Here we go – I live blogged the French & German Berlin #digitalsovereignty meeting. It starts bad but gets better, ends with interesting statements by Mertz and Macron.
People keep asking about it, so now I've pinned it. Isn't it wonderful that Mastodon lets you edit toots? If only someone let us fix lists' links... there's one fork because a toot got stuck in drafts for a week.
Ironically, the wifi sucks here. #digitalSovereignty
First speaker: Karsten Wildberger
DE Fed Minister for Digital Transformation & Government Modernisation
Absolutely horrified to hear BS about "EU only buying" and "too much ex ante legislation." The EU digital governance has been built over decades on observed harms, and the EU is passing China on both WIPO AI IP and the market capitalisation of the companies that hold it.
There's certainly a problem with the US domiciling & failing to regulate a few transnational utilities, but AI is much more than those few companies.
Roland Lescure
French Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Industrial, Energy and Digital Sovereignty, is much better! Claims to be aligned with Wildberger, but talks about the need to enforce and support DSA & DMA.
next
Henna Virkkunen
exec vp for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy, EC
says DMA & AIA being enforced.
#digitalSovereignty
In our paper, "Is there an AI Cold War", @helenamalikova and I showed that the EU was absolutely building AI, on par with China as measured through WIPO patents and the market cap of companies that hold those patents. That was 2020, but it's still true, here is the unpublished updated data:
https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/2/1/24803/117647/Is-There-an-AI-Cold-War
Next panel #digitalsovereignty is less depressing, some winners in quantum & robotics & VC see Europe's advantages & advances.
Startups, Investors and Government
Thomas Steffen, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWK), Germany
Chloé Poisbeau, COO, Alice&Bob
Marc Wietfeld, CEO, ARX Robotics
Romy Schnelle, Managing Director, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF)
Thomas Courbe, Director General, Ministry of Economy and Finance, France
Timotheus Höttges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom
we used to have global values chains now: tech nationalism
we had physical ownership, now we have digital access, who owns?
we used to have proprietary systems, now everything is about openness and interoperability, setting the standards defines the access and quality; is this us?
old: digitalisation; new: superinteilligence he gives EU zero for this. "Ai is able to reason, ai is able to create, it's creating autonomous systems"
old: industry 4.o new: "physical ai"
"put your blinkers on and cross the river feeling the stones.
Cristina Caffarra, Expert in Digital Markets / Euro Stack Initiative
stack is only chips, we need to regain contol on this.
we did a complete wrong term when we thought regulation would give us an industry [no, we thought it would give us a large, solid, sustainable, secure market, and we were right. Last I knew she took a lot of money from Apple and Microsoft?]
Final #digitalsovereignty panel before lunch: Europe: The Continent of AI Opportunities
Vanessa Cann, AI Leader, Entrepreneur, Business Angel
Christian Klein, CEO, SAP
Arthur Mensch, Founder and CEO, Mistral
Robin Rombach, CEO and Co-Founder, Black Forest Labs
Christel Heydemann, CEO, Orange Group
lots of idioms being thrown around.
We're back to hear more bashing on the regulation that's helping us not demolish our own security like the US is and UK has. This time from Ralf Wintergerst, President, Bitkom in the context of
The EUDI Wallet: A Key Enabler in Building a Digital Europe Rooted in Sovereignty, Trust and #Interoperability
(everyone is talking about interoperability today but no one can pronounce it :-D I shouldn't joke my German and French are also terrible.) #digitalsovereignty #digitalGovernance #AIEthics
More speakers:
Roberto Viola, Director-General, DG Networks, Content and Technology, EC
Kristina Yasuda, Product Owner, SPRIND
Anne-Gaëlle Baudouin, Executive Director, ANTS
Agnès Diallo, CEO, IN Groupe
Oliver Lauer, CDO, Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband
Am I the only one who doesn't like having my phone near readers? Is this really all cybersecure in all circumstances? I feel a lot safer waving cards and circulating cash #digitalsovereignty #cybersecurity #digitalWallet #personalSecurity
How does letting children have wallets on their phones link up with those trying to prevent children and therefore everyone from having #cybersecurity?
Slightly delayed #digitalSovereignty keynote: Caroline Stage Olsen, Minister for Digital Affairs, Denmark
"European strength has never come from building walls" #Berlin
I love Denmark, but not that both of their diplomats to the US big tech got hired by Microsoft after they finished their terms.
She's proposing that we make the EU sovereign by eliminating its laws. You can move "decryption" of the law forward WITHOUT changing the law, but by education & services.
DK holds the EU presidency right now.
At lunch, we discussed how the proposed delay of enforcement of the #AIAct is a consequence of allowing the centralisation of enforcement in the EC. While an understandable response to the GDPR enforcement issues, but neither a smart nor the best one. Centralising power facilitates regulatory capture.
#digitalSovereignty for the EU should involve exploiting the resilient resource of our 27+ governments. We don't want veto players. We do want #enforcement
My seat mate, Anke Domscheit-Berg (former Linke MP) gets me to stop being snarky to listen to Thomas Jarzombek, Parliamentary State Secretary, Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, Germany whom she says isn't as bad as some of the ones who went before, but TBH I didn't catch much new from him either.
The panel is The Power of Digital Commons: Building Europe’s Shared Digital Future
Art de Blaauw, CIO Dutch Central Government, Ministry of the Interior & Kingdom Relations, apparently was just elected the first president of a committee (edict?) on digital commons within the EU. He makes a nice speech but again no news…oh here's some news! Docs, open source govtech document editor built by DE FR & NL. Which I cannot find even searching with @kagihq 300K people are using it? #digitalSovereignty
It's a little weird hearing an Austrian talking about since the beginning of humanity technology determined empires. He said EDIC started in Vienna only 8 weeks ago hmm I think this is DC-EDIC https://www.zendis.de/en/newsroom/press/dc-edic-gegruendet which is one of the special cases of EDICs https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic
Alexander Pröll, State Secretary for Digitalisation, Federal Chancellery, Austria
still failing to find it online...
#edic #digitalSovereignty
I believe it was Adriana Groh, Managing Director, Sovereign Tech Agency
who just said
"this [independent, multi provider, open source software?] is the mission of the sovereign tech agency...infrastructure is power "
Corinne Cath, Digital Policy and Infrastructure Governance Expert @article19
The attacks on infrastructure are attacks on democracy disguised as glitches. These were timed to interfere with Danish elections.
In general, Corinne Cath, was awesome (as always) Someone finally calling this warfare out, really talking about why this matters.
"We cannot be turned off by accident, or as is increasingly likely in 2025, by intent."
Now Emmanuel Sardet, President of Cigref and Vice-CIO, Crédit Agricole talks good sense, yay! The last thing we as a bank need is agentic AI forced won our throats. The EU's lead on B2B AI is super, super important.
Fairer Markets in Support of #DigitalSovereignty is the new panel he's on. The panels are getting better and better, I guess because Macron & Merz are closing the day!
They are talking about how important the #DMA is, but they could equally say #GDPR https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7357055079889207299/
How much did the GDPR cost German SMEs? Nichts! – In fact, it looks to have improved profitability for the smallest companies. Which is what the GDPR was for – yes, it has compliance costs, but it simplifies doing business across the EU, so it shouldn't be surprising that actually net benefits corporations! I indeed nominally supervised Vy Vo on this project, but it was her idea, and she found the dataset and did the stats. Thanks to Arianna Ornaghi (an actual economist) who as also checked this work. And Vy for putting her work including all her code on github before she was even marked, so she could contribute to the EU deliberations and negotiations at that time on "simplifying" GDPR. Her Github is here: https://lnkd.in/e3k2aFWX UPDATE well, the github is there, she moved the dissertation (the old version said "submitted but not marked" the new one says "passed & nominated for a prize") https://lnkd.in/epRpBgW7 but you can find all the code and PDFs by looking at the column on the left). #GDPR #digitalGovernance Hertie School #AIGeopolitics #geoeconomics #AIAct #DSA #regulation | 16 comments on LinkedIn
This #digitalSovereignty panel is great. Alexandre de Streel, Professor of EU Law, CERRE and Université de Namur was just on an absolute tear about how great a champion Trump is for the #DMA that we can all see why we must enforce this.
Before him, Filomena Chirico, Head of Unit Digital Markets, DG Networks, Content and Technology, EC took a long turn talking good sense about the value of the DMA. She's now talking again about the good stuff about cloud in the DMA.
de Streel is also back now, pointing out that we had #openSource for DECADES and it wasn't saving us and this is now we now need #digitalGovernance #digitalRegulation. YES!! Contra the nonsense earlier in the day, this legislation is entirely ex post!
Sardet back too: we all talk about #interoperability but no users are changing and everyone just procures from hyperscalers. ABSOLUTELY! https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2021/05/neither-interoperability-nor-data.html no one believed me, I guess I should send that to him :-) #DMA
chair: are you sure the #DMA is going to solve this? Verena Pausder, Chair, German Startup Association
I can't promise but it is a sword and we need to use it. Startups aren't always talking about regulation but we all want this.
She also wants regulation to get some of the $300B/year invested into German pensions (incl. by me!) to go into VC, some fraction of a percent is now. Easily fixable without too much risk! #digitalSovereignty
Open source is an illusion without infrastructure.
Hey, I'm finally getting engagement here, including links to some of the software mentioned, see thread https://mstdn.social/@testman/115571162035084576 #digitalSovereignty
Now the panel is sadly confusing the #DSA and the #DMA. The DSA is supposed to be providing us visibility for recommenders. Oh, de Streel understand this, but there is a competition element given that the agentics are being inserted into widely-used browsers. (I'm switching my browser, email etc. over the local Solstice-associated holidays.)
Joanna Bryson, blathering
Jan Penfrat