A Strategic Agenda for Digital Commons and Public Digital Infrastructure
Building on our work in the NGI Commons project, we’re launching the Strategic Agenda for Digital Commons and Public Digital Infrastructure—a proposal to embed these models into the EU’s long-term budget and digital transformation strategy.
With the next Multiannual Financial Framework (2028–2034) on the horizon, the European Union has a critical opportunity to reshape its digital future to reduce strategic dependencies and put public interest at the center of technological development.
This Strategic Agenda is aimed at EU institutions and member states involved in shaping investment priorities and governance models for the Union’s digital infrastructure. It outlines a roadmap for shifting how the EU designs, funds, and sustains digital infrastructure, treating digital commons as a strategic foundation for digital sovereignty.
Digital commons—digital resources defined by distributed and communal production, ownership, and governance—already underpin critical layers of our digital infrastructure. From open-source operating systems like Linux to collaborative platforms like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, they offer alternative models to state-controlled and corporate-dominated models that can scale effectively while serving the public interest. These models enable transparency, democratic participation, and collective stewardship—principles that must guide the EU’s approach.
In particular, the Strategic Agenda draws from our mapping of the last two decades of digital commons related policies in the EU, as well as our analysis exploring how digital commons can provision digital infrastructure that maximizes public value.
Towards True Sovereignty
The Agenda is based on an understanding of sovereignty that goes beyond geopolitical autonomy and state control. Digital sovereignty also means ensuring that individuals and communities have meaningful control over the technologies that shape their lives. True digital sovereignty must be grounded in the EU’s foundational values: respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and human rights.
This view of sovereignty extends beyond control over technical infrastructures and is rooted in maintaining the integrity of digital public space. Today’s dominant communication platforms—where much of democratic discourse now takes place—are controlled by private corporations with limited transparency or public accountability. The EU must invest in and maintain publicly governed communication infrastructures, covering protocols, algorithms, and platforms, that foster democratic discourse, civic participation, and equitable knowledge sharing. Protecting the integrity of these spaces is a core issue of sovereignty.
Further, while sovereignty emphasizes independence, the open internet remains a shared, global infrastructure. Many democratic governments worldwide face similar challenges from dependencies on foreign and proprietary infrastructures. Open source ecosystems and digital commons offer critical foundations for coordinating investment and mutualizing benefits across borders. This creates opportunities for the EU and member states to foster meaningful alliances and collaborative responses to shared challenges.
Policy Shifts and Policy Interventions
This agenda identifies two fundamental policy shifts to correct the course of the EU’s digital transformation. These strategic adjustments will strengthen the resilience, democratic character, and sovereignty of Europe’s digital ecosystem.
First is recognizing digital commons as legitimate providers of public digital infrastructure that deserve long-term public investment, policy support, and institutional integration.
Second is moving beyond purely market-correcting approaches to actively advance public value alongside innovation and competitiveness, acknowledging that corporate models often fail to deliver long-term societal benefits.
Building on these shifts, the strategy outlines five policy interventions:
- Aligning EU funding instruments with the realities of digital commons by supporting full project lifecycles, not just early-stage development. This includes establishing long-term funding for critical open source projects and creating European Data Commons governed as public goods.
- Reducing dependence on oligopolistic hyperscalers by developing open, interoperable cloud infrastructure designed to prevent vendor lock-in and support commons-based solutions.
- Leveraging the EU’s public procurement power to prioritize open and interoperable alternatives, focusing on long-term digital resilience over short-term cost efficiency.
- Continued investment in decentralized, transparent platforms for public discourse, i.e. digital public spaces, that resist corporate capture and foster algorithmic pluralism, drawing on both digital commons and public service broadcasting models.
- Using the Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC) as a governance and coordination mechanism to provide the institutional continuity necessary to scale promising experiments into durable, operational systems.
A Time for Action
Growing geopolitical instability and the increasingly strategic role of digital infrastructure make the upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework a pivotal moment. The EU’s current budget proposal highlights the continued emphasis on industrial competitiveness and frontier technologies, but with insufficient attention to public digital infrastructure and the role of digital commons. The recent trade deal between the EU and the US demonstrates how the EU’s strategic vulnerabilities can be weaponized through coercive bargaining. Without decisive action to build democratic, rights-aligned digital infrastructures, the EU risks perpetuating the very dependencies it seeks to overcome.
Success requires more than new investments. It demands bold political choices and concrete financial commitments that align the EU’s digital transformation with democratic values.
This Strategic Agenda serves as a draft for expert consultation and stakeholder validation. Over the coming months, we hope to engage policymakers, civil society organizations, and digital commons practitioners to refine and strengthen our approach.
The text of this document is based on a report submitted to the European Commission as a deliverable of the NGI Commons project. This preliminary version is published as a contribution to ongoing discussions. The official deliverable will be made available on the NGI Commons website once it has been formally accepted.
NGI Commons (Open Source and Internet Commons for Europe’s Digital Sovereignty) project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement number 101135279. This work has received funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation (SERI). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
