Digital sovereignty in telecoms, Mobile Europe briefing

Digital sovereignty in telecoms: who really controls Europe's critical capabilities? Governments now rely on telecom networks for their own sovereign operations, which makes digital sovereignty a defining issue for operators and states alike. In this Mobile Europe briefing, our CEO and co-founder Yann Chevalier joins Orange's Chief Trust Officer to discuss what it means in practice. The conversation covers two sides of the same asset. On one side, the regulatory stakes: emergency caller location, population warning, and what the Digital Networks Act should include to protect capabilities Europe still controls. On the other, the commercial case: a location-based services market worth around USD 37 billion in 2025 and projected to reach USD 164 billion by 2034, of which operators capture only a small share. In this conversation: Why sovereignty is less about where data sits than about who can change the system, switch it off, and answer when it breaks Where Europe is most exposed on emergency caller location, and why network-based location matters as the fallback Three narrow clauses Yann argues belong in the Digital Networks Act What conformity testing for safety-critical device functions would actually involve How Kuwait's national public warning system was deployed in 10 days, and how sovereignty over the data was preserved The three families of commercial location use cases, and which ones are mature today What makes an operator's location data different from the data broker chain Why CAMARA standardisation turns national one-offs into a market Three priorities for operators over the next twelve months