🇪🇺 Beyond regulation: building Europe’s Public Digital Infrastructure
Open Future on the underlying building blocks of a better internet
Along with our friends from the Integrity Institute, we’re hosting a Happy Hour in Washington, D.C., on February 1st. Hope to see you there.
In general, New_ Public is more interested in creating new, prosocial products and spaces than changing the dominant, established platforms. Typically, we don’t focus on policy, like new rules and laws to curb toxicity and harm.
Some of our friends and peer organizations have taken this on with great passion. We applaud the Council for Technology and Social Cohesion and the Prosocial Design Network for advancing improved tech design governance. American efforts to lobby for a better internet are crucial and must continue.
However, regulatory change is extraordinarily difficult in the United States, especially concerning technology. While there is some movement in the courts, and at the state level, Congress has not yet been able to pass any meaningful legislation to regulate social media.
Meanwhile in Europe, there has been action. European legislators are actually doing what their American counterparts are unwilling or unable to do. And they aren’t nearly done. Below, our friends at European policy think tank Open Future lay out new focus areas and concepts that build on European regulatory progress and expand the continent’s tech leadership.
In particular, they lay out a vision for publicly-funded infrastructure to ensure that new tech services and solutions, including social media, are built and function in the people's interest. This next era is an incredible opportunity to shape the global digital ecosystem for the better.
–Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial
Europe leads the way
Many communities throughout the world seem to have learned the hard way that commercial social platforms are far from ideal as online public squares. Instead, they often serve as perfect breeding grounds for algorithmic manipulation and amplification of anti-democratic voices.
In Europe, we’ve found that regulation is an essential tool to strike a balance between fostering innovation and safeguarding people and the environment from technological harm. Laws can prioritize the public interest and help to ensure that technology is developed and used responsibly and ethically, and with consideration for its broader impact on various aspects of life.
The European Union has made significant strides in the last five years with some notable digital regulations, including the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the Artificial Intelligence Act, and the Platform Workers Directive. These are Brussels-created rules aimed at curbing the power of the largest platforms and protecting human rights, and they are making waves around the world.
Now, Europe is ready to take the next step. Civil society organizations working on digital rights in Europe, like Open Future, EDRI, Wikimedia Europe, and many others, have been arguing that governments have an obligation to ensure the existence of a Digital Public Space — an open and sustainable ecosystem offering alternatives to existing commercial social platforms. (We use “digital public space” a bit differently from New_ Public, which refers to the platforms themselves.)
Publicly-funded, prosocial alternative digital products and spaces are necessary in order for people to be able to enjoy digital rights, such as privacy, self-determination, and freedom of speech. They’re also needed for collective collaboration, creation, and sharing of resources.
Last year, Europe made an important statement by adopting the Declaration on digital rights and principles. Fostering participation in a Digital Public Space is one of its key goals. As 2024 unfolds, the EU is gearing up for the European Parliament elections and the formation of a new European Commission, its executive body.
Now is the perfect time to explore ideas and policies that will help to create a Digital Public Space in Europe:
Fund Digital Public Infrastructure
One key development in recent years has been the growing insight that Europe must move away from the dominant Silicon Valley tools and towards European Public Digital Infrastructures.
Currently, private companies shape the majority of user-facing communication technologies, aligning them with the financial interests of shareholders and venture capital. Developing digital solutions and building infrastructures that prioritize values like openness, equality, and democratic control calls for a shift in funding. This can help make sure that the services we use and rely on can be held accountable to the public.
Public Digital Infrastructure needs to be built not only with digital rights but also with ecological sustainability in mind. Such a holistic approach must take into account the material underpinnings of digital technologies, including the overall environmental impact of how all materials and energy are developed, used, discarded or recycled.
Public funding is needed to ensure the creation and maintenance of essential, underlying technological building blocks. These, in turn, can be used to create new, reliable digital tools and services, such as public media services, educational tools, or civic solutions for local communities. The next European Commission will have the opportunity to deliver results on these insights by launching a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund.
Create and share resources as Digital Commons
Policies that establish a Digital Public Space also need to support the creation of Digital Commons. These are collectively created and managed resources — such as data, information, and knowledge — that are shared as freely as possible and managed in a collective and democratic manner. Wikipedia, open-source software, digital cultural resources that are in the public domain, or academic articles shared under open licenses are great examples of Digital Commons.
Again, Europe has been leading in some aspects, including the early adoption of Open Access standards for European research. Europeana, the public gateway to Europe’s cultural heritage in a digital form, is another example. These offer proof that Digital Commons can help put technologies in the service of citizens and the public interest.
The newest challenges in this space concern generative AI. European regulation — like the recently finalized AI Act — needs to go hand in hand with projects that build alternatives to commercial services. One such project should be creating training datasets that are not proprietary but publicly-funded and freely-shared. This requires setting rules to ensure that companies and organizations that benefit financially from Digital Commons by, for example, creating bots trained on Wikipedia, channel some of this value back into the further creation and maintenance of those resources.
Bring interoperability back
Interoperability is a big idea at the heart of the internet. It is a principle, expressed in technological standards and code, that ensures different parts of the digital domain stay connected. Thanks to interoperable email protocols, you can reach anyone with an email address, no matter what server, service, or program they use.
Unfortunately, interoperability has been marginalized by commercial platforms: you cannot easily share content between different video services or message friends across different social networks. New interoperability standards, usually discussed as measures to bring market competition, are also powerful generative mechanisms that can help civic, non-commercial spaces flourish.
Europe has made the first step by mandating that messaging services will need to be able to “talk to each other” by March 2024. In the coming years, there will be a need to expand this mandate: public institutions will need to build a presence on new, decentralized, and interoperable networks like the Fediverse. This will prove the utility of interoperability, especially if the new networks connect with the proprietary networks owned by corporate giants.
The power that the largest tech platforms hold over our online spaces poses a challenge, but it’s not an insurmountable one. Europe, through regulations, has begun to seek solutions. As the world waits for the effects of the new legislation to kick in, Europe also needs to create alternatives. There’s a high chance that such a bold policy vision will be adopted by the new European Commission this year. A mix of interoperability mechanisms, public infrastructures, and Digital Commons would create the basis for a European internet that feels much more like a Digital Public Space — a collective and collaborative, publicly-controlled internet.
–Open Future
To read more about Open Future’s policy ideas on how a Digital Public Space could come to life in Europe, check out their Digital Public Space primer and subscribe to their newsletter.
Shoveling out my front walk,
–Josh
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