From disruptive innovation to infrastructure.

On April 21, the European Parliament’s ITRE committee published its rapporteur’s draft report on the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF) proposal. This represents an early but significant moment in the negotiations around the next Multiannual Financial Framework. The proposed ECF will be one of the flagship instruments of the EU’s next multi-year budget — a mechanism that translates political priorities into meaningful budgetary commitments.

Digital sovereignty remains high on the political agenda. In our initial analysis of the Commission’s draft, we argued that how the EU directs technology spending in this period will have lasting consequences for achieving meaningful digital sovereignty: going beyond a “made in Europe” label, toward meaningful self-determination for people and institutions over the digital systems that depend on.

With a more explicit focus on digital infrastructure, the Parliament Committee’s draft report signals some welcome changes to the Commission’s proposal. But the final version of the ECF can go further in connecting its commitments to digital sovereignty with the open infrastructure that can make such commitments operational and durable.

From innovation to infrastructure

The EU’s approach to funding research and innovation has long been criticised by us for focusing largely on disruptive and frontier technologies, with insufficient attention to the infrastructure layer. This layer consists of shared systems that people and institutions depend on, and that underpin the very innovation the EU funds. It has also lacked a clear pathway for translating promising projects into durable public infrastructure. As we argue in our policy brief on the EU’s research and innovation funding framework, closing these gaps is a precondition for meaningful digital sovereignty.

An instrument like the ECF represents a positive step in this sense, adopting a more strategic and values-driven approach to funding technologies. Unlike previous funding instruments, it is not solely focused on research and early-stage innovation, but explicitly aims to scale technologies into real-world deployment.

The ITRE Committee’s draft report takes this further, with a much clearer focus on infrastructure across its proposed amendments. Most visibly, it proposes renaming the relevant funding window from “Digital Leadership” to “Digital Infrastructure and Agile Leadership” — a signal, at the highest level of the text, that infrastructure should be a first-order priority.

The Commission’s proposal also signalled the importance of closer coordination between Horizon Europe, the instrument for funding research and early-stage innovation, and the ECF. The Parliament’s current draft proposes a more concrete framework for institutionalising this coordination in the form of Horizon Europe Pathway Actions. These programmes will have the explicit purpose of translating Horizon project results into real-world uses — including the establishment or upgrading of technology infrastructures.

Programs like Next Generation Internet already fund grassroots open source and Digital Commons innovation, such as the federated platforms and open protocols that form the emerging alternative to closed social media platforms. What has been missing is a mechanism for supporting these projects through the transition phases that allow them to be incorporated into public infrastructure — particularly where there remains reliance on proprietary technologies that create institutional dependence, or undermine public interest and may be subject to expansive surveillance regimes or geopolitically motivated disruption.

Taken together, these changes bring us closer to a strategic framework capable of enabling meaningful, scalable alternatives to the dominant proprietary technology paradigm.

Infrastructure as the basis for sovereignty

A clearer focus on infrastructure is welcome, and it opens the door to a more expansive understanding of digital sovereignty. While the ECF proposal references technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy as priorities, it needs to go further and explicitly foreground an understanding of sovereignty that goes beyond simply having technologies made in Europe. Genuine sovereignty entails the capacity for independent and self determined use and design of digital technologies by states, organizations and individuals. In practical terms, users must retain the capacity to change providers, adapt systems, and exercise real control over their digital environments. That capacity depends on open source code, open standards, and open protocols.

Open and resilient infrastructure is also not just a precondition for competitiveness and sovereignty, it is the sociotechnical foundation that shapes how the rights in the Treaty on the European Union and the Charter of Fundamental Rights —which the ECF itself invokes — can be exercised. Public funding should flow toward infrastructure and ecosystems that are structurally aligned with those rights, and not toward those that undermine them.

This entails assuring that infrastructures that people and institutions depend on, remain free from capture, are provisioned sustainably, and not through models that undermine public interest or their public function. The question is most acute in the context of social media, where dominant platforms function as the contemporary public square, while being built on a business model of engagement maximisation that amplifies hate speech and disinformation.

The ECF presents an opportunity to fund alternatives grounded in a different paradigm: open source technologies developed as Digital Commons, governed collectively, and oriented toward public function rather than extraction and enclosure. The communities that sustain open source infrastructure already provision the shared foundations that European institutions and enterprises rely on — but currently without stable public funding, and they remain vulnerable to capture or collapse.

What next?

Open source and Digital Commons should therefore receive explicit recognition in the ECF as a pathway toward meaningful sovereignty, and as the foundation for an ecosystem that offers genuine alternatives to proprietary and closed technologies built on extractive business models. The Digital Commons EDIC demonstrates growing Member State consensus around Digital Commons as a way to address the shared dependence on proprietary technologies. Recognising Digital Commons explicitly in the ECF, which already identifies EDICs as a key institutional mechanism, would enable further aligningment and coordination across instruments. The rapporteur’s draft will now go through further committee deliberation, a committee vote, and ultimately a plenary vote that will constitute Parliament’s formal position. As that process unfolds, and as the broader MFF package moves toward interinstitutional negotiations, there is therefore room to go further on two fronts.

First, the focus on infrastructure should be maintained — but interpreted broadly enough to encompass the rights-bearing and democratic functions of infrastructure, not only its economic efficiency.

Second, the ECF’s understanding of technological sovereignty should be made explicit in its connection to resilient, open infrastructure: recognising open source and Digital Commons as the foundation for shared European infrastructure that is resilient, accountable, and free from capture.

The rapporteur’s amendments point to important changes in the Commission’s proposal for the ECF. But the final iteration needs to close the gap between European funding for research and innovation, digital sovereignty as a priority and Digital Commons as the pathway.