Towards a federated European Open Internet Stack – Conclusions from NGI Forum 2025 in Brussels

The Next Generation Internet (NGI) Forum 2025 took place in Brussels on 19 & 20 June, bringing together over 200 on-site participants plus several hundred online. Topics centered around the shift from research and experimentation to the deployment of sovereign, open digital infrastructures.

Over the course of two days, 37 speakers and panelists shared their insights and expertise with regard to Digital Commons and Digital Sovereignty, among which were:
– Dr. Monique Calisti, Director of the NGI Outreach Office
– Thibaut Kleiner, Director at DG CONNECT
– Dr. Michael Granitzer, University of Passau and project coordinator OpenWebSearch.eu
– Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament
– Jan Hajič, Charles University and project coordinator Open Euro LLM

The OpenWebSearch.eu team co-organized the morning sessions of day 2 of the forum. The sessions were dedicated to the future of Open Web Search in the context of European digital autonomy in fields such as research, economic innovations, web literacy, data protection and AI. The sessions were moderated by Sara Garavelli from CSC – IT Center of Science, a Finish supercomputing centre which counts amongst the biggest in Europe.

Europe’s digital blind eye

Dr. Stefan Voigt, scientist at the German Aerospace Centre and founder and chairman of Open Search Foundation (partner in OpenWebSearch.eu) kicked off the morning with his presentation on “Introduction to Sovereignty in Web Search”. His entry slide read: “Europe is moving blindly in digital time and space.” Inspired by the Copernicus program, which was successfully launched by the European Commission and the European Space Agency in 1998 to provide a sovereign infrastructure for earth observation and geo-information services, Stefan demands the same level of attention be devoted to the digital infrastructures in Europe. “The current high dependency on digital information monopolies harbors dangers such as disinformation and censorship and is a risk for our democracy. Europe has to have its own capacity to navigate and orientate in the web“, he stated, pointing toward the recently launched European Open Web Index (OWI), as a federated open source solution, provided by the OpenWebSearch.eu team of researchers. Web search, he explained, goes beyond URL lists, but also includes, mapping services, e-commerce sites, recommender systems and much more. He closed his presentation with an urgent call for sustainable funding options to scale up the OWI and lay the groundworks of true digital sovereignty in web search.

In his opening keynote “The first European Open Web Index – Current State and Perspective” Dr. Michael Granitzer from the University of Passau reinforced the alarming situation in terms of digital dependency in web search, including in the field of opinion shaping biases. He referenced a study titled “Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME): Theoretical Analysis that Search Engines can impact voter behavior in the range from 20-80%”. 
His thesis: “The web is the richest information source out there, but we (Europeans) have limited access to finding and verifying relevant information. In addition, data from the web are important to train European LLMs. Even established AI Chatbots come with integrated search applications to feed the software with fresh data.” The importance of accessing web data directly and transparently was thereby underlined.

Granitzer then moved on to introducing the newly launched federated Open Web Index named OWI, which is a European answer to overseas web indices. Currently processing roughly 100 million URLs per day with a focus on European domains and European languages, the OWI is hosted on four (super-)computing centers across Europe, with the goal to serve as the backbone for building sovereign search services. It is open-source and transparent by design, and aiming to support digital services including in the fields of AI and analytics. 
However, both maintenance and development are costly endeavours. 
Additionally, the current legal and financial hurdles in transitioning prototypes to production-ready services, call for longer-term public funding frameworks.

Alexandra Geese shakes up the audience with an eye-opening Policy Perspective

Member of the European Parliament Alexandra Geese, who – among other topics – negotiated the Digital Services Act, spoke on the current powers in place and why these powers are opponents of democracy.

The Big Tech agenda according to her includes manipulating opinions deliberately and enforcing full surveillance. 
”They [the Big Tech companies] have the US government fighting on a diplomatic level, on an international level, through blackmail against any kind of regulation that we have created in Europe, to make sure that the digital services, digital products work in the service of citizens and not just of a few billionaires“ she stated, adding “The US government is threatening the European governments.“
She reported that some of the threats include visa restrictions to anyone working on the Digital Services Act. Half of the European Commission cannot enter the US anymore.

Additionally, a global collapse of the international knowledge system seems to be a deliberate US choice. 

Attacks against universities and individual scientists as well as cutbacks on science funding support this notion. 
The focus seems to lie on AI initiatives rather than real science.
 Whether LLMs hallucinate doesn’t seem to matter. 
There is growing evidence that they are getting worse and one third of results is disinformation.

 “The algorithms promote not only a general distrust of politicians and authorities, but of experts, of science. Algorithms pushing rumors, propaganda and mis- and disinformation.” In the US there is a narrative that anyone who works on researching disinformation just wants to censor people, according to Geese. “There is no such thing as facts, just different political opinions. Anyone who wants to distinguish between high and low quality information would be a target of this narrative.” she says.

But Alexandra Geese finishes her informative speech on a positive outlook.
She calls on Europe to create its own digital sovereign infrastructure. “Whether or not Europe still exists as independent continent with freedom, democracy and scientific knowledge that makes sure we have knowledge, health and climate protection depends on that!“, she reflected.
The metrics are: open data, open standards, federating! 
 
She also made clear that “we do not want a European Google, we want a great network based on open standards.”

And steps forwards are indeed happening! The European Parliament voted to support technological sovereignty! 
The aim is to build an alliance between politicians, the scientific community and the European industry.
Alexandra Geese’s call for action was loud and clear: “Producing knowledge and making it accessible. It is the basis for free democratic societies. This is what we need to fight for!”

The subsequent discussion brought in Per Öster – Director Advanced Computing Facility at CSC – IT Center for Science.
Per shared about the start of the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative and why CSC – IT Center decided to join. “It was about research in the start, but the scope is much bigger. Every citizen does something everyday on the web. You research information daily. This information is totally controlled by few platforms. Over time how this information is served to us has deteriorated. Google is an advertising company at its core.“, he explains and added that what they present to us is a compromise between serving decent information and making money of advertising. In the end the advertising always weighs more.

Alexandra Geese reaffirmed: “The internet is going to worsen so much in the coming years, that safeguarding knowledge is a very important task.  
Additionally the cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe is not reflected by Big Tech companies. 
Our richness of diverse languages and cultures need to be leveraged. Cultural diversity is important for how we think and for our freedom.”

Panel Discussions on Open Web Infrastructure and Digital Sovereignty

The panel on “Applications of the Open Web Index and Web Data Infrastructure” brought together voices from Ecosia, OpenEuroLLM, EC-JRC, and CSC. Wolfgang Oels, CEO of Ecosia, introduced the European Search Perspective, a joint initiative between Ecosia and Quandt. In his introduction he pointed out that “25 Million officials working in public administrations train foreign algorithms for free and this has to stop!” He argued for altering user habits and defaults as well as public procurement rules. He emphasized that better European alternatives already exist, but need urgent backing to scale up. He also reinforced Alexandra Geese’s analysis regarding the massive power that backs the current infrastructures; a problem that has to be tackled.

Jan Hajič, Project Coordinator of Open Euro LLM and Professor at Charles University introduced the Euro LLM project, that unites 20 partners from research, economy and industry related research organisations. Euro LLM aims to integrate the 24 official European languages plus 12 additional regional languages. Jan advocates for clearer data-sharing frameworks to support LLM development.

Per Öster from CSC – IT Center for Science who are a partner of bothe OpenWebSearch.eu and Euro LLM, stated: “AI is nothing without data. One of the data sources is what is available on the web, which is why these platforms that have been scraping the web for years have been able to so quickly build these LLMs. 
The next stage of the EURO HPC Initiative is called AI Factories, which we are now planning to contribute to. LUMI AI (LUMI being one of CSCs supercomputers) aims to continue to serve the open web index to the public.”

Emmanuel Cartier from the European Commission – JRC showcased the potential of EU tools like the European Media Monitor for supporting a trusted, sovereign information ecosystem.

Jan Hajič additionally adressed the current challenges with clearing copyrights for data, collected from the web – a topic that is also being investigated and discussed within the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium. Moreover, he added that Europe needs to stack up on hardware contingents.

The discussion on “Web Sovereignty – Towards a Sovereign Web Tech Stack for Europe”, moderated by Stefan Voigt, featured Ana Garcia Robles (BDVA), Gaël Duval (Murena), and Renaud Chaput (Mastodon). The overall tone of voice echoed a call for more funding, awareness, and strategic alignment.
Renaud Chaput, CTO at Mastodon, a federated European Social Media platform emphasized the importance of governance and maintaining Social Media platforms as public digital commons, as opposed to profit-driven ventures. Instead of bringing people into closed systems, Mastodon is built on an open system philosophy.

 Gaël Duval, CEO at Murena stressed that while technical capacity exist, market entry is hindered by dominant platforms.

All in all, the panelists agreed on a need for better governance, marketing, and education around open source projects. Users have to be at the center of the undertakings.

Ana García Robles, Secretary General at BDVA calls web data is one of the most valuable resources. She spoke on “volume vs quality“, stating that data diversity is important, as well as being able to process the „right data“ for specific use cases. Also, speed is important for economic success. Understanding market needs is crucial for the success of the web tech stack idea.

Conclusions and outlook

The current status quo: Europe is a world leader in Open Source software but thus far has not managed to commercialize, monetize and disseminate these products successfully in ways that allow true digital sovereignty.

Web Search is still relevant not just despite, but because of the fast developments of LLMs that largely rely on up-to date web data.

Digital Commons including in the domain of Web Search require financial backing from EU institutions and national entities.

Dissemination of Open Source technology has to go beyond user acceptance, and create true user enthusiasm to make the shift happen.

A replay of the full conference day is available here:
https://webcast.ec.europa.eu/ngi-forum-2025-06-20