Pushing for digital sovereignty as a member of NLdigital

Since March this year, Defined Once Engineering has joined the NLdigital trade association. By becoming a member, we aim to remain connected with IT-focused organizations in the Netherlands, as well as to stay on top of political developments and their legal implications for our work. We believe this to benefit both us and our clients. However, NLdigital also represents companies with conflicting values to ours, mainly on the topic of digital sovereignty and data control. In this blog post, I want to provide full transparency on our decision to become a member anyway.

The problematic side of being a member

At Defined Once, we have put our founding values front and center to our operation. As software engineers and cybersecurity experts we have become aware that it is not self-evident for technology to always prioritize its end-users. Especially when monopolies form, we have seen focus shift from building a good product to optimizing for short-term gains. In the process, we tend to offload our data, knowledge and IP to venture-capital backed datacenters overseas, accelerated by cleverly constructed vendor lock-in. This is a practice that we, as "proud Europeans", believe to be problematic for security, privacy and operational stability in a changing geopolitical environment. As such, we encourage, and want to contribute to, moving European companies and governments to European software and sovereign cloud environments.

When considering joining NLdigital, we have critically reviewed its members to understand to what extent they support or oppose this stance. After all, we do not want to be part of an organization that claims to speak in our name if we do not approve of its message. In particular, we are unhappy with Microsoft (which as one of the biggest members of NLdigital has de-facto control over its leadership) being part of the debate on digital sovereignty in the Netherlands. We hold that Microsoft's interests can simply never be aligned with the need for a sovereign cloud, and that hence, it should not misuse the NLdigital brand as a mouthpiece to push a pseudo-sovereign cloud agenda that does not actually contribute to regaining European control on data and operations. When NLdigital becomes too closely attached to the Microsoft corporation, promoting our membership might overshadow our emphasis on European values, also scaring away potential clients that do in fact share our mission.

Benefits of a strong Dutch trade association

Despite our criticism towards some of NLdigital's members - which we will continue to share - we do find that having a strong Dutch trade association is a requirement to build a successful technology sector. In this regard we also recognize that for more than twenty years (and in different forms), NLdigital has fulfilled its mandate quite well. Even when its public-facing message differs from ours, its effort to connect decision makers at companies of different sizes does provide us meaningful conversations and a valuable network.

Case in point for us was the NLdigital Ondernemersdag, last Wednesday in Ede. There, we were happily surprised to see that many companies are becoming more aware of their operational risks, creating a focus on sovereignty, security and privacy. In various rounds of talks, we exchanged ideas with representatives of IT organizations throughout the Netherlands in an easy-going and pleasant way. We acknowledge that this is quite rare, and that it is one of the unique benefits of being a member of NLdigital.

Furthermore, as a small collective of engineers, we are also happy with the insights we get on political developments and their legal impact. It is simply not profitable for us to dedicate resources for a specialized legal team at this stage, but by sharing the burden with other members, we can stay on top of the news in a cost-effective way.

All in all, we find that the NLdigital brand certainly is not perfect, but that there is simply no feasible alternative to the services and network it provides us. For now, our membership will end in February 2027, at which point we will re-evaluate our decision. In the meantime, you can rest assured that we will approach its members with a critical stance, using our own channels to rectify NLdigital's public stance where we deem necessary.