Digital Sovereignty and Platform Dependencies - A Scenario Catalogue for Assessing Digital Sovereignty and "Weaponised" Dependencies (v1.0)

This scenario catalogue is a practical reference tool for organisations that acquire, operate, or depend on third-party digital platforms that are critical to operational capability and to the organisation's societal mission.

The catalogue is intended to help senior leaders, such as CIOs, CISOs, risk owners, procurement functions, and other decision-makers, assess whether platform procurement and use have been examined in light of current geopolitical uncertainty and digital sovereignty debates.

The catalogue focuses on dependency scenarios in which an organisation may retain formal ownership, contractual rights, technical security, or regulatory compliance, while still losing practical control over the digital platform capabilities or its content. The scenarios are designed as structured stress tests for leadership discussions about whether the organisation has sufficient governance capacity and strategic autonomy to fulfil its mission when commercial, legal, operational, societal, or geopolitical conditions change.

The catalogue does not assume that all digital dependencies should be eliminated. Its purpose is to help organisations make sovereignty trade-offs visible, explicit, and governable. It supports discussion of which dependencies are unacceptable, which are necessary and governable, and which restrictions may unintentionally weaken resilience or mission capability.

The catalogue is designed to support strategic dependency and risk assessments; procurement reviews; supplier governance; resilience, continuity, and exit planning; assurance and evidence-based control reviews; and executive-level dialogue about digital sovereignty.

Version 1.0 of this scenario catalogue is based on existing literature, AI-supported exploratory research on digital sovereignty risks and ongoing public debates, and the author's operational experience.