Digital sovereignty and freedom
Digital sovereignty and freedom
When will Norway contribute to digitally sustainable communities, digital sovereignty, and freedom and stop sleepwalking into supporting American big tech and surveillance capitalism?
Op-ed by Emil A. Røyrvik (Department of Sociology and Political Science) and Eric Monteiro (Department of Computer Science and NorwAI). This text is a translation from a Norwegian text, originally published in Klassekampen.
With the revelations brought forward by in particular Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, one would think Norway as a nation would have taken major steps to make the data systems we use more socially, economically, and technologically sustainable and, not least, ensure they contribute to greater freedom and control over our own data.
The tech oligarchs
There is overwhelming documentation of how the large American tech companies contribute to massive surveillance (and sending data to government authorities), to training their own AI models, to the war industry and genocide in Gaza, to enormous concentration of wealth and power, to control over so called “free markets” (they have received huge fines from the EU), and to the homogenization of the digital society. We saw the leaders of these companies line up like a royal court around Trump during his inauguration. The symbolism was obvious. But little to nothing has happened in Norway.
However, with the major rearmament, security, and preparedness awakening now sweeping our country, something can and should happen. In fact, it is already happening in several of our neighboring countries, including Germany and Denmark. Germany is creating its own cloud service based on the collaboration platform Nextcloud, which is open source and not American big tech.
Germany to phase out Microsoft
The northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein has begun phasing out Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office on 30,000 computers in local government offices. They are switching to open source and free programs, including what is considered the world’s best operating system, Linux, and the office suite LibreOffice.
The reasoning is that these systems are independent, sustainable, and secure. The state aims to become a digital pioneer and the first German region to implement a digitally sovereign IT workplace in public administration. This is the first phase in a process toward complete digital sovereignty. They state that the government has no way to control how citizens’ data is used as long as they rely on closed, proprietary systems like Microsoft. [1]
They also plan to become completely independent of Microsoft by replacing SharePoint and Exchange/Outlook with open source products such as Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird, and Univention AD-Connector [2]. The engine behind big tech’s customer lock in is not individual tools alone: Office suites (like Word), cloud solutions (like Azure), email and calendar servers (like Exchange), web technology (like .NET), or generative AI (like Copilot). It is the way these collectively reinforce each other (what economists call “network externalities”), which over time creates monopoly tendencies.
Denmark follows suit
Denmark has also recently announced that its national digitalization strategy is based on digital sovereignty and that it has begun phasing out Microsoft [3]. Here too, there is a transition to Linux and LibreOffice. The reasoning is sovereignty over technology and data, and the Minister for Digitalization states that Denmark cannot make itself so dependent on so few suppliers that it cannot act freely: “… far too much public digital infrastructure today is tied to very few foreign suppliers. That makes us vulnerable. Also economically. An important track when we work to increase our digital sovereignty is therefore also to provide better frameworks and space for more Danish and European tech companies to grow and for the public sector to achieve real self-determination when it comes to choosing digital solutions.” [4]. This applies to the entire public sector and is an agreement between the state, regions, and municipalities.
With this move, funds currently spent on expensive licenses for tech companies can be freed up to stimulate new and support existing technology environments that develop better, more sustainable, and secure systems based on open source giving users much greater insight, freedom, and control.
What about Norway?
Is enough happening in Norway? It doesn’t seem so. When will Norway truly join in and invest in digital sovereignty and techno-political self determination and freedom? The hegemony of American big tech companies is a fundamental democratic problem in so many areas, and Norway will likely end up scrambling to strengthen democracy through digital sovereignty and self determination in a decade or so. Today, Norwegian municipalities, our schools, nursing homes, and bus services as well as administrative bodies at both regional and national levels, are at the mercy of these techno oligarchs and must sign countless terms they neither fully understand nor can control or escape. In a situation where the Norwegian public sector is under strong pressure to meet new, demanding needs, its ability to deliver agile digital solutions is severely hampered by being “locked in” to big tech platforms and tools. The ongoing race to exploit AI’s obvious potential to improve public administration is equally dependent on non-democratic, opaque big tech companies with, at best, underdeveloped ethical instincts.
But couldn’t it be, especially since Norway is one of the world’s most digitized countries with high technical and other competencies, that Norway takes the lead in this important matter? Norway should lead the way in transitioning to better, safer, and more democratic, ethical, and sustainable software and show others that this is entirely possible. In Denmark, this is already a national strategy.
2025-12-16
References
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-state-moving-30000-pcs-to-libreoffice/
[2] https://nordictimes.com/tech/german-state-abandons-microsoft-for-open-software/
[4] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7338124713430331393/?ref=news.itsfoss.com