Did you know that RT is the second most shared Spanish-language “information source”?
In my guest commentary for the FNF EU I identify a Propaganda Dilemma for democracies. While authoritarian states brazenly spent money to spread their false narratives at home and abroad, our values of free press and media make it almost impossible to match the messaging or deal with the lies imprinted on our open societies. I´ve suggested four steps the West should take to counterattack the Russian disinformation ecosystem.
Super happy that the updated and English Version of Sven Hilgers and my paper on the different development waves of digital currencies and the future of money is published and available for free on Freiheit.org.
In the updated version take the developments of the last couple of months into account and extended our policy recommendations in light of the Proposals discussed in the European Union. Hope you enjoy the read!
Last week the political parties that plan to form the new German Government presented their coalition agreement and their governmental agenda for the next four years. Over the weekend, I looked into the deal of the “Traffic light coalition” and