Digital rights organizers warn UK is too reliant on big tech, urge digital sovereignty

The UK is overly reliant on a small number of American tech giants, according to digital rights campaigners, but open source software could pave the way to digital sovereignty.

In a new report, the Open Rights Group (ORG) has called for a "strategic shift" to open technologies to boost spending on UK tech companies, prevent inflated costs from vendor lock-in, and avoid security and surveillance risks. The findings come amid a rise in support for digital sovereignty, with sovereign cloud spending in Europe set to triple from 2025 to 2027, according to Gartner.

"For years, a handful of Big Tech companies have used their power to gain control of the UK’s digital infrastructure, locking the government into wasteful contracts and shaping tech policy in their favour," said Jim Killock, the executive director of Open Rights Group.

"This overreliance on foreign tech companies is now an urgent national security issue as well as an economic threat."

The report points to the debate over the Scottish police shifting data storage to Microsoft's cloud in a way that could see crime data held overseas, to investigations by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) into Microsoft and AWS.

Both firms recently announced voluntary changes to practices such as egress fees, customer provider changes, and interoperability following CMA activity.

The ORG’s report also considers the UK's recent deals with controversial tech giant Palantir, as well as an Oracle project in Birmingham that leapt from £19m to £170m, and more.

Authors argued that there's a contradiction in government plans to invest in British AI while spending so much on American hyperscalers, adding that now is the time to avoid vendor lock-in with AI, before it's too late.

Open source alternative

There are alternatives to US tech giants, with the paper pointing to European efforts including France's Mistral AI and Germany's Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDis). Alongside those, there's also the pan-European Gaia-X Cloud, and France is shifting its public services to home-grown alternatives to Zoom and Microsoft Teams via its Suite Numérique project.

Unlike those efforts, the UK lacks a "coherent" digital sovereignty strategy, with existing policies serving to reinforce dependency on "foreign tech giants", the ORG said.

"The UK needs to follow the EU’s lead and develop a digital sovereignty strategy that builds and deploys open source software and promotes international collaboration," added Killock. "Public money should be spent on public code that benefits us all, rather than lining the pockets of Big Tech’s shareholders."

Indeed, ORG argues open-source tech could be a boon to the economy – and not just Silicon Valley. It noted that OpenUK data suggests open source contributes £13 billion (£9.59 billion) annually to the UK economy.

"The economic case is overwhelming: open source generates £4 for every £1 invested and has created 2-3% of global GDP," added Liberal Democrat peer Lord Tim Clement-Jones in the report's foreword. "France's open-source preference has driven 9-18% annual growth in tech start-ups."

Building digital sovereignty

ORG called for digital policy in the UK to be "reset" with digital sovereignty becoming a strategic goal, achieving that by adopting a policy of "public code for public money," in which software developed for the public sector is always made available under an open-source license.

ORG called for digital policy in the UK to be "reset" with digital sovereignty becoming a strategic goal, achieving that by adopting a policy of "public code for public money," in which software developed for the public sector is always made available under an open source license.

Beyond that, the report called for stronger regulation, in particular with regards to competition boosting ideas like interoperability and data portability, and said the UK should join international initiatives and collaborate with other countries on AI and cloud computing, to help counter Big Tech dominance.

The report added: "The UK needs to rebuild its inhouse technical expertise to reduce its reliance on external consultants and make smarter procurement decisions."

The call to use open-source to achieve greater digital sovereignty was welcomed by politicians from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

Green MP Sian Berry said the digital sovereignty recommendations should be a "top Government objective", adding: "By investing in open source software and diversity of talent, pioneering British businesses could deliver accessible, user-friendly services designed with the people who use them in mind. It is an open-goal we must not miss."