Much has been written about Europe’s push for a more “sovereign” technological infrastructure, one unshackled from Big Tech’s iron grip.
As Jack Wang wrote for Resilience Media back in May, Europe’s emerging sovereign cloud ecosystem is no longer just rhetoric. With institutional backing and rising investor interest, it is starting to reshape the region’s technology landscape.
“What was once primarily a regulatory concern has developed into a strategic priority with substantial implications for the investment community,” Wang noted.
On the one hand, this opens the door for new and incumbent open source startups to flourish via a promise of transparency and self-hostable software. But it also underscores the importance of being able to quantify sovereignty itself. How can we move beyond rhetoric and gut-feel, and apply hard numbers to a country’s technological autonomy?
This is something the folks at open source startup Nextcloud are addressing with the Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI), a new scorecard designed to measure and compare nations’ technological independence.
“Sovereignty” in the context of technology can be defined in different ways. It might encompass control over hardware supply chains, access to rare earth minerals, or plans for a multi-orbit satellite constellation to rival Starlink. The DSI, however, narrows this focus to the visibility of self-hosted collaboration tools, most of which are open source.
“The Digital Sovereignty Index aims to provide a comparative snapshot of visible, self-hosted infrastructure across borders,” Jos Poortvliet, Nextcloud co-founder and director of communications, told Resilience Media. “It doesn’t measure intent or regulation – it shows which tools are actually in use.”
While the act of self-hosting anything (e.g. databases or web servers) can signal digital independence, the DSI’s specific lens on communication and collaboration tools — areas where Big Tech dominate — highlights a conscious choice to replace proprietary platforms with locally controlled alternatives.
Hence, the DSI could be seen as a proxy for societal sentiment toward digital sovereignty, showing where Big Tech alternatives are gaining ground.
Europe vs. the world
Announced in early August, the DSI ranks countries on their adoption of around 50 different self-hosted tools, such as Taiga in project management; Seafile in file-sharing; Jitsi Meet in video-conferencing; and (as you might expect) Nextcloud itself, an open source productivity and collaboration platform available in both self-hosted and managed cloud offerings.
The DSI draws on data from Shodan, a search engine for internet-connected devices such as servers, and assigns each nation a score reflecting the density of self-hosted tools per 100,000 people. Those figures are then normalised against the highest and lowest adopters to produce a comparable index from 0 to 100.
So, what do the results tell us? Well, Europe scores high overall, constituting the entirety of the top 12 positions, and 17 of the top 20. The average score across the European Union (EU) is just 16.3, though there are wide national variations.
Finland leads by far with 64.5, followed by Germany at nearly 54 and the Netherlands at 36. Outside the bloc, Canada and the US sit just behind in 13th and 14th place with scores of 14.94 and 14.88 respectively, while the UK trails in 21st with 9.21.
In some ways, the DSI complements other existing indices such as the European Sovereignty Index, launched back in 2022 by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a pan-European foreign policy think tank. However, while the ECFR’s incarnation focuses on a broad gamut of policy domains such as climate, defence, and health, the DSI is tightly focused on the technological layer — measuring how far countries have moved toward digital self-reliance.
Moreover, the DSI relies on a more quantitative approach, designed to minimise subjective input.
“We kept things relatively simple, and put in as little judgement as possible,” Poortvliet said. “I would say, in a way, both are complementary.”
Blind spots
Like any such ranking, the DSI isn’t without its shortcomings. For starters, it only measures servers that are visible on the open internet, which means anything hidden behind proxies or private networks goes uncounted. Additionally, the set of tools it tracks, though broad, is not comprehensive.
It’s also worth noting that “location is not ownership,” as Poortvliet puts it, highlighting one of the index’s key constraints: the physical location of a server doesn’t necessarily reflect who owns or controls it.
“A server’s IP may be in one country, while its users or data reside elsewhere,” he said. “If a country outsources hosting, its index score may fall, while a country that hosts data from other countries sees its index rise – regardless of control or access.”
The score can be misleading in other ways, too. Counting servers tells us about their presence, not how many people use them or how critical they are — there’s a world of difference between a hobbyist’s home server and the backbone infrastructure of a national health system. This distinction matters at a time when more public sector institutions across Europe are striving to reduce their dependence on software from the likes of Microsoft and Google.
“The index says more about the choices of individuals and small companies than what governments or large corporations do,” Poortvliet said. “For example, the research shows high awareness in Germany and The Netherlands. Yet, we know from other studies that the public sector in both countries is still largely dependent on Big Tech. It is an interesting discrepancy that government organizations are deeply dependent on Big Tech providers, while the people and small companies actually show they care about digital sovereignty.”
Could there be a way to adapt the index in the future to account for server capacity or user base, so it measures actual adoption rather than deployment count?
“Unfortunately not,” Poortvliet continued. “While we could possibly update our approach to get a little more info on each server, information on user numbers is almost certainly out of reach. The DSI is not an absolute measurement of sovereignty, but it offers a strong indication of the choices a society makes about their data.”
The current version of the DSI covers some 50 countries, with the inaugural dataset captured on July 28, 2025 from more than 7 million servers. Poortvliet said that Nextcloud intends to update the index “regularly,” which should mean at least every six months.
“We see the DSI as a starting point,” he said. “We are receiving great feedback and suggestions on the DSI, which will help us to improve the index. We plan to research and publish an updated version. With each iteration, it can become more robust – and more useful for policymakers, researchers and the open source community.”
