Actions and Words

“Actions are more precious than words”

- John Pym 1628

It is past the point we treat Digital Sovereignty as a reality, instead of a theoretical political discussion. In recent times, a string of actions has shown that what we once thought of as threats are now clearly placed in the real world.

In May 2025, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court - ICC, lost access to his email. This was the result of an Executive Order that imposed sanctions on the ICC and specifically named Mr. Khan.

At the time, the ICC was a Microsoft customer and their email services were hosted in Microsoft 365 service. Although only Mr. Khan was named, the ICC recognized that trusting their whole digital communication channel to a company subject to a foreign government’s rule presented a real problem and not just an “ideological” threat.

For this threat, there was an alternative. By the end of October, the ICC had decided to replace Microsoft 365 [1] and, by November, moved 1,800 workstations to openDesk [2].

The latest in a string of Open-Source migrations comes from the Swiss government. In September, they announced a pilot project to migrate from Microsoft 365 to openDesk citing sovereignty as one of the key motivators[3].

openDesk is an Open-Source project maintained by ZenDiS, the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty that provides a suite of productivity software, designed for the European public sector. The ultimate goal is to reduce the current reliance on proprietary software from foreign companies.

While most of the conversation on Digital Sovereignty lies clearly in the software space, with Free and Open-Source Software solutions being the clear alternatives, the physical side of the sovereignty coin is usually not discussed. Until it demands to be.

Let’s go to October 2026. News channels reported that Starlink, an American-owed private company, was throttling the Internet speed for Ukraine, effectively hobbling their attack and defence capacities in an asymmetric war that has been dragging on for almost 5 years. I think the best description of the whole situation comes from The Globe and Mail’s editorial from October 24 [4]:

“Digital sovereignty seems like a luxury, a bulwark against theoretical risks, until the threats become real – at which point, it’s too late.”

Whether it was a corporate or political decision to hamper Ukraine’s defence ability is a moot point. The event revealed that not being able to ensure sovereignty over your communication needs is a real matter of national security.

There are reports that Ukraine has approached Nokia and ICEYE to study how a new national communication infrastructure can be developed to replace their over reliance in Starlink's services. But developing an entirely new satellite-based fast Internet infrastructure takes a significant larger effort than replacing software.

If there has ever been a wake-up call for digital sovereignty, it has been this last one. It is clear that governments and private companies cannot rely only on the cheap resources provided by clouds subject to foreign countries’ rules. Free and Open-Source is the way to go when we are talking about software. Hardware requires planning and investment. The push towards AI brings even more complexity to the discussion: with the current technology, will it even make sense talking about sovereign AI? How much sovereignty can we expect when we don’t fully control the software or the hardware involved in the development of the new frontier models?

Sovereignty is not an event. It is a journey. And we must take the first steps now.