European Sovereignty Monitor is daily news on who owns and operates Europe's technology, whose laws apply and where its parts come from. Each item also records which way the change pushes Europe's dependence on suppliers, systems and law it does not control. The publication is built in layers, each resting on the one below.
The record: four areas and the voices
New items are published twice a day across four areas: policy and law, compute and infrastructure, defence and space, and industry, investment and R&D. Why these four areas explains the division. The record covers legislation moving through Council and Parliament and the national laws that bind sooner, public money entering the compute stack and where it lands, procurement that goes to a European supplier and procurement that does not, capital entering European technology companies and where it comes from, and the programmes deciding who supplies Europe a decade from now.
Beside the news sit the voices: the published positions of the organisations and public figures who argue about all of this, recorded as opinion and kept apart from what actually happened. An opinion records that someone argued something. It never moves the index, and when it answers a news item the two are linked on both pages.
The trust layer
Every item carries one of two grades. Verified means the primary document was opened and read at the passage that asserts the claim: the Official Journal, the Council's public register, a Commission release, a company's own filing. Reported means the primary text could not be reached and the claim rests on a named secondary source, which the item cites. Figures are not repeated from press summaries when the underlying document is available.
Every item also states what its source does not establish. A grant counts as contracted until the money is paid. Co-membership of a consortium is not partnership. A funding round says nothing about where control now sits unless the filing does. That boundary line is the publication's editorial position, and it is rarely published anywhere else.
Corrections are written on the item with the original claim quoted, never edited silently. Where a development is still unfolding, the item says what is still open and the date the record checks again. Each item also links the organisations and people it is about, so everything the record holds on one of them can be read in one place.
Connected datasets and the index
Four open datasets sit underneath the record and are updated alongside it. The stack map carries Europe's technology stack from silicon to market, each entry scored on jurisdiction and dependency, each with a public source. The ledger follows public money from funder to the jurisdiction of profit and records where the trail stops in public. The timeline sets European digital regulation on a true time axis, from proposal to law to first effect. The Horizon Europe grants, drawn from CORDIS, show the consortia the map's organisations sit in and the money contracted to them.
The European Sovereignty Index makes the record measurable with two numbers: where Europe stands against twenty measurements, half of them with a goal (the targets), and which way this year's news has pushed it. The weights between the four areas are the editor's, and the reader can change them. The calendar lists the dated events ahead, drawn from the record and the timeline.
Analysis
Analysis that reads across the record and the datasets sits on top of all this. It is planned as part of a paid offer, and the record, the datasets and the index stay the base it stands on.
How to reach it
The record is on this site, in a free email and in the connector for AI assistants. Anyone who signs up gets an email every Friday with the week's main stories, what we recorded in each area and everything else the record took in, and the monthly issue at the end of each month. Point Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or VS Code at it and ask what the record says about a tender, a supplier or a programme; every item it returns carries its grade and its boundary line. The same page has the JSON API and the open data files, published under CC BY 4.0.
The record and the emails are published in English. A connected assistant can explain the record in whatever language it is asked.
What it is not
The Monitor is not an initiative and it does not argue for a policy. It records what governments, institutions and companies decided, and what each decision does and does not bind, and it names every company plainly. A national move gets the same treatment as one from Brussels: Germany writing digital sovereignty into its procurement law, France steering state IT purchases to French and European vendors, or a member state buying air defence outside Europe all go in the record on the same terms, and the reader draws the conclusion.
Four questions, not one
Sovereignty is not a single property, which is why two products launched in the same week can both be called sovereign and mean opposite things. This publication separates four questions: who owns it, who operates it, whose law governs it, and who made the parts. Most European instruments test the first three and stop before the fourth, so most of the work here is reading the four apart.
Who writes it
Reidar Balstad edits the Monitor independently (the editor). The news items are drafted by an AI system and each one says whether the editor read it before it went live; the Method page explains how the record is made. The publication accepts no sponsorship and no payment for coverage, and any consulting relationship that touches an organisation in the record is disclosed at the item.
Corrections and tips
Corrections, missing items and disagreements are all welcome, particularly with a primary source attached. Reply to any email, or write to info@sovereigntymonitor.eu. A correction with a primary source attached is applied and credited.