Solution Pathways to Regain Digital Sovereignty
Above image is titled “The Future is Open” by Preeti Singh for Creative Commons. The piece is part of The Greats, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Building Counter-Power Against Techno-Authoritarianism
This is the third in a series examining BigTech’s threats to democratic society and exploring pathways forward. [1], [2].
As explored in our previous articles, democratic foundations face unprecedented threats from BigTech’s construction of techno-authoritarian infrastructure. The concentration of digital power in the hands of a few corporations undermines democratic institutions, accelerates climate breakdown, and systematically excludes marginalised communities. Yet this trajectory is not inevitable. Alternative pathways exist—pathways that prioritise human agency, democratic participation, and sustainable development.
Moving from awareness to action requires understanding both the preconditions necessary for digital sovereignty and the concrete steps needed to build counter-power against extractive digital capitalism.
The Foundation: Essential Preconditions
Open Source as a Starting Point
Free and open source software represents a fundamental precondition for transparent digital processes. By enabling community-powered collaboration, avoiding vendor lock-in, and enhancing system security, open source provides the foundation for democratic technology. However, the past two decades have demonstrated that open source alone is insufficient.
Major corporations, including Microsoft, Google, and Meta, have successfully exploited open source benefits whilst maintaining oligopolistic control over users. Microsoft transformed from calling Linux “a cancer” to becoming a major publisher of open source software. Google built its surveillance-advertising empire on modified Linux systems. Meta leverages open source extensively whilst operating closed, extractive platforms.
The lesson is clear: whilst open source remains essential, it must be combined with other elements to achieve meaningful digital sovereignty.
Open Standards and Protocols
Open standards for document formats and interoperability protocols have featured prominently in policy discussions across Europe and beyond. Yet implementation has revealed significant challenges. Lobby pressure has corrupted even international standards organisations, allowing corporations to have proprietary formats officially recognised as “open standards.”
More troubling is the “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” strategy, originally developed by Microsoft and now widely adopted. Google exemplified this approach with its Messaging service: initially embracing open standards to gain interoperability, then extending their implementation with proprietary features, and finally extinguishing compatibility to lock users into their ecosystem.
Open standards remain necessary but require vigilant protection and enforcement to prevent corporate capture.
Decentralised Architecture
Software architecture fundamentally shapes power distribution. Centralised services like Google and Facebook, despite using open source technologies, face no obligation to share their modifications due to their closed, centralised nature. Each platform operates as a walled garden: Instagram, YouTube, and X all provide messaging functionality, yet none interoperate, each locking users into separate data silos.
Decentralisation was the guiding principle of the early internet, designed to avoid single points of failure and communication breakdown. Email remains one of the internet’s most successful applications precisely because it maintains decentralised architecture. Anyone can establish an email server using open protocols and exchange messages across the entire network.
Decentralised networks distribute power, eliminate single points of failure, enhance security and resilience, and provide greater freedom for participation and innovation.
Beyond Technical Solutions: Systemic Change
Regenerative Business Models
Technical solutions alone cannot address the systemic issues created by surveillance capitalism. Google pioneered behavioural profiling to sell predicted consumer behaviour to advertisers, becoming the world’s largest advertising platform. Meta followed with intensive data mining to capture the second-largest advertising market. Amazon evolved into a marketplace that increasingly controls commodity production and pricing whilst extracting substantial fees from sellers.
These extractive practices appropriate behavioural data from legitimate owners, abuse platform power, and profit from influencing people against their interests. Rather than merely regulating these practices, we must develop alternative business models that regenerate commons and build collective capacity.
Platform cooperatives, cooperative clouds, and data commons represent emerging models that place ownership and governance with users and producers rather than extractive corporations. The Free Knowledge Institute’s Five Pillar Framework provides a methodology for analysing existing ventures and designing new ones based on community-centred missions, shared knowledge, co-production models, regenerative revenue strategies, and co-governance structures.
The Limits of Regulation
Democratic societies depend on shared rules and regulations. The European Union leads globally in protecting citizens and companies through comprehensive legislation addressing digital rights and platform accountability. This regulatory work, supported by networks of civil society organisations, politicians, and civil servants, remains essential for democratic defence.
However, regulation alone proves insufficient. Multimillion-euro fines imposed after years of investigation represent mere business costs for corporations whose power concentration continues unchecked. BigTech routinely violates existing regulations with impunity, treating sanctions as operational expenses rather than meaningful constraints.
Effective regulation requires both stronger enforcement and complementary strategies. Public procurement policies offer particular opportunities to encourage public digital infrastructure by setting conditions that favour smaller, locally-focused, democratically-organised alternatives.
Building Counter-Power
The most critical challenge involves building sufficient counter-power to make regulation effective. Currently, democracies remain almost completely locked into BigTech ecosystems, with citizens, businesses, institutions, and governments dependent on platforms controlled by a handful of tech moguls and their autocratic political allies.
Democratic technology represents the antithesis of techno-authoritarianism. Rather than serving corporate interests, democratic tech truly serves its intended users. Rather than exploiting users for profit, it enables meaningful participation in its development and governance. Rather than operating as black boxes, it maintains transparency and accountability.
Public digital infrastructure¹ embodies this vision: democratic digital environments where citizens collaborate closely with public institutions and communities co-govern the technologies they use. This infrastructure operates according to public interest rather than private profit, ensuring that technological development serves collective wellbeing rather than extractive accumulation.
The Path Forward
Building digital sovereignty requires coordinated action across multiple fronts. Open source software, open standards, and decentralised architecture provide necessary technical foundations. Regenerative business models and platform cooperatives offer economic alternatives to surveillance capitalism. Strong regulation and public procurement policies create supportive institutional frameworks.
Yet the decisive factor remains building sufficient counter-power through democratic technology that serves people rather than corporations. This means creating alternatives that people actually want to use—platforms that provide genuine value whilst respecting privacy, autonomy, and democratic participation.
The urgency cannot be overstated. As techno-authoritarian infrastructure consolidates, the window for effective resistance narrows. However, the foundations for alternatives already exist through decades of commons-based collaboration, open source tech and cooperative development, and democratic innovation.
The question is not whether alternatives are possible—it is whether we will mobilise sufficient resources and coordination to build them at the scale and speed necessary to counter BigTech’s assault on democracy.
In our next articles, we will explore concrete examples of democratic technology and examine how communities, institutions, and movements can collaborate to make these alternatives widespread and effective.
The Free Knowledge Institute works to accelerate the growth of digital commons, cooperative clouds, community networks, platform cooperatives, data commons, community AI, and civic technology. Learn more at freeknowledge.eu
References
¹ Towards Public Digital Infrastructure, NESTA Report (2022): https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/TowardsPublicDigitalInfrastructure_v0.2.pdf