The Tech Brief

The internet’s multi-stakeholder model faces recurrent pressure from political actors that want to assert control over its backbone infrastructure. These tensions are generated from the accusation that the internet is too US-centric, which seems shared not only by non-Western powers such as Russia and China but also by Europe itself. We discuss the challenges for internet governance and whether there is a need to ‘democratise’ it with Goran Marby, CEO of ICANN.

Julia Hess and Jan-Peter Kleinhans, Technology and Geopolitics experts at the German Think Tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, share their assessment of the Chips Act as it is proposed and explain what they would change, particularly in pillar three. Instead of supply chain monitoring, they suggest that governments should perform value chain mapping and leave the former to the industry. 

The Commission’s Joint Research Centre recently published a report with a comparative analysis of the national strategies on Artificial Intelligence across the EU. We discuss the topic with Raquel Jorge, one of the report’s authors, diving into the state of AI uptake in Europe, what best practices are emerging, the challenges from the lab to the fab and potential approaches on regulatory sandboxes.

The war in Ukraine is being fought also in the cyber space. We discussed the key takeaways that can be drawn from the conflict so far with Ginny Badanes, Microsoft’s senior director of the Democracy Forward.

The Von der Leyen Commission recently passed its mid-term. With Andrea Garcia Rodriguez, the lead digital policy analyst at the European Policy Centre, we discussed what the EU executive has achieved in this first half of the mandate and potential perspectives for the future.

Scandinavian countries are well-known for having their own approach to social affairs. As regulating the working conditions of platform workers is now an hot topic in Brussels, we got a non-EU perspective to the issue in this discussion with Norway’s Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion, Marte Mjøs Persen.

Measures addressing copyright infringements are often a hot topic in EU digital policies. We discussed what is the state of play and trends in the EU with Alexandra Poch, Deputy Director of the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights, Julio Laporta, Head of Communication and Spokesperson at the European Union Intellectual Property Office.

EURACTIV caught up with the Czech Deputy Prime Minister for Digitisation, Ivan Bartoš, directly from Luxembourg during the Telecoms Council. We discussed the approach of the upcoming Czech Presidency to the open questions of the AI Act and Data Act, two of the main digital file Prague will have to deal with. We also discussed the telecoms’ ‘fair share’ proposal and the never-ending ePrivacy Regulation.

The European commission has unveiled on 11 May its long-awaited proposal to fight against child sexual abuse material online, or CSAM in short.

While children’s organisations have been receiving this regulation very well, it also sparked a lot on concerns for privacy defenders, worried that the provision forcing tech platforms to scan the communications of their users to detect CSAM would lead to an indiscriminate and disproportionate intrusion into our lives and would undermine encryption.

This week, Dan Sexton, the chief technical officer at the Internet Watch Foundation, a British child safety nonprofit, and Ella Jakubowska, a policy advisor at the European Digitals Rights network, joined the podcast to discuss the proposal.