Europe needs to step up its efforts to defend openness. Even in the cloud, there is a perpetual risk of lock-in: from the convenient bells and whistles management interface offered by Cloud giants, the scale of their offering, their ease of deployment to their pricing based on subscription or use. In addition, these services come with proprietary mechanisms for storage and transaction, their own message queuing and the seamless connections to their legacy computing platforms.

In Sweden, a government study shows that there is work to be done to make web-based office services (word processing, email and text/video chat) comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the country's rules on long-term archiving and secrecy. It seems likely that open source software and open standards are key to achieve this compliance.

In France, the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, a constitutional consultative assembly, concludes that free software and sharing and reuse are strategic parts of the European digital culture. CESE calls on the EU to place sovereignty at the heart of its digital model.

Only when truly open will ICT infrastructure offer freedom of choice, and can it power free software innovators to compete even with the biggest cloud provider. If we want the whole EU to experience a successful digital transformation, we must make sure everyone can participate.

One more reason for our governments to have policies that support open standards and open source. Their decisions must take the long view, and they must dare to do the right thing. Inconvenient? Perhaps, but well-worth our long-term benefits.