Tariq Krim: In Europe, we no longer have any technology leaders, because we favored big companies such as telcos and did not believe in small startups. And we do not have a real software culture: because, yes, the software is culture. A larger and larger part of our data is stored and operated from companies abroad, and that's a massive risk. After the European Court of Justice ruled in favor of Max Schrems we are left with no regulations. We need European quotas for software, exactly how we in France have them for music over FM radio. Companies should stop worrying about page views and likes, abandon third-party platforms, and re-own their relationship with customers.
Media Monitor Podcast for May 16, 2022
This week we're moving away from our usual Italian-centric focus to talk with Tariq Krim about European data independency, why all big platforms (such as YouTube, Instagram, etc) are US based, how European media organizations should abandon third-party platforms and get the customers relation back into their hands. The entire conversation is available in podcast form here
Tariq Krim
Tariq is a writer, tech entrepreneur, and inventor based in Paris. in his short bio on the web, he states that, after helping create Web 2.0, is now working to make the internet a nicer place to live. He was the creator of Netvibes and the founder of Jolicloud. In 2008 he was the first French national named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. He is Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters).
The Interview
(Newslinet) - First of all two words on who you are and your experience in France and in the Valley.
(Tariq Krim) - I'm a French entrepreneur, based in Paris, but I've also lived in San Francisco during the 90s. Internet era. So I have both cultures. I've been involved in computers since the really early days of the web. Actually, before even the web existed with phones and modems.
Then I've been involved in what we used to call the web 2.0, the reinvention of the web. You know, for decades the Internet existed, but basically, nothing really happened. And then here comes a player called Mozilla that (re)invents the browser allowing a lot of companies like mine (Netvibes at the time) to do new things.
Then of course YouTube and Facebook and a bunch of others started, making the web more interactive.
At the moment, I'm writing about the history of the internet: let's say that I'm taking the time to pose and look back and look at how and how we got where we are today.
Musk and Twitter
(NL) - It seems that in 2022 everybody focuses on the dangers of a Musk-owned Twitter, and no one worrying anymore about Facebook and the question of algos amplifying divisive content. What is your view?(TK) - The question of social media has always been the same, it's that we allowed machines, and we allowed computers to be in our personal life, in our intimacy.
We allow them to access photos or messages or text, everything we own: our music playlist, our video playlist. And based on that, a lot of algorithms have been used by companies like Facebook, YouTube or Apple, etc, to try to figure out how they can simplify our lives, and how they could better learn who we are to serve as better options, but also, better-targeted ads.
And a problem is, I believe, that assumption that they should live within the intimate space of a user is a very dangerous assumption because by getting to the intimate space, you get to change people's beliefs. You change people's positions; you change how people react to things.
Angriness
Suddenly, out of the blue, people start being really angry at things that they don't even care about, don't even understand, just because of the way this news and information came into their intimate space. And the other thing is because social media trying to regroup people with the same belief, then this amplifies angriness, this amplifies the fact that people are just talking to angry people.
Maybe this kind of approach is great for businesses because you can easily sell to someone angry, someone you can easily manipulate. But at this point, this is having very big effects on our democracy, on public debate, on health policy.
No Vax
A lot of people who needed basic health aid, and who needed vaccines were the most, loudest advocate for not using them. Some of them even died. This is the tragedy of where we are today, we have all the technology we need, and people do not believe in science anymore
Europe and the Tech giants
(NL) - Let's talk about the tech giants. France has some companies competing with them - like Daily Motion, Qwant, etc. Yet not one has become dominant, as another European company, Spotify, did. Why is that?(TK) - So this is a very, very, very interesting question about why and how we in Europe didn't get to have leaders in many spaces of technology. We used to have technology leaders: the telcos, the telecom operators. Telcos were big companies with very strong rules and businesses.
A giant in every country
With telcos, what you do is you split the world into different places, and then in each just a few operators exist. With the deregulation of telecommunication, a few more operators came in, like, you know, like, Vodafone Orange, Omnitel. So few large companies have really started controlling tech in Europe.
A new kind of competition
But when the internet came in, it was a different competition. First of all, the amount of money you needed to play with was extremely important. But also, I think a lot of people in Europe didn't understand and still do not understand that at this point, the value shifted from infrastructure, the telecommunication network, and the ability to connect with the customer.
Shifting value
With the internet, software became the most valuable asset. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, they're basically software companies, sometimes they don't even own the data center. And they operate on the assumption that with good software, you can make way more money on the only end customer.
Lack of end-user software culture in Europe
That culture of building consumer software didn't really exist in Europe. And the reason it didn't exist is that a lot of companies - like mine at the time, Netvibes - were small companies, and nobody would ever help us to grow to become a bigger company.
In Europe, we thought growth could come from TELCOs
Nobody believed that small companies would actually exist in the long term, so what did they do instead of allowing smaller companies to thrive? What happened in Europe is we thought that Telcom operators could actually build services in place of the smaller companies.
And this was a disaster because, at the end of the day, a lot of the companies that had great products did not get traction. For one, I would leave for the US or basically got acquired and basically die.
Sovereign Cloud
(NL) - President Macron is trying to push for France (and Europe) to have a sovereign cloud. First of all, is hesucceeding, is anything moving?
