Beyond Regulation: Why Europe (and Philanthropy) Must Start Funding the Internet We Actually Want

By all appearances, the European Union is leading the charge to rein in Big Tech. But when it comes to building alternatives, it’s still standing on the sidelines.

From the GDPR to the Digital Markets Act, the EU has spent the last decade crafting what is now the world’s most sophisticated body of digital regulation.

These laws have rightly been praised for putting user rights, competition, and democratic oversight at the heart of the digital agenda.

But there’s a problem: while Europe is busy regulating Big Tech, it is still fundamentally dependent on it.

Google remains the default search engine. Meta still mediates public discourse. Microsoft underpins public education systems. And Amazon continues to host vast swaths of the EU’s public cloud infrastructure.

The question isn’t whether regulation is necessary — it is. The question is whether regulation alone is enough to change the direction of our digital future.

Regulating the Inevitable?

For all the political momentum, the EU's approach still amounts to firefighting — chasing after misconduct rather than reimagining the system that breeds it. And increasingly, even that firefighting is being undermined.

According to Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl, tech giants now spend over €343 million annually lobbying Brussels. Meta alone has increased its spending by 141% since 2020. Microsoft and Apple have followed suit. In February 2025, EU plans to regulate AI liability and tech patents were shelved after sustained industry pushback (Reuters).

This reveals a hard truth: when your infrastructure is Big Tech, you can’t regulate your way out of dependency. You have to build your way out.

The Missing Strategy: Infrastructure as a Public Good

Ask most policymakers or philanthropies how they’re addressing Big Tech’s dominance, and they’ll point to policy reform, advocacy, or litigation. These are important tools — but they’re not strategies for systemic transformation.

What’s missing is the one thing Big Tech excels at: infrastructure. Not just platforms, but entire ecosystems — cloud, identity, communications, and developer tooling — all seamlessly integrated, user-tested, and infinitely scalable.

The common pushback is familiar: "We can’t just build our way out." “Alternatives won’t get adopted.” “They’re not good enough.” “They’re not sustainable.”

But here’s what that framing misses: we don’t need to start from scratch. New ecosystems is already growing. It’s just not being resourced to win.

What Already Exists

Take Matrix, a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted communication protocol now used by more than 60 million people. It underpins entire national infrastructures — including France’s secure messaging app, Tchap, for members of the government to communicate and collaborate safely.

Then there’s Acter, built on Matrix, co-designed with grassroots movements and human rights defenders, already enabling real-world organizing.

Or consider Nextcloud, Europe’s homegrown, open-source alternative to Google Drive.

These aren’t only “alternatives” in the experimental sense. They are ready, globally used, and value-driven platforms. What they lack is not capability — but capital.

Unlike Silicon Valley startups, these projects weren’t built to exit. They’re built to serve. But without patient, long-term funding to support adoption, development, and ecosystem integration, they remain niche when they could be the norm.

Philanthropy’s Caution, and Its Consequences

Global philanthropy, too, has mostly sat this one out.
Despite the critical role digital infrastructure plays in enabling civil society, funding for digital equity makes up less than 1% of overall giving by large foundations (Connect Humanity - Funding for digital equity 2022)
This underinvestment poses an existential risk to the very organizations tasked with defending democracy, justice, and social cohesion.

As noted in Digital Infrastructure for Civil Society — a 2021 report led by the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG):

“An economy needs roads, bridges, and train stations to thrive. A community needs schools, parks, and houses of worship to ensure the flowering of human potential. And civil society needs infrastructure to ensure that nonprofits and foundations can act with integrity and impact.”

— “Investing in Infrastructure,” letter from 22 Philanthropy Serving Organizations (2016)

This is not just a matter of efficiency. It’s a matter of equity, scale, and survival. The COVID-19 pandemic made this painfully clear, as nonprofits scrambled to digitize service delivery and advocacy while lacking even the most basic tools or support.

Lucy Bernholz, Director of Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, captures the broader stakes:

“I’ve been arguing for several years now that civil society is dependent on digital systems.”

— TAG, 2021

And when those systems fail or fall into monopolistic hands, it is the most marginalized communities — the ones civil society aims to serve — that suffer first and most. As Ford Foundation’s Michael Brennan noted:

“If digital infrastructure fails, the consequences will be the same as when physical infrastructure falls apart: people with privilege and resources will find other ways to navigate the world, while those on the margins will bear the brunt through higher costs, decreased access, and a related lack of opportunity.”

Philanthropy’s hesitation to invest in “tech as infrastructure” is no longer tenable. Digital systems are not just tools. They are the terrain of civil society — and funding them is no longer optional if we hope to build sustainable, democratic futures.

From Dependency to Digital Sovereignty

Europe has the opportunity — and arguably the responsibility — to break this cycle.

Imagine an EU-wide fund for open, democratic, interoperable tech — something akin to what Open Future describes in their European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund White Paper. Not to duplicate Big Tech’s logic, but to escape it. To invest in platforms that don’t surveil, don’t exploit, and don’t lock users in.

This isn’t just about protecting privacy or regulating AI. It’s about reclaiming agency over the systems we rely on every day — to learn, to work, to organize, to govern and to resist.

The internet we need already exists — it just isn’t funded yet.

We already know what we’re fighting against: surveillance capitalism, data extractivism, black-box AI etc. but do we know what we’re fighting for?

Let’s explore what it would take — politically, financially, imaginatively — to build a digital public sphere not owned by five American corporations?

Let’s not only discuss what we want to regulate, but what we want to build.