EU & Civil Society need to progress on Digital Autonomy - Bert Hubert's writings

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By now (happily) everyone wants to talk about digital autonomy, although some parties insist we talk about sovereignty. Fine.

tl;dr: The discussions on digital autonomy are now going round in circles. Civil society and think tanks want to contribute, and are well placed to do so. In this piece, I urge everyone to look further ahead, beyond legislation and talking about European values. The road to digital sovereignty is very long, and we need to make progress along that entire road, which includes things further afield than what we are discussing now. We will not attain any form of digital sovereignty without the help of civil society, and below is a list of things I think we should be doing more of.

I often attend events, often in Brussels, on how to improve Europe’s autonomy/sovereignty, and lately these events have left me feeling somewhat frustrated. Although a lot of ground has been covered, it appears we are stuck. Our talking is no longer getting us closer to digital sovereignty.

Getting actual “boots on the ground” digital sovereignty requires work by European government technical staff, who need to have management that approves of that. That in turn requires a ministry that has decided to work like that. And that also requires a procurement department that is VERY on board, and willing to suffer lawsuits over their efforts to procure European services. Also, there need to be software/services companies willing and able to deliver such services to governments.

This in turn only happens if senior government people are either forced to do it because of EU rules, or they themselves believe this is necessary, and that in turn only happens if politicians care.

This is a very long chain of things that need to happen.

Yet when we (civil society) do events on this, no one from procurement is present. Not even procurement groups or trade bodies. And they are important, since they currently have no time or money to deal with the lawsuits that come with doing anything other than big tech.

Also, no IT department people ever join the conversation over at think tanks. We rarely have vendors present. And also, no member state government executive people in general chime in.

The work on digital sovereignty is appreciated, and I know it is also well-intentioned. But we need more.

A brief aside: what is civil society and what is its role?

Civil society, including think tanks, councils, boards, committees etc, tries to influence government or more broadly societal decision making. In a way this looks like a weird place to try to change policies. You could join a political party and make policy directly. Why sit on the sidelines and talk nonstop about things, hoping that this will deliver change?

Yet, by dint of its very out-of-power setting, civil society has a license to speculate, to entertain quarter- or half-baked policy ideas, without immediate reputational consequences. Although government and political people often attend, they won’t be held liable for listening to a discussion where novel and perhaps as yet unpalateable ideas are being raised. Things the politician would not be able to talk about in an official setting. “Since when is party XYZ ok with nuclear power?”. And it is good that we can discuss such things without making headlines in the news.

I like to compare our civil society activities to the sweeping that happens in curling. Source: By Krazytea - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Policy making is difficult enough. There are many unknowns. The best ideas are non-intuitive, and politicians and other decision makers are not fluent in everything (nor even in most things, to be honest).

Government workers typically abhor “novel ideas”. By discussing an idea to death in over 20 panels, it is possible to rob an idea of its dangerous novelty, and make it staid enough for people to go to bat for it in political debates.

A simple change in law may need lots of work on downstream rules and regulations. And before authoring the change, legislators need to know a lot about the landscape and the eventual effects.

Civil society can massively smoothen this process by engaging with participants, having them speak their minds, and elaborate how they think things should work.

In this way, think tanks can also provide proven talking points to politicians. In addition, panels, debates, work groups can expose legislators to a broad set of often world class experts.

Civil society can level a path towards desired policies, and mostly do so in a more transparent way than professional commercial lobbyists trying to do the same.

With all that, civil society is in a great place to inform, facilitate and influence decision making. In fact, it is hard to imagine how many laws could even be made without being “pre-soaked” in civil society meetings.

So, it is...