The Fight for Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, and Why It Matters, Especially for the EU

摘要

Digital sovereignty seems to be something very important, given the popularity of the topic these days. True. But it also sounds like a technical issue, which concerns only specialists. False. Digital sovereignty, and the fight for it, touch everyone, even those who do not have a mobile phone or have never used an online service. To understand why, let me start with four episodes. I shall add a fifth shortly. June 18, 2020: The British government, after having failed to develop a centralised, coronavirus app not based on the API provided by Google-Apple,' gave up, ditched the whole project (Burgess 2020) and accepted to start developing a new app in the future that would be fully compatible with the decentralised solution supported by the two American companies. This U-turn was not the first: Italy (Longo 2020) and Germany (Busvine and Rinke 2020; Lomas 2020) had done the same, only much earlier. Note that, in the context of an online webinar on COVID-19 contact tracing applications, organised by RENEW EUROPE (a liberal, pro-European political group of the European Parliament), Gary Davis, Global Director of Privacy & Law Enforcement Requests at Apple (and previously Deputy Commissioner at the Irish Data Protection Commissioner's Office), stated that "Google/Apple can disable the system [i.e. the contact tracing app, my text] on a regional basis when no longer needed".