European technological sover eignty

For these past two years in Europe, we’ve been talking about technological sovereignty and independence. These are two intertwined concepts, and they represent one of the biggest challenges for the European Union. In this article we want to discuss them and analyze the role that infrastructures such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) play.

WHAT IS EUROPEAN TECHNOLOGICAL SOVEREIGNTY?

Let’s begin with this concept: European technological sovereignty. In the words of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, European technological sovereignty implies that Europe in this area should be able to “make its own decisions, based on its own values, respecting its own rules” . We are then talking about the EU’s ability to control its digital and technological resources, and make decisions about them. 

But in order to get to this point where we make decisions about our resources, we need to possess them in the first place. Currently, Europe has a high level of non-European technologies implanted in its value chains. For example, think of chips, which are vital to a hyperconnected world and they come to Europe from Asia. In our value chains, we also have a high number of companies from outside of Europe that, once they’re inside, they’re very hard to replace. 

TECHNOLOGICAL DEPENDENCY ON THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA

What you’ve read means that the EU, right now, has a high dependency level on technologies and companies from other regions of the world, mainly the United States and China. The goal of European technological sovereignty -and now we’re approaching the second of the mentioned concepts- is to prevent technological dependency that harms the evolution of the European economy and society. 

This is why the European Commission  is promoting investments in the development and implementation of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, edge computing and blockchain, among other technologies, and also digital infrastructures such as 5G. It’s also promoting the data economy. Starting with data security and privacy, the goal is to increase transparency in the use of information on the Internet, and that it should serve society: its citizens, businesses, administrations and public entities. 

EUROPEAN GAIA – X PROJECT: STRENGTHENING TECHNOLOGICAL SOVEREIGNTY 

If we’re talking about data economy, we definitely need to refer to Gaia-X, the European public-private project aimed at achieving technological and cloud data sovereignty. Meaning: European data generated in Europe, should remain within the European territory. Or better yet, in the European Cloud, under European principles and laws, and shouldn’t be transferred to the United States, where the level of protection is lower. We want to avoid that industrial data goes through what has happened with personal European data: in most cases, they’ve ended up in the United States. 

On March 18, the founding assembly of the Spanish hub of Gaia-X, met in Talavera de la Reina. 

Transparent Edge contributed by drafting the status as part of its reviewing group. From the start, we knew we had to be there as a Spanish technology company with the only commercial Spanish CDN. To ensure data sovereignty is also to ensure the control of related technologies, the CDN being one of them. 

EUROPEAN TECHNOLOGY PROVIDERS

A CDN is a network of nodes distributed globally: it replicates the original content from origin servers so that when a user requests certain content, what they receive is a copy of it from the nearest node. This proximity decreases the latency and bandwidth consumption, and guarantees quick downloads. A CDN doesn’t only deliver web content, but any data that can be digitized, such as audio, video, apps, games, etc.

In the context of making efforts towards technological sovereignty and independence in Europe, the existence of one or more European CDNs of reference is essential to guarantee that the European content (data) is distributed by technology providers that operate under European values and regulations.

Our goal is to give the European space a vital infrastructure for the proper performance of the Internet, that contributes to ensure technological sovereignty, and also guaranteeing that the speed and safety of the network won’t lie exclusively in the hands of non-European CDN providers. There is no technological sovereignty without European technology actors.