"Digital commons" refers to a concept that provides for the management and use of digital resources as common goods.

In her major work "Governing the Commons", Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, laid the widely recognized theoretical foundations for understanding the communal management and use of common goods based on many years of empirical research. Data, programs and their descriptions as well as other digital artefacts are predestined for management and use as common goods due to their characteristics as non-rivalrous ("non-subtractive") intangible resources.

The management and use of digital resources as common goods is an alternative to privatization or nationalization and, in a liberal constitutional environment, a socio-political decision by the actors involved and affected. The publication of the report "Towards a sovereign digital infrastructure of commons" by the European Working Team on Digital Commons in June 2022 during the French EU Presidency is noteworthy in this context. It underlines the strategic importance of the commons for Europe's digital sovereignty