Mario Mariniello
A Bruegel economist specialising in EU technology and competition policy.
Bruegel economist Mario Mariniello argued in June 2026 that Brussels treats company nationality as its security yardstick, even though barely 15% of the EU cloud market runs on EU-owned infrastructure.
Last refreshed: 4 August 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
If EU cloud has 15% of its home market, can nationality-based procurement rules actually close that gap?
Timeline for Mario Mariniello
Mentioned in: Seven AI gigafactories go out to tender
European Tech SovereigntyMentioned in: €659m for four fabs, none at the edge
European Tech SovereigntyArgued the June sovereignty package uses nationality as a proxy for security
European Tech Sovereignty: Bruegel says EU sovereignty mimics rivalsBackground
Mario Mariniello is a research fellow and economist at Bruegel, the Brussels-based international economics think-tank, where his work addresses how EU competition law and technology regulation interact with industrial policy, including digital markets regulation, the AI Act and the structural conditions for European technology competitiveness.
His most prominent public position is a structural critique of Brussels' sovereignty agenda: that mandating nationality-based procurement conflates legal ownership with genuine security, and that legal mandates alone do not generate the supply-side capacity needed to fulfil them . The argument does not reject the sovereignty project; it challenges the proxy Brussels has chosen to measure it by.
Bruegel's wider research programme gives Mariniello's critique an institutional weight beyond a single publication, positioning him as a recurring voice questioning the design, rather than the aim, of EU technology sovereignty policy.
He calls sovereignty a security proxy
Mario Mariniello argued in a June 2026 Bruegel publication that Brussels treats company nationality as its yardstick for security, mirroring the approach Washington and Beijing already take, even though barely 15% of the EU cloud market runs on EU-owned infrastructure .
His case does not reject the sovereignty agenda outright; it questions the mechanism. Mandating EU ownership, he argues, selects for legal origin rather than for the security properties those rules are meant to guarantee, so a European provider with weak security architecture is not more sovereign than a US provider that meets the technical bar.
What is Bruegel's critique of EU digital sovereignty policy?
What share of the European cloud market do EU providers hold?
Who is Mario Mariniello and what does he study?
