How can we design a democratic digital space?

Architecture is the space between people. Architecture is organizing this space. Not only through material, form, or construction, but through social structures. Through rules, traditions, and cultural norms. Architecture is never merely built matter. It is always an organization of nearness and distance.

Today, this task is shifting. The digital framework begins to organize the space between people itself. It does not merely simulate nearness and distance. It actively produces them. It groups people, separates them, directs attention, and decides which encounters become possible and which never occur.

From this perspective, digital infrastructure must be understood as the most consequential architecture of the twenty-first century. An architecture without walls, but with profound political force. An architecture that no longer represents social space, but structures it.

This architecture is not democratic by default. As privately owned systems, Big Tech platforms increasingly resemble feudal structures rather than public space. What should be a civic infrastructure has become an economic one.

For liberal democracies, this is fundamental. The space between citizens must be designed and governed democratically. Europe must provide the sociological and technical conditions for this architecture to remain a democratic one.

Switch Europe responds to this shift. It translates existing European law into technical reality by defining a binding standard for interoperability and migration between platforms. Not to regulate content, but to restore movement, choice, and plurality in the digital public space. If democracy depends on spatial freedom, then it must be designed into infrastructure.

Starting Point and Core Problem

With the GDPR, the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, and the AI Act, data portability, interoperability, transparency, and platform responsibility are legally binding and enforceable. In practice, however, digital markets remain closed. Users can export data, but they cannot take their social relationships, networks, and contexts with them.

This structural lock-in prevents switching, stabilizes market power, and makes new European social media offerings practically non-viable, because they cannot reach critical mass.

The Concrete Solution

Switch Europe is a standardized data migration and interoperability architecture, functionally comparable to a router. Switch Europe is not a platform and not a social network. It is a neutral mediation layer that organizes the transfer of data and social graphs between existing platforms, new European services, and user accounts.

Switch Europe translates existing law into technical standards. For large platforms, Switch Europe simplifies compliance with regulatory requirements. For new European companies, Switch Europe lowers market entry barriers. For users, Switch Europe makes switching real.

Social, Political, and Economic Relevance

Without the ability to switch, there is no fair competition. Without fair competition, no European alternatives can emerge. Data portability is therefore a prerequisite for democratic resilience, European sovereignty, and open markets.

Switch Europe strengthens competition, creates opportunities for European companies, and expands choice and service options for EU citizens in the spirit of free and fair markets.

Academic Role and Purpose

The goal of Switch Europe is to develop a neutral reference architecture that demonstrates how existing European digital law can be implemented in practice. Legal, technical, and economic foundations are translated into a concrete, verifiable implementation.

This act of translation requires an institutional framework in which different perspectives can be brought together and independently examined. This is precisely where university research and teaching contribute, at the intersection of law, technology, and societal impact.