybrid infrastructure: connectivity (5G/6G), semiconductors (ASML, NXP, IMEC…) IoT and IIoT, ML and AI, and Quantum.
Instead of juxtaposing centralization and decentralization as mutually exclusive concepts, our architecture allows for different balances of both within a particular layer of the architecture. Hedging and Intercentrality support urgent infrastructure shifts for adaptation to multipolar realities in a G2 world. These shifts are actionables on device level. The solution and future wealth is on device level.