European Search Perspective, a Franco-German joint venture for sovereign search infrastructures, has sent open letters to heads of government across the European Union proposing to establish national search indices to strengthen Europe's digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on foreign technology providers.
The proposal comes 100 days after the Digital Sovereignty Summit in Berlin, where European leaders committed to reducing critical digital dependencies and building sovereign infrastructure where necessary and achievable.
Search engines play a central role in both democratic societies and digital economies. They determine how citizens access information, how businesses are discovered online and how artificial intelligence systems retrieve knowledge from the search.
Today, 99.5 percent of European search queries are based on answers by just two US companies (96 percent), and one Russian company (3.5 percent).
According to European Search Perspective, this concentration exposes European countries to systemic risks. If access to dominant search indexing infrastructure were restricted – whether due to sanctions regimes, regulatory conflict, export controls or commercial decisions – governments could lose critical analytical capabilities and economies could face complete collapse within days.
The majority of Europe's GDP (approximately 18 trillion) is directly dependent on the search index based economy.
European Search Perspective proposes that EU member states establish sovereign search infrastructure consisting of a national search index hosted under European jurisdiction, a national ranking algorithm, and infrastructure supporting both public search services and AI search grounding.
"Without a sovereign search index, Europe does not control the gateway to its own digital economy," says Wolfgang Oels, Director Europan Search Perspective.
The organisation argues that search infrastructure should be treated as strategic public infrastructure, comparable in importance to energy grids or telecommunications networks.
European Search Perspective is currently establishing a sovereign search index for France and Germany and has offered to extend the initiative to other EU member states.
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