Our open access article “Enabling the EU’s digital sovereignty: A Europe-level quantum internet as the key infrastructure for a European digital polity” is out in the Journal of Telecommunications Policy.

This publication is the outcome of 1.5 year of work together with Anastasija Nikiforova (University of Tartu) and Martino Travagnin (colleague at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission – Ispra).

The article intersects open data ecosystems, digital sovereignty, and quantum networks from within a geopolitical framework which situates the EU’s digital strategy in the context of today’s multipolar global scenario.

The key question we ask is: Given currently asymmetric data sharing frameworks between the EU and other geopolitical actors, such as the US and China (not to speak of private actors), how can the EU keep enacting internal (open) data sharing, while also preserving its outward digital sovereignty?

The answer we provide is the consolidation of a Europe-level quantum internet, as the continent-wide infrastructure establishing the boundaries of a fully-formed European data polity, key to proper digital sovereignty.

In this respect, we also identify current sociotechnical and governance challenges to this idea and avenues for further research which can help constitute a Europe-level quantum internet as a stack in its own right. Notably, establishing a European quantum internet requires coordinated efforts across sectors and among different stakeholders as well as supra-national governance by default.

Here the abstract

Over the last 20 years, Open Data (OD) regulations and Open Data Ecosystem (ODE) initiatives have enabled the creation of socioeconomic value, proliferating on the precondition of a global digital polity based on the internet as a commons infrastructure. Yet, with the consolidation of an increasingly multipolar geopolitical scenario, revindications of sovereign positions in matters of data sharing and technological innovation have gained traction, leading to geopolitical (and commercial) power asymmetries that need rebalancing, for instance, concerning the European Union’s (EU) High-Value Datasets (HVDs), which are mandatorily open. It is in this regard that in this article, we advance the idea of a Europe-level Quantum Internet (QI), as a strategic infrastructure capable of safeguarding intra-EU open data sharing while supplying leverage for currently missing fairer mechanisms of (open) data sharing vis-à-vis non-EU countries (and actors). In this regard, a Europe-level QI can keep enhancing the EU socioeconomic value creation by/through OD and ODEs, while enabling the consolidation of a European digital polity and its digital sovereignty. To sustain our idea, we explore the strengths and limitations of current quantum networks, which are key in view of a scalable QI, as well as potential QI use cases. We conclude by discussing why and how a Europe-level QI, far from being a tech-only affair, requires an orchestrated multidisciplinary effort and supra-national governance.