Democratic Digitalisation –
book by Simona Levi et al, @
Xnet.
Recently, Simona Levi and co-authors published their book ‘Democratic Digitalisation - Digital Sovereignty for the people’ in Spanish and Catalan. Time to review their reflections and policy recommendations.
The book is based on a
reflection paper by the same authors at the request of the cabinet of former President of the
European Parliament, David Sassoli in 2021. The original publication in English:
Proposal for a sovereign and democratic digitalisation of Europe, S. Levi et. al (2021).
The book is written to require the public institutions to impulse an internet based on digital rights and cooperation, by default and by design, in other words: a
digital sovereignty where each person and each organisation can control the use and destination of created content and generated data.
At the start, their intentions are declared: the digital age as an opportunity to advance democracy, its capacity to resolve problems in a distributed manner, the disintermediation of relations of power, from centralised towards decentralised and distributed network models. No surprise then to see GAFAM (the acronym for the 5 biggest value expropriators of our times: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) as the big tech players that are mediating most internet relations.
When talking about digital sovereignty, they introduce a sovereignty that is disintermediated and distributed. Fundamental rights like privacy and distributed supervision of the public institutions are considered as the starting point for the design of infrastructures and tools for a democratic digitalisation as a basic requirement for a real democracy in the 21st century. The digital age, more than a technological change, is seen as a change to organisational and governance thinking.
The European Union has currently the better privacy protection regulation in the form of the GDPR. But these regulations should be implemented effectively and sanctioned more seriously. Digital tools should facilitate that a) people using them should maintain the control over their data and content and b) these tools should be auditable by the people, by everyone interested to do so. And that
auditability in a distributed fashion is only effectively possible by using software with published source code under free licenses, a.k.a. free software / libre software / open source software (FLOSS).
The book also refers to the increasing use of the concept and terminology of the commons, digital commons in this context. The UNDP advocating for
Digital Public Infrastructure, rights-based. The French government launching its
Action Plan for Free Software and Digital Commons in 2021. Missing however is a mention to the important report, supported by 16 EU Member States:
‘
Towards a sovereign digital infrastructure of Commons’ (2022). That came after the reflection paper was written for the EU Parliament’s presidency.
The book discusses a list of centralised technologies and their problems and celebrates the Digital Service Act and Digital Markets Act as an EU regulation that helps us advance, for example by prohibiting dark patterns (manipulative designs in user interfaces).
Interestingly, the authors propose concrete actions, like prototypes to start building democratic digitalisation. The
first action plan is a plan specifically for
education, a suite of online web applications, arguably the best of the free software world, that form the basis of a solution for the needs of educational centres. This is called the
DD project – Democratic Digitalisation-, and with an initial pilot funded by the Municipality of Barcelona, it was piloted at some 10 schools in and around the city. The DD suite includes well-known components like NextCloud, Moodle, BigBluebutton, WordPress and Etherpad, available under a Single Sign On mechanism.
The
second action plan is for a an interpersonal communication system, today known as
email. The need is clear when we look at the secrecy of communication: like the good old mailman is not allowed to open one’s (paper) mail, this right of secrecy is also protected for digital communications. This is called the ‘inviolability of communications’ and is protected amongst others by the
Charter for Fundamental Rights of the European Union. However more than half of all email accounts are managed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Not only is the secrecy of communication not guaranteed, also the use of email as medium of identification to identify oneself at other sites is seriously compromising people’s sovereignty. To have an infrastructure for interpersonal communication that guarantees the inviolability of communications is not an easy thing to accomplish. Especially not as it should be auditable by anyone interested. But the choice is political: if we care about digital sovereignty, this is an essential piece of infrastructure to develop.
The
third action plan is about the web browser. It is clear that the
web browser is an unmissable piece of infrastructure for a digital sovereign society. Also, after the browser wars of the last decades, Microsoft’s browsers initially took over and later Google Chrome, which has now such an enormous dominance (70%) that the use of Firefox has declined from 20% to ca. 7% of internet users. Firefox, despite its controversy, is considered the best option for a case study and opportunity to reclaim digital sovereignty. The Mozilla Foundation is loosing income, which it had been receiving from a deal with Google. Instead, the EU could step in and guarantee the sustainability and independence of Firefox.
Authors reflect about
economic sustainability about free software, e.g. citing a European Commission
study about the economic impact made by these softwares in the EU estimated at between 65.000 and 95.000 million Euro and a small increase in the contributions to these projects could generate a much higher return in terms of GDP.
Interesting is co-author Claudia Delso’s critical reflection about public procurement. Current EU regulations affirm that public contracts need to arrive at Small and Medium sized Enterprises, and need to be adjusted to the needs of SMEs. However, this is not applied. Most public procurement is absorbed by big corporations. Often SMEs are too small to be able to participate in public tenders, which makes that they cannot mature and build up the experience and mussel to participate in future rounds. This is a fundamental problem of not investing in the distributed economy and building capacity for sovereign digital infrastructure.
A last chapter deals with the prerequisite of having
quality internet access at affordable prices. This chapter is written by Ramon Roca, co-founder of Guifi.net, the network commons that started two decades ago in rural areas, where people started building their connections to the internet, with wireless and fibre optics technologies, and sharing their parts of the internet infrastructure between each other under commons governance. Roca points out that, while internet network infrastructure covers the whole of the EU, in rural areas some 10% of households doesn’t have access to cable/fibre and 41% doesn’t reach 30 Mbps. Overall of all EU citizens, 8% doesn’t reach even the minimum of 10 Mbps. Given that much public money is invested, this can be solved if public contracts 1) are divided in small lots that allow SMEs to participate, or even collectives of citizens, 2) prioritise shared use of neutral infrastructure to lower the ecological footprint. This means to extend obligations to provide wholesale access so small operators can reuse existing infrastructure.
Conclusions. The book explains how digital sovereignty could look like building on existing regulations and with concrete starting points, for cloud, email, web browser and internet access. It includes tons of references and provides many useful insights. Importantly, it is a rights-based approach.
What I missed is the last couple of years of work on funding mechanisms for public digital infrastructure and digital commons, and a much longer and wider field of business models, economic sustainability and transition methodologies that ranges from platform cooperatives, cooperative clouds to networks of organisations working together towards a better internet. For sure, it is a very good read to get our policymakers and public administration officials informed about the urgent need for change and how public policies can look with an investment agenda for digital public infrastructure.
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