Time to build

The geopolitical landscape around digital platforms has shifted dramatically. The Trump administration banned former EU commissioner Thierry Breton from the US for enforcing content moderation rules, while the State Department actively opposes European data sovereignty laws. US cloud providers control 85% of the European market, creating infrastructure dependencies that now carry significant political risk. European countries are responding by seeking alternatives. Denmark is piloting open source classroom technology, French public media is evaluating independent hosting, and governments across Europe are actively searching for sovereign digital infrastructure. The discomfort with platform dependency is no longer abstract or fringe. Europe largely gave up building consumer social and media platforms after companies like Spotify and SoundCloud emerged over a decade ago. But European platforms built natively within EU digital governance frameworks now have a structural competitive advantage. The opportunity is to build the best independent publishing platform in the world with global ambition but a European foundation, designed for the regulatory environment rather than fighting against it. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@paul/post/time-to-build