Sovereignty
Featured
Europe’s missing compliance layer
Europe is building sovereign payments and sovereign AI. The layer that interprets its regulation still runs on foreign software.
Martin Foerster · · 3 min read
Thought Leadership
Sovereign compliance
Essays on who gets to interpret European law — and why the infrastructure that reads a regulation is a question of sovereignty, not just software.
Written in Berlin · processed and hosted in the European Union
12 essays
Regulation
The wall under EU–US data transfers just moved
A US ruling on who controls the FTC has quietly unsettled the legal basis for moving European data across the Atlantic.
Jan Jensen · · 3 min read
Regulation
The Data Privacy Framework on borrowed time
A US ruling on who controls the Federal Trade Commission has quietly removed a load-bearing assumption beneath every transfer of European data to the United States.
Jan Jensen · · 10 min read
Architecture
When you paste a contract into an AI, who else can read it?
Checking a draft contract or a live incident against European law by running it through a foreign AI transmits the full text to a provider under foreign jurisdiction. That is a disclosure, and it may be one you never learn about.
Martin Foerster · · 3 min read
Sovereignty
The layer Europe’s sovereignty push forgot
The 3 June package targets chips, cloud, and AI. It says almost nothing about the systems that interpret Europe’s own regulation.
Martin Foerster · · 2 min read
Sovereignty
The sovereignty test
A short set of questions that separates genuine digital sovereignty from an EU region with a sovereignty label, applied honestly to ourselves as well.
Jan Jensen · · 2 min read
Regulation
Compliance outgrew the spreadsheet
For most companies, compliance still lives in a spreadsheet held together by one overworked person. It breaks in four predictable places.
Martin Foerster · · 3 min read
Architecture
The case for keeping your documents where they are
The industry standard is to pull a customer’s documents into the vendor’s cloud. For regulated European firms, that convenience is the exposure.
Jan Jensen · · 3 min read
Regulation
Your compliance tool is a third-party risk
DORA made banks map every critical technology provider. Few have turned that discipline on the software they use to manage compliance itself.
Martin Foerster · · 2 min read
Geopolitics
The payments channel Europe built and never used
In 2019 three of Europe’s largest economies built a mechanism to trade around US sanctions. Its near-total failure is the clearest lesson in dependency Europe has.
Martin Foerster · · 2 min read
Sovereignty
What sovereign compliance actually means
The term is appearing on every European vendor’s website. Most uses describe where data sits, not who controls it.
Martin Foerster · · 3 min read
Architecture
Who interprets European law?
For fifteen years European data protection has asked where information is stored. Artificial intelligence has changed the question to where regulation is understood.
Jan Jensen · · 4 min read