Mario Mariniello

Mario Mariniello is a research fellow and economist at Bruegel, the Brussels-based international economics think-tank specialising in EU economic and technology policy. His research focuses on how EU competition law and technology regulation interact with industrial policy, addressing digital markets regulation, the AI Act and the structural conditions for European technology competitiveness.

In June 2026 Mariniello published an analysis arguing that Europe's digital sovereignty package uses "nationality as a proxy for security", mimicking the US and Chinese approach while the EU's home cloud market share remains near 15%. The critique, reported by Lowdown, argued that legal mandates for sovereign procurement do not automatically generate the supply-side capacity to fulfil them.

The June 2026 analysis was his most prominent intervention in the sovereignty debate: placing a quantitative anchor (15% cloud share) against a policy architecture that had been largely qualitative. The argument does not reject the sovereignty agenda but questions its current form. Mandating nationality-based procurement rules, Mariniello's case runs, selects for EU ownership rather than for the security properties those rules purport to guarantee. A European cloud provider with weak security architecture is not more sovereign than a US provider that meets the technical requirements; the proxy substitutes legal origin for substantive assessment. Whether Brussels refines its sovereignty instruments to address this critique is a question the June 2026 package leaves open.