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What does it mean for digital infrastructure to be public? Who are these systems actually built for—and who gets left out? On 26 February 2026, Open Future hosted a webinar to present new research on how India, Brazil, and the European Union are approaching digital public infrastructure (DPI), and to examine the promises they make against the realities of their design.
The event brought together Mila T Samdub, Open Future research fellow and author of the report, and Ramya Chandrasekhar, lawyer and researcher at CNRS and member of the Sustainable Data Commons project. The discussion was introduced and moderated by Zuzanna Warso.
Watch the video recording:
Mila’s presentation drew on a year and a half of research conducted as an Open Future research fellow. In his first report, he traced the evolution of the DPI concept through three phases: an early period of loose usage; a second phase, beginning around 2020, when the acronym became closely identified with the Indian model and promoted through multilateral institutions and transnational philanthropic networks; and a current phase of localization, in which the concept is being adapted across national and regional contexts.
His latest research, presented in more detail during the webinar, identified two sets of key findings. The first concerns the promises DPI systems make. He unpacked the broad framing of “digital sovereignty” into more specific goals: competitiveness and domestic innovation; strategic autonomy; digital and financial inclusion; improved public service delivery; rights protection; and environmental sustainability. The second concerns architectural choices: questions of stack scale, adoption strategies, interoperability, and the risks of marketization—where states socialize risk while profits flow to private actors.
Mila closed with his central takeaway: the question of why DPI is ultimately the question of for whom DPI. These are not technocratic questions. They require genuine public participation at every stage of design and implementation, because the answer to “for whom” can shift dramatically between a pilot proposal and a system operating at scale.
Ramya agreed with Mila that the most important question is not only what DPI is and why it is being built, but, as she put it, who is imagined as the beneficiary of these large-scale state projects, and who gets left out.
Her first reflection was normative. She argued that advocating for DPI requires a clear commitment to publicness across three axes: public attributes, public ownership, and public value, referring to Open Future’s work on digital commons as providers of public digital infrastructure. In practice, that commitment is under pressure. In the current context of state capitalism, states bear the capital costs of infrastructuring while creating conditions for private investment. In India, the model asks citizens to leverage open software and open APIs to participate in the digital economy, while welfare entitlements are simultaneously eroded.
Her second reflection was strategic, focusing on how these contexts navigate dependencies. In Europe, she saw a stronger orientation toward openness—open source, open hardware, and open protocols—as a way to reduce dependence on proprietary systems. India and Brazil, by contrast, tend to leverage dependencies for strategic gains rather than reduce them. The challenge is how to adapt these strategies to the socioeconomic realities of Global South countries.
The discussion turned to the AI Impact Summit held in Delhi shortly before the webinar—the fourth global AI summit and the first hosted by a majority-world nation. Zuza, who recently wrote about the conference, asked our speakers for their thoughts. Mila, who attended, noted two dominant themes: a doubling down on the sovereignty discourse and a focus on use cases and impact. His conclusion was that DPI and AI are converging not on the ground of sovereignty, but on the ground of use cases. A largely unreported development was India’s alignment with the US Pax Silica coalition, effectively trading infrastructure dependencies for policy coordination—a telling signal of where sovereignty rhetoric ends and strategic pragmatism begins.
Ramya added that India’s framing of DPI as essential to responsible AI reflects a broader pattern of “regulation by infrastructure” rather than regulation by law. In Europe, she pointed to the discursive plasticity of digital sovereignty as a structural vulnerability, allowing large tech companies to repackage their offerings as “sovereign” or “federated” cloud solutions without fundamentally reducing public institutions’ dependence on them.
As the webinar approached its end, we covered two questions from participants:
Are there examples of collaboration between India, Brazil, and the EU?
Mila noted that such collaboration exists but is largely routed through US philanthropic capitalism. He questioned whether it rests on any shared values-based foundation or is driven primarily by immediate strategic and economic interests.
Are there historical examples of infrastructures that enabled the flourishing of publics without capturing them?
Ramya pointed to research on water distribution systems in India, drawing on Nikhil Anand’s work on the emergence of a “hydraulic public”—communities that came into being through infrastructure and then used it to develop their own norms of access and accountability. She also cited activism around India’s right to information laws, along with open source and free software communities, as comparable examples of civil society organizing around infrastructure to contest and rewrite the rules governing it.
Download Mila T. Samdub’s report
