On 8 December 2025, DCN Members Mauro Santaniello, Chiara Spiniello and Nicola Palladino took part in SplinterCon Paris 2025, titled “Sovereignty: Autonomy or Isolation?”. Together they presented the paper “Does EU digital sovereignty have constitutional limits?”, focusing on how the EU’s constitutional core—rooted in the TEU, TFEU, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights—can constrain digital sovereignty initiatives, especially where emergency powers and the protection of fundamental rights intersect.

Their presentation mapped the legal “boundaries” embedded in EU primary law (including provisions on restrictive measures, defence, essential security interests, and the rules governing limitations of rights) and asked when sovereignty-driven infrastructure projects could shift from resilience tools to potential vectors of fragmentation. An empirical focus was placed on DNS4EU, a European Commission–funded initiative aimed at building a recursive, federated, privacy-enhancing DNS resolver infrastructure within the EU. The paper argued that the EU’s rights-based legal order can work as a lato sensu constitutional constraint—helping preserve openness and the free flow of information while preventing the “weaponization” of internet infrastructure.

These contributions are an outcome of the PRIN 2022 project: “PRIN 2022KTTSBC – CUP Master D53D23007300006 Digital Sovereignty in Comparative Perspective: State Authority, Corporate Power and Fundamental Rights in Cyberspace”.