Technology

The people, not governments, should exercise digital sovereignty


European politicians who have been complaining recently about the loss of “digital sovereignty” to US technology companies are like children grumbling in the back of a car about where they are heading.

They itch to climb into the front seat and seize the steering wheel even if they don’t know how to drive. Instead, they ought to stop yapping, take some driving lessons and help design a new car. It is only when Europe becomes a global leader in tech again that it can hope to control the destination of travel in the 21st century.

As almost every aspect of our lives turns digital, Europe’s leaders are right to worry that too much power is being grabbed by consumer internet giants, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, and Chinese hardware manufacturers, such as Huawei, which runs 5G networks. Sovereign governments used to wield exclusive power over validating identity, running critical infrastructure, regulating information flows and creating money. Several of those functions are being usurped by the latest tech.

Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, recently told The Economist that Europe had inadvertently abandoned the “grammar” of sovereignty by allowing private companies, rather than public interest, to decide on digital infrastructure. In 10 years’ time, he feared, Europe would no longer be able to guarantee the soundness of its cyber infrastructure or control its citizens’ and companies’ data.

The instinctive response of many European politicians is to invest in grand, state-led projects and to regulate the life out of Big Tech. A recent proposal to launch a European cloud computing company, called Gaia-X, reflects the same impulse that lay behind the creation of Quaero, the Franco-German search engine set up in 2008 to challenge Google. That you have to Google “Quaero” rather than Quaero “Quaero” tells you how that fared. The risk of ill-designed regulation is that it can stifle innovation and strengthen the grip of dominant companies.

Rather than just trying to shore up the diminishing sovereignty of European governments and prop up obsolete national industrial champions, leaders may do better to reshape the rules of the data economy to empower users and stimulate a new wave of innovation. True sovereignty, after all, lies in the hands of the people.

To this end, Europe should encourage greater efforts to “re-decentralise the web”, as computer scientists say, to accelerate the development of the next generation internet. The principle of privacy by design should be enshrined in the next batch of regulations, following the EU’s landmark General Data Protection Regulation, and written into all public procurement contracts.

The most persuasive champion of this redesigned future is Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, who has since launched Solid technology to give users greater data rights. “We have to imagine a world in which any data you create is under your control,” Sir Tim told me at the Open Data Institute conference this month. “By default you will control your data. By default it will not be shared with anybody.”

What that means in practice has been spelt out by Francesca Bria, the former chief technology officer for Barcelona, now a senior adviser at the UN. Europe, she says, now has a chance to set the privacy and security standards for the digital economy that will define future platform innovation.

“Europe should invest in technologies that are decentralised, privacy-enhancing and rights-preserving, that give data control back to citizens, so citizens are able to decide what data they want to keep private, what data they want to share, with whom, on what terms,” she says.

The shift from surveillance capitalism to a more user-centric data economy is already opening up new business opportunities. Europe has the chance to jump ahead of this coming revolution, rather than just playing catch-up with the US and China.

Graham Cooke, a former Google employee and chief executive of the Qubit data company, says the very dominance of the US tech companies could blind them to this coming shift. Big Tech has built powerful, and highly profitable, technological engines fuelled by all the data they have acquired. But there may soon be a switch in that fuel supply.

“Just like Microsoft lost out to the web, Facebook and Google will be taken off guard by that change of fuel. I think it is inevitable but we just cannot see it yet,” Mr Cooke says. “Consumers will be empowered by owning data. This is such a disruptive thing that is happening so soon.”

john.thornhill@ft.com

Follow John Thornhill with myFT



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