Can a sheep field be sanctioned?

The digital sovereignty issue tends to often get framed as a binary choice: American big tech or European big tech.

But there’s a third option that doesn’t get as much press: open source, also known as the digital commons.

The commons are things owned by no one but managed by all the people who use them. It’s an idea that’s much older than computers. Think of shared pastures or fisheries, managed collectively rather than by the state, a landlord, or a company.

There are digital versions of this idea all around you: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Linux, … No single owner, no shareholders, just a community maintaining it all.

And that can be a better guarantee than whatever flag is on the box. A company, be it European or American, usually has an owner. And owners can be bought, leaned on, or sanctioned.

And, when that happens, things can change very suddenly. Ask the ICC judge who lost all his accounts when the Trump government sanctioned him, or the Dutch citizens who very nearly saw the local company that held their data suddenly get sold to a US one.

There’s no switch to flip on a commons, no boardroom to pressure, no chokepoints or pricing to tighten gradually.

So, one question you could ask when evaluating another tool isn’t just “Where is my data?” but “does someone own this, and could they take it away from me?”

Colin