A handful of companies dominate the platforms where public debate happens, and they govern themselves the way they govern us: from the top. At X, Elon Musk has the final word. At Meta and Alphabet, founders keep control through share structures that outweigh their actual ownership stake. OpenAI started as a non-profit meant to keep AI in the public interest; today, strategic power sits largely with executives and a major investor.
That’s the democratic deficit at the heart of EPD’s latest report: “Democratic by Design”, funded by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and drawing on around 30 expert interviews and two stakeholder workshops.
How to fix it?
The report’s central finding: what makes a company genuinely participatory isn’t whether it’s public or private, for-profit or mission-driven. It’s whether power is decentralised and dispersed.
Models that already work
- Cooperatives — owned and governed by users or workers, like the creator-owned platform Nebula
- Decentralised non-profits — open, community-led governance, the model behind Wikipedia and Mastodon
- Purpose-driven companies — mission legally embedded to limit pure shareholder logic, seen at Proton and Bluesky
- Public-private partnerships — for capital-heavy infrastructure like cloud services and AI computing, the logic behind the EU’s AI Factories and Sovereign Cloud
What the EU could do
- Link public funding and procurement to governance standards, not just innovation metrics
- Consider targeted ownership rules in strategic digital sectors
- Give civil society and academia a genuine seat at the table, not just a consultative one
To keep online spaces healthy, tech should be treated like a common good. The question isn’t whether Europe’s tech sector will change; it’s already changing fast. The direction ultimately taken will not be accidental, but shaped by deliberate political and economic choices. The key question, therefore, is not whether change will happen, but which model Europe chooses to promote.
Published with the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.
The analysis and opinions expressed in this report reflect the views of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.
