26-6-2026 –, Plenaire zaal (1B.10) Taal: English
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.
In this talk, I argue that meaningful sovereignty requires developing alternative technological trajectories aligned with European values rather than merely redistributing ownership of technological infrastructure and services. Following the analysis in the Letta Report, Europe must leverage its single-market scale (450 million consumers and substantial public procurement) to sustain alternatives. GSM, UMTS, and GDPR demonstrate that coordinated European requirements can create an alternative global technological trajectory, and the way to achieve this is not through a mission-oriented innovation policy, but rather by focusing on diffusion and the participation of all parts of society in infrastructural development: researchers, government, end-users, and the private sector.
Before presenting this, I show how Russia, through an industrial policy of network sovereignty and import substitution, has sought to isolate itself from global networks through the development and deployment of TSPU, and how China, by leveraging the coordinating powers of government-directed standardisation and public procurement, is creating its own technological trajectory.
This shows that Russia's isolationist approach sacrifices interconnection for control. China's top-down coordination achieves scale but lacks democratic accountability. Europe's challenge is charting a path that achieves autonomy while maintaining openness and embodying European values.
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.