The USA and China both have their own online platforms for mail/messaging, (social) media, business, commerce and cloud services. These services are run by Internet conglomerates such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft in the USA, and in China the Alibaba Group, Baidu and Tencent. Even Russia has its own conglomerates and platforms, e.g. the Mail.ru Group (which also owns ICQ, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte), Rambler and Yandex.
Despite their geo-economic differences, the underlying model for all of these services is similar: a highly centralised platform economy/ecosystem built as a walled garden, bringing together very large numbers of users, network effects,Rufus Pollock, founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) calls these 'platform effects' in his 2018 book 'The Open Revolution' (as discussed in section <7.1.17>). and surveillance capitalism or (state) mass surveillance.
Even though Europe has many platform companies, it lacks this type of large, powerful Internet conglomerate. European citizens and organisations have traditionally piggybacked on US-based platforms.
In the future, the GAIA-X projecthttps://www.data-infrastructure.eu/GAIAX/Navigation/EN/Home/home.html – to be based on European regulations and values – may play an important role in providing a European (nationally federated) FOSS-based, open cloud/data infrastructure, hopefully helping to build our digital sovereigntyIn March 2021, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, and Finland sent a joint letter to EC President Ursula von der Leyen, calling on the EU to accelerate building Europe's digital sovereignty. and protect the privacy of European citizens. However, the project is supposed to provide an underlying infrastructure rather than a platform to directly compete against or replace existing hyperscalers. <TODO: source> From a business perspective, that train is long gone anyway, even if this type of conglomerate was ever a good match to the European business climate.
Instead, the real opportunity for Europe to build its own infrastructures and platforms is in the new paradigm of federated networks. This includes distributed social networks such as Mastodon and PeerTube (both built on the ActivityPub protocol and having European roots: German and French, respectively), as well as Element and Synapsehttps://github.com/matrix-org/synapse (a client and server, respectively, for the Matrix protocol). Together, all the interconnected nodes form the so-called Fediverse.
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)https://ipfs.io/ is another example of a decentralised network, in this case for storing data in a distributed file system.
Note that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), which investigated the compliance of contractual arrangements between the EU institutions and Microsoft,https://edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2019/edps-investigates-contractual-agreements_en recently recommended Mastodon and PeerTube as the most privacy-friendly solutions.https://twitter.com/EU_EDPS/status/1355103335272079360 EDPS, together with other European institutions, recently started using both solutions in a first pilot. <TODO: source> In April 2021, PeerTube announced that the development of the next version of the software will be funded through an NLnet grant.https://joinpeertube.org/news#roadmap-v4
Strongly related to these federated and decentralised networks are self-hosted systems such as Nextcloud (which also supports ActivityPub), CozyCloud,https://cozy.io/en/ Seafile and Jitsi.
All of these servers can be deployed on virtual machines in the cloud, but also on small and cheap single-board computers (SBCs) running Linux, such as the Raspberry Pi (not open) and BeagleBoard.
But that is not the only link to open-source hardware and software: One can imagine that the freedom for people to choose their own internet access routers/modems, which is an implicit part of the 'EU Regulation on open internet access',https://fsfe.org/activities/routers/routers.en.htmlhttps://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/open-internethttps://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2015.310.01.0001.01.ENG&toc=OJ:L:2015:310:TOC will make it a lot easier to deploy a router/modem running the Linux-based OpenWRT system. A great example of such a system is the fully open-source Turris Omnia routerhttps://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/ developed by CZ.NIC, the Czech registry for the .cz top-level country domain name, after a highly successful crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. [see also section <B.2>] Having an open Linux-based system in every home in the form of an appliance like this would allow households to easily participate in the Fediverse and take full control of their data.
While internet access providers have a commercial interest in frustrating this free choice of routers – in addition to Internet access, they often sell hosting services to their customers, for example – the European Commission could make an additional effort to clarify the implications of the Regulation with regard to "router freedom".https://www.jipitec.eu/issues/jipitec-11-3-2020/5188 In the meantime, people can for example use the Linux-based FreedomBox softwarehttps://freedombox.org/ to turn an OLinuXino or BeagleBone SBC into a fully-featuredhttps://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Features private server appliance that they can connect to their routers.
Note that all these decentralised, self-hosted and federated systems are about moving away from de facto standards to true open standards and protocols (required for interoperability), about openness (through open source), about freedom of choice (instead of being forced to use the centralised, oligarchic conglomerate platforms), and about individuals having full control over their data (escaping the walled gardens of surveillance).
All of this is a great match with European values and culture [OIN], and provides Europe with plenty of opportunities to play a pivotal role in next-generation networks and applications.
This article is part of the research performed for the EC project 'Development of a Funding Mechanism for Sustaining Open Source Software for European Public Services' (2022).
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