Interoperability and Standards

Abstract

Every sovereignty control examined elsewhere in this series carries a fragmentation risk: a world of forty differently architected “sovereign clouds” is not more resilient than a world of three hyperscalers, it is merely differently fragile, and it forecloses the economies of scale and interoperability that made cloud computing valuable in the first place. This paper argues that interoperability and open standards are not in tension with sovereignty but are a precondition for it at scale. It traces the history of standardization efforts in adjacent technology domains, examines the EU’s data space model as a working example of federated interoperability alongside fourteen further case studies, specifies which layers of a sovereign stack should standardize and which should remain sovereign-differentiated, and addresses ten common objections. It closes with economic and organizational considerations, an implementation roadmap, a glossary, and a self-assessment checklist.