When I built my first website back in 1998, the internet felt expansive. You could publish something in Berlin, and someone in Boston or Belgrade might stumble on it within seconds. But today, as a small number of tech monopolies hoover up attention and strangle innovation, that spirit of connection has been lost.

Through their powerful platforms, social media giants control a large share of the digital world’s underlying architecture. Meta ( which owns Facebook and Instagram ), X and others operate as walled gardens, and their algorithms discourage users from leaving by deprioritizing posts with outgoing links. People end up stuck on one platform, scrolling mindlessly – an outcome diametrically opposed to the early vision of the internet as a web of interlinked sites and communities.

Europe should recognize this for what it is: a systemic dependency that threatens the continent’s digital sovereignty. Just as the European Union seeks to reduce its reliance on external providers for semiconductors, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, it must do the same for social media. The dominant platforms extract value from European users by capturing their attention and selling their data, while paying little in taxes and skirting regulations. Their proprietary infrastructure increasingly shapes our lives, from the news we see to the way we speak online.

While European policymakers have long expressed concern about the concentration of corporate power among the big social media companies, and their outsize influence on society and politics, last year’s presidential election in the United States should be sounding alarm bells across the continent. Tech billionaire Elon Musk weaponized X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he acquired in 2022, to help Donald Trump win re-election by promoting content favourable to him. He has since threatened to interfere in European elections.

One solution is to invest in EU-based alternatives. But time and again, policymakers trot out the same excuse: there are no viable options. The European Commission’s new International Digital Strategy is likewise sceptical that the bloc can wean itself off Big Tech, instead calling for collaboration with the US to address its dependency.

But this stance ignores the emergence in recent years of social media sites built on decentralized, open protocols. These new platforms are fundamentally different, in principle and design, from American behemoths like Instagram and X. They restore control to users, reduce gatekeeping, and encourage innovation.

Perhaps the best example is the AT Protocol, which serves as the foundation for Bluesky, a fast-growing platform that has amassed nearly 36 million users. Designed for interoperability, the AT Protocol allows users to own their data and control the algorithms that curate their feeds. Anyone can develop apps on the decentralized system – which means that no single company can dominate – and users can easily move between platforms, taking their followers and content with them. That means they never have to start over from scratch.

This dedication to pluralism helps break Big Tech’s monopoly power over social media, which has stifled European innovation for decades. Europe-based firms have already used the AT Protocol to create platforms like SkyFeed and Graysky.

Others are trying to protect and build out this social ecosystem free from Big Tech’s grip. The Free Our Feeds campaign is working to ensure that the underlying infrastructure continues to be governed in the public interest. And Eurosky is a new pro bono effort by a group of European technologists, including myself, to create tools ( such as built-in content moderation aligned with EU laws ) and infrastructure on the AT Protocol that help European developers build and scale platforms that can rival the social-media giants.

Open protocols are not some utopian project. They are poised to upend the status quo of social media, creating a more democratic digital world. That is why European policymakers should designate these social networking frameworks as critical infrastructure and invest in developing them.

Social media should be at the heart of Europe’s digital-sovereignty agenda. Building platforms in Europe that rely on an open-source framework would help safeguard democratic discourse from foreign manipulation, create economic value for the continent, and ensure European social-media users control the algorithms that shape what they see. Countries outside the EU could also benefit from these efforts to challenge Big Tech’s dominance.

The online world has gone astray, with America’s tech sector largely calling the shots on how it is developed and used. Europe can help return the internet to its roots by fostering a social-media ecosystem built for pluralism, not polarization, but it needs political leaders who are willing to fight for a new, truly social digital infrastructure.

Sebastian Vogelsang is the developer of Flashes, a photo- and video-sharing app built on the AT Protocol.

Copyright: Project Syndicate