Not every cloud makes you sovereign: the Digital Decade targets must measure independence, not just adoption

The Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030, adopted in 2022, sets measurable targets for Europe’s digital transformation in four areas: digital skills, secure and sustainable digital infrastructures, the digitalisation of businesses and the digitalisation of public services. More than €288 billion have been mobilised through national roadmaps with over 1,900 measures. The programme review was due by 30 June 2026; the Commission has announced a further review of the 2030 targets for 2027.

GISAD – Global Institute for Structure relevance, Anonymity and Decentralisation, the standards institute of the Trusted WEB 4.0 concept – welcomes the review and the choice of its four target areas. Yet the 2026 State of the Digital Decade report confirms a structural problem: the programme measures adoption, not sovereignty. The EU misses its targets precisely where sovereignty is at stake – 9 % instead of 20 % of the global semiconductor market, and significant dependence on non-European providers in cloud services, cybersecurity and other strategic technologies.

1. Make the cloud, AI and big data target for businesses measurable by origin

If 75 % of EU companies adopt cloud and AI services that sit with US hyperscalers – CLOUD Act included – the target is met and sovereignty is lost all the same. GISAD recommends supplementing the adoption targets with a target figure for structural independence – for example, the share of critical infrastructures running on systems without US dependence in their core infrastructure. The European Digital System (EU-D-S), with one trustee per discipline, shows that European providers can carry this alternative: every Digital Decade target can be achieved with European technology.

2. Digital skills are a question of participation, not of training

55.6 % instead of 80 % of adults with basic digital skills – this gap is not closed by courses, but by structures that do not demand proficiency in the ways of a profiling economy. getmySense transfers the principle of participation instead of social welfare into the digital world with 2,500 written languages: those who take part in their own language and in clear categories need no algorithm literacy. Participation lowers the barrier – especially for older people, whose exclusion from digital life is a measurable health risk. The skills target remains important, but it must be complemented by a participation target.

3. Bandwidth is not resilience

Gigabit and 5G measure speed, not survivability. The CrowdStrike outage, the Charité incident, the Baltic cable sabotage and the Starshield throttling show: the bottleneck is not throughput, but central dependence. The review should anchor resilience as a target dimension of its own – decentralised networking that keeps functioning when central infrastructures fail. Decentralised digitalisation does not replace a single cable – but it takes the catastrophic effect out of every cable break.

4. Public services WAN-anonymous instead of state-centred

Today, the digitalisation of public administration means central data pools and a digital identity for everything. The EU-D-S shows the third way: citizens use public services WAN-anonymously, with assignment solely via the trust station – powerful administration without an all-round profile. And the review’s aim of strengthening structured channels for regions, cities and local actors finds its model in the EU-D-S: trust stations as points of contact in disputes are local, citizen-facing structures.

A 2030 horizon that only measures the adoption of the existing network will make Europe more digital – but not more sovereign.