experiences
On October 27, The Hague Tech spent an entire day exploring the question: what do digital sovereignty and autonomy mean? During the opening session, everyone unanimously agreed on the urgency of the issue. However, on a poster featuring orange stickers and asking “How long will it take for Europe to become digitally independent?”, the answer ‘never’ received far too many stickers. We left with a very different conclusion.
Photo by Isabella Street
Sovereignty doesn’t mean you have to replace everything tomorrow, nor do you need to be an IT expert. It starts with a few simple steps: know what you depend on, understand what you are entitled to expect as a customer and make choices that leave you free to switch to another solution. We attended several sessions throughout the day, where these very steps were at the heart of the discussions.
In the presentation of Sarah van der Landt, “Big Tech is your landlord”, the focus was on a simple question: what are you dependent on and how much control do you have over it? Your audience, content and customer data are often hosted on someone else’s platform. Once you map that out, you can see where you are vulnerable and where it is perfectly fine to keep renting.
Regulations rarely sound like the recipe for an enjoyable afternoon, but La Gro brought the subject to life in a refreshing way with a pub quiz. The questions covered European and Dutch legislation, from the Data Act to recent court cases. Legislation such as the Data Act is giving customers more and more freedom to switch providers. For example, cloud switching charges are being phased out, with 12 January 2027 marking a key turning point. What used to be a wall is increasingly becoming just an obstacle.
Closed commercial services make switching providers expensive. Open standards such as PDF, S3-compatible storage and Kubernetes keep the door open, as do contractual agreements on exit support and the return of your data. We experienced this firsthand during one of the workshops, where we were presented with two scenarios involving companies looking to switch to a different cloud provider. One was completely tied to a proprietary system, while the other had been built on open source foundations from the start. Our task was to develop and present a plan for each company. It quickly became clear that most of the work does not lie in the migration itself, but in the decisions made years earlier.
Alongside the sessions, there was also plenty of room for networking, and we were happy to make the most of it. It was great to catch up with partners such as Ellen Mok from Digitale Doetank and Sarah van der Land, who is also affiliated with SVDJ, among others. Seeing ProcoliX mentioned on one of the slides as a Dutch alternative for hosting and websites was the perfect finishing touch to an already successful day.
So no, we and hopefully many others after EUtechfest are not sticking a ‘never’ sticker on the question. Becoming digitally independent is not a giant leap, but a habit: with every new decision, ask yourself whether you will still be able to walk away from it later. Organisations that start doing this today don't have to wait for Europe to catch up.