Do We Really Want a European AWS, Google or Facebook?
Recent actions and signals from the current US administration certainly have profound ramifications. Particularly with respect to our ability to function as sovereign, European nations, in control of our own media, information and data. It is dawning on Europe, that it is in fact the control of our own destiny, our freedom, that is at stake.
The core problem is of course that today, Big Tech handles almost all of our communications, our media and our data. The lifeblood of any modern society.
We should however keep in mind, that there are other problems with Big Tech than the fact that most of it is run by American corporations. Yes, Big Tech has had a profound impact on our societies, but if we for a moment disregard economic gains in efficiency, as it turns out, most of this impact is bad. In fact, Big Tech may be one of the reasons we ended up in the current predicament.
We know now with absolute certainty (https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393), that monopolistic, centralized Big Tech eventually turns evil. When it comes to this basic fact, it matters little if it’s American or European.
If Europe wants to grow a tech industry that can stand strong in its own right, we need to stop dreaming about creating European copies of the broken, unregulated, monopolistic corporations that prey on our free and open societies. We need to figure out how to build things in a European way. Our technology should reflect our values. Because we now see, that technology shapes our societies.
The European values of openness, fairness, transparency and decentralization are deeply embedded in the concept and practice of open source. Open source software can never be evil. Open source infrastructure will never be centralized or monopolistic. It’s that simple. Let’s actually learn from the past, and make this a requirement for all European cloud infrastructure. Particularly for cloud infrastructure that is run for our tax money.
Europe is a world leader in regulation. This is often ridiculed and used as an explanation for why Europe has not spawned any monopolistic, Big Tech corporations. About 50% of the revenue of Big Tech is generated in Europe. And a lot of this by advertisements that have destroyed our own advertising industries and local shopping life. The original vision of the Internet was not to be a medium where 90% of the information flow was designed to trap people in information loops with advertisements as the only escape. Ads in European social media should be heavily regulated and perhaps even forbidden in some contexts (think children). This would of course have very large implications for Big Tech in Europe. I think for the better. We might even end up growing our own, decentralized platforms.
