Faced with French and European dependency on major foreign platforms, the Conseil de l'intelligence artificielle et du numérique advocates for a new method: organizing coalitions between public actors, private companies, and digital commons ecosystems. The report notably proposes the creation of a "Digital Commons Factory" and a strengthened role for the future Ariane authority.
Digital sovereignty can no longer be thought of as a simple national preference or as opposition between public solutions and private actors. This is essentially the message conveyed by the Conseil de l'intelligence artificielle et du numérique in a note dedicated to the "urgency of organizing cooperation between the public, private, and digital commons." The report starts from a now widely shared observation: France and Europe remain heavily dependent on a small number of foreign actors for digital infrastructures and services that have become essential, with economic, security, political, and governance risks.
The subject goes beyond the circle of experts alone. According to CIANum, digital sovereignty was among the priorities expressed by a majority of the 6,000 respondents to its citizen consultation conducted at the beginning of the year. This concern is now found in both administrations and companies, as issues related to cloud, data, artificial intelligence, critical software, and technological dependencies take on an increasingly strategic dimension.
A response through coalitions rather than scattered competition
The report was developed from a working group supported by six qualified individuals, including Guillaume Poupard, co-president of CIANum and Chief Trust Officer at Orange, Sébastien Soriano, Director General of IGN, and Aymeril Hoang, Director of EuroCommons within the Caisse des Dépôts group. About thirty stakeholders were interviewed, from the public sector, private sector, research, free software, open source, digital commons, and professional federations.
The central proposal is to break away from a silo logic. For CIANum, French and European strategic autonomy requires federating actors around common projects, rather than allowing fragmented, sometimes competing initiatives that are often insufficiently sustainable. The report thus emphasizes the need to build public-private-commons coalitions capable of reaching a critical mass, in a context where technical complexity and investment needs make isolated responses unrealistic.
This approach gives particular importance to digital commons, open lower layers, and interoperable standards. The goal is not only to produce sovereign alternatives but to make them sustainable, adoptable, and governable over time.
A "Digital Commons Factory" to identify critical dependencies
To structure this strategy, CIANum proposes the creation of a "Digital Commons Factory." Its mission would be to identify priority components through a dynamic mapping of dependencies, to federate public, private actors, and commons communities, and then to lead the development and sustainability of co-constructed open components.
The idea addresses a recurring weakness of European digital policies: the existence of numerous initiatives, but without always clear prioritization, stable financing, or sufficiently clear governance. By mapping dependencies, the Factory would aim to concentrate resources on truly strategic components: infrastructures, software, protocols, standards, or technical components essential to the functioning of critical public and economic services.
The report also emphasizes the role of public power. It should not only animate the coalitions and ensure the sustainability of projects but also use public procurement as an acceleration lever. In other words, the State and local authorities should not only finance or encourage sovereign alternatives: they should become the first users when these meet identified needs.
Ariane called to play a steering role
CIANum places its recommendations in the context of the creation of Ariane, the future authority for digital and artificial intelligence. The report suggests that a dedicated fund, led by Ariane, could support strategic projects. It also calls for mobilizing legal vehicles adapted to the governance of commons, especially when projects involve both public actors, private companies, and open communities.
This legal dimension is central. Digital commons often suffer from a paradox: they can constitute essential infrastructures but rely on fragile economic and organizational models. Funding them punctually is not enough. The report therefore advocates for frameworks that allow stabilizing their governance, clarifying responsibilities, and ensuring their maintenance over time.
The systematic adoption of open standards is also among the recommendations, to avoid fragmentation and ensure interoperability. This is a decisive point: without common standards, sovereign initiatives risk creating new silos, where the goal is precisely to reduce dependencies and facilitate cooperation.
A necessarily European sovereignty
Finally, CIANum reminds us that digital sovereignty cannot be built within a strictly national framework. The market size, investment needs, and cross-border nature of digital infrastructures require a European approach. The report recommends relying on EDIC Digital Commons, whose mandate could be strengthened to become a European pivot of digital commons.
Three missions are proposed: mapping existing projects to avoid redundancies, financing already proven strategic commons, and animating the community to ensure effective coordination and balanced governance. This logic aims to avoid the scattering of European efforts, often criticized in digital and industrial policies.
A cultural shift rather than just a technical program
CIANum's note has the merit of shifting the debate. It does not reduce digital sovereignty to the creation of national or European "champions," nor to the mere substitution of foreign suppliers with local ones. It emphasizes collective infrastructures, invisible dependencies, standards, governance, and the ability to maintain critical digital components over time.
The challenge will now be operational. Mapping dependencies, choosing priority components, mobilizing financing, making actors with sometimes divergent interests cooperate, and above all transforming public procurement into a true lever of adoption: each of these points constitutes a complex project. But the report raises a question that has become central for digital Europe: how to organize cooperation before dependencies become irreversible?