At Swisscom Trust Services, we are committed to building the Internet of Trust, where identities are verified and transactions are safe for all parties, always and beyond any doubt. We believe digital sovereignty is the foundation for this vision.
In this blog post, we want to explain what the Internet of Trust means, why digital sovereignty is crucial for building it, and how Swisscom itself is working towards sovereign infrastructure.
Why we need more trust in today's web
To date, the history of the internet can be split into three major periods. First, there was the academic internet, originating from ARPANET, with limited access, a small user base, and limited use cases.
Around 1990, it started to become more open and conversational. Tech advancements opened the web to the public with static websites, email, and forums. It was still mostly safe, unless you clicked shady links or shared personal info too carelessly. However, the potential damage was relatively limited as the web was not yet widely monetized.
This was the next major evolution starting in the early 2000s. This commercial internet not only brought web shops and online payments but also social media, where consumer data became a new currency. With this came scams, phishing, tracking, data abuse, and many more malicious online activities. Europol's Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment 2025 confirms how far this has gone: data has become a key commodity in the cybercrime landscape, both a target and an enabler of attacks.
Technological advancements brought static websites, email, and forums to the wider public. It remained relatively safe, provided users avoided suspicious links and guarded personal data.
Nowadays, most people's personal and professional lives are tied to the internet—or have almost entirely migrated to it. As a result, potential risks have grown, as has the need for countermeasures that build trust. This integration is far from over; in fact, it will extend even further in the future.
Technologies such as AI are expanding the online world to unprecedented frontiers and making it seem increasingly real. The AI-native internet is immersive, persistent, and hyper-personalized. Identity, content, and fraud blur together, and the risks can't be categorized as scams anymore. Trust must be central to the internet of the future to prevent digital dystopia.
Where trust and sovereignty meet
Trust and sovereignty are closely connected, and both are essential for the Internet of Trust. Sovereignty is the ability to control digital systems, while trust determines whether people and organizations are willing to rely on them. Digital sovereignty asks who controls digital infrastructure, where data is stored and processed, and which laws apply. Digital trust, in turn, asks whether users, businesses, and governments can count on the reliability, transparency, and accountability of digital technologies and services. The connection becomes particularly clear when we look at dependencies.
As more of our professional and personal lives move online, the infrastructure behind them matters more than ever. If critical European data or public services depend heavily on providers outside Europe, European organizations have less control over their digital environment. The EU Council, in its October 2020 conclusions, agrees that to be digitally sovereign, the EU must reinforce its ability to define its own rules, make autonomous technological choices, and develop strategic digital capacities and infrastructure.
This raises concerns regarding jurisdiction, data access, cybersecurity, supply-chain disruptions, and foreign regulatory leverage, which are dependencies that directly undermine trust. In ENISA's Threat Landscape 2025, supply chain risks make up 10.6% of the threat categories it tracked, and attackers increasingly go after third-party providers.
Conversely, stronger sovereignty builds trust by giving European institutions and organizations the autonomy to verify, regulate, and govern critical technologies and data.
Yet sovereignty alone does not automatically create trust. A European-owned cloud provider is not trustworthy simply because it is European. Users still need evidence that the provider protects data, maintains strong cybersecurity, operates transparently, and complies with relevant regulations. That is why cybersecurity requirements, certification schemes, data-protection rules, transparency obligations, and secure digital identities matter for both sovereignty and trust. They make trust verifiable.
Together, they form a cycle: sovereignty creates the conditions for trust, while trust makes sovereign digital infrastructure usable and sustainable. Europe needs the capacity to control critical technologies and infrastructure, but it also needs citizens, companies, and public authorities who trust them. As AI makes the online world ever more immersive and synthetic, this becomes particularly relevant in areas such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, digital identity, cybersecurity and data spaces, where technological dependence and confidence in the technology increasingly overlap.
Swisscom's approach to achieving digital sovereignty
Building the Internet of Trust is an ambitious endeavor, but what does this actually mean in practical terms? In day-to-day business, this boils down to creating tamper-proof certificates, signing and sealing documents, verifying digital identities, and maintaining the resilient underlying technical infrastructure for these services. The infrastructure and services themselves must be sovereign and resilient. Otherwise, they undermine every other effort.
For this reason, Swisscom puts strong emphasis on its own infrastructure:
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Swisscom Trust Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of Swisscom AG. It is a publicly listed entity with the Swiss Confederation as its majority shareholder, giving our organization unmatched institutional backing and long-term stability.
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By pairing Switzerland's stable, business-friendly jurisdiction and bilateral EU agreements with certifications under both eIDAS and ZertES, Swisscom anchors its trust services under European legal standards, offering clients Swiss stability alongside EU regulatory certainty.
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Our modular architecture integrates seamlessly with client systems, and we support multi-trust-center deployments whenever distinct Swiss and EU data environments are required.
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Leveraging our experience as Switzerland's leading telecommunications provider, we host all services across geo-redundant data centers to ensure maximum resilience. Furthermore, we partner with European hardware vendors for critical components like hardware security modules (HSMs) to secure our supply chain and curb reliance on non-European hyperscalers.
Do you want to dive deeper into the topic of digital sovereignty? Download our free whitepaper "Realizing Digital Sovereignty in Trust Services" here.
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