Niels ten Oever
Niels is an Assistant Professor in the Department of European Studies and Co-Principal Investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. His research examines communication infrastructures through the lenses of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and International Political Economy (IPE), tracing their evolution from the telegraph to the internet, contemporary submarine cables, 5G, and satellite networks. Additionally, Niels coordinates the Tech, Power, and Policy theme group at the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies and serves as a visiting professor at the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro.
Niels’ research examines how norms, values, and ideologies are inscribed, resisted, and subverted within communication infrastructures, and how these systems influence the transnational distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities. His most recent work focuses on the infrastructural ideologies of industrial policies for the production and standardisation of the internet in China, Russia, and the European Union.
Niels is co-founder and former chair of both the Human Rights Protocol Considerations (hrpc) Research Group and the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes (rasp) Research Group in the Internet Research Taskforce (IRTF), and a veteran of the Internet Research Steering group (IRSG). He served as Vice-Chair for the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (giga-net) and as the final editor of the Tao of the IETF. During his PhD, he was affiliated with the DATACTIVE Research Group at the University of Amsterdam. After that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University and a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance’ project at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. For his research, Niels has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, the Internet Society Foundation, the Omidyar Foundation, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the MacArthur Foundation, the Amsterdam Municipality, and the University of Amsterdam.
Before Niels returned to academia, he worked as Head of Digital for ARTICLE19 where he set up the digital programme which mainstreamed human rights in the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). He co-authored the book How the Internet Really Works, which has now been translated into French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Korean. Before all this, Niels designed and implemented freedom of expression projects with Free Press Unlimited, mainly in the Horn of Africa. At the beginning of his career, he helped establish the first community radio stations of Ethiopia. He holds a cum laude research MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam.
Session
European digital sovereignty initiatives focus on reducing dependence on US companies by creating European alternatives and through data localisation. This approach overlooks a fundamental problem: network externalities create continued US dominance even under European ownership. In this talk, I compare Russia's isolationist network sovereignty, China's government-directed standardization, and argue for a distinctly European approach. This approach is rooted in developing an alternative technological trajectory by designing open architectures that distribute power and embed European values: democratic governance, environmental sustainability, privacy, and social inclusion.