(TK) - This is an interesting thing because this idea of digital sovereignty is a concept that's been pushed for a while. And it is a concept that I believe is slightly changing now with what happened with the war in Ukraine. So basically, the idea is that, as a country, you should own your data, you should own your critical infrastructure. And you should be making sure that your citizens are not controlled, either by third parties or manipulated by social networks. You should have this kind of sovereignty, making sure that no third-party operator is messing up with either your economy or your people, and you should make sure that you can protect the data, the most important data of the country.
No partnership with US tech giants
Because of the big tech domination, a lot of companies, and a lot of governments are now trying to do partnerships with external companies and try to explain to us how that would be more efficient. I believe it's a mistake. I've been trying to push against this for 10 years. But at the moment, what we see with the Macron government and the previous government is that there's a larger and larger part of what should be operated by us that is now operated by foreign operators.
A massive risk
And that has a massive risk. And one of them is the risk of resiliency. When you think about how we were very, very exposed to outside technology. We've seen what happened, how fast it was to disconnect Afghanistan when the Taliban took over, with just the switch button. And basically, they are now locked out. The same thing is happening right now in Russia. So, what will happen one day, if we are not agreeing with this or that? How do we make sure that we can still get control over here? And this is a very deep question, but a lot of governments at the moment have chosen not to respond.
An "Azure" Europe?
(NL) - Do you think that Microsoft stating "European data is hosted on Azure servers on European soil" is a good answer?
(TK) - Right, that's one of the things that most of the big tech says: Well, you know, if you host the data with us, within Europe, it's like if you were hosting the data with a European company.
Not true
And of course, it's not true, because any US company is subject to the cloud act, FISA, and many different directives that force them to allow the government, US government at different levels (it could be military, it could be intelligence, but it can also be a simple judge), to access the data that are stored anywhere in the world. Outside the US, that is. This is a big issue.
An issue between Europe and USA
It's a big issue between Europe and the US. It's an issue that has created some friction because we had an agreement between the US and Europe for the free flow of data. And that agreement was broken apart by an Austrian activist called Max Schrems, and the European Court of Justice said he was right. So right now, we do not have any regulations.
Illegal?
And a lot of people now believe that if you're putting your data in big tech companies outside of the EU, this is something illegal. And so far, there's no real answer to that.
Gaia-x
(NL) - Gaia-X. Mr. Filloux view is that it is just a typical European bureaucratic monster, not agile enough to gain traction. What's your point of view?
(TK) - There have been several approaches to creating an organization to build a sovereign cloud initiative. The most well-known the German-French (in fact mostly German) one is called Gaia X.
A monster
But actually, it has become this monster of a dozen of companies, including Chinese companies, and American companies, trying to work on an official standard. There are now about 100 European companies, small and mid-sized companies in the project I believe a lot in what they're doing, trying to reconnect everyone together and create an ecosystem that works well together.
Small companies in GAIA-X
An interesting situation because again I believe that the future of Europe comes from smaller companies, not from the big companies, the big companies have lost this. They've lost their way of creating new ideas and just basically became glorified resellers of American or Chinese-based solutions.
Lack of talents
And the reason is that we need engineers, we need more engineers to create a great product. And I believe personally that only smaller companies and startups can do this. The question is, when we have this, how about the next step? How do we make sure that Europe is buying the product that European companies are producing?
European quotas
This is a massive challenge, I'm personally in favor of using quotas in buying. So, a certain amount of buying should be European.
Software is culture...
In the same way, we had a quota rule for culture: I believe software is culture, I believe it's software made in Europe is very different from software made in the US. The mindset is different and the approach to productivity vs. life is different.
...like music
And I think we should protect that. In the same way we protect the music in France, and that saved music and allowed bands like Daft Punk to thrive globally. This is something that very few of us are trying to push. And there are a lot of people who say this is shouldn't be a good idea. But I, in the long term, believe that at the end of the day, technology is about culture more than anything else.
Suggestions for media organizations
(NL) - Finally, your suggestions to media organizations (radio/TV/newspaper etc.) that want to make sure their operations do not depend on systems and services hosted abroad.
(TK) - Well, first of all, I truly believe that whatever a company is doing, it should operate independently of other media companies. Basically, if your operation is on YouTube, it means that you don't know who's watching them, you have to rely on Google and companies like that to know what's happening to your customers and how to create relationships.
Own the Relationship
And we forgot that the essence of the media business is to create a relationship between a brand, a group of programs, and the community and I truly believe that we should explore new ways of promoting contact. Podcasts, newsletters, things that give the direct approach, direct contact with the end-user. And this is something we tend to forget because we're all trying to read the usual numbers, how many people follow us on Facebook and Instagram etc..
What's good for Facebook is not good for our brands
But this is good for Facebook and Instagram and it's not good for you. Because at the end of the day, if you're putting everything you have on YouTube, Instagram, etc., your content becomes in competition with low-quality content from whatever creator is out there, whatever content competitor, and you have zero control.
Re-own the relationship and the platform
I think it's important to re-own the relationship between customers and the brand, while also owning the media platform. I think we'll see more and more companies trying to do that, start rebuilding their own platform and figuring out a way to operate in that space, how to create an organization that lives in our own sovereign cloud space. (M.H.B . for NL Newslinet).
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