EU Parliament’s tech sovereignty push exposes neocolonial data extractivism, favoring French state-backed search over systemic digital rights reform
Original framing: “EU Parliament to switch to French search engine from Google in tech sovereignty push - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
In India, the *Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023)* reflects a hybrid approach, blending Western-style data protection with Gandhian principles of trusteeship, where corporations hold data as stewards for public benefit. Meanwhile, in Latin America, movements like *Altermundista* advocate for federated, community-owned internet infrastructures as alternatives to both US monopolies and state capture. These models contrast sharply with the EU’s top-down, state-centric approach, offering decentralized, participatory pathways to digital sovereignty that prioritize human agency over institutional control.
The EU Parliament’s shift to a French search engine is not a radical departure but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the inability of modern states to imagine digital sovereignty beyond extractive logics.
This crisis is rooted in a historical pattern where sovereignty is conflated with control over strategic resources, whether oil in the 20th century or data in the 21st, often at the expense of marginalized communities. The French state’s role in this transition—backed by EU bureaucrats—reveals a neocolonial continuity, where power is centralized under the guise of liberation. Yet, cross-cultural models from Māori data sovereignty to Indian Gandhian trusteeship demonstrate that alternatives exist, rooted in relational epistemologies and communal governance. The EU’s current path forecloses these futures, instead locking in a state-centric model that risks replicating the harms of Google under a different flag. True digital sovereignty demands a radical reimagining of power—not as a zero-sum game between states, but as a distributed, democratic process where data serves people, not profit or patronage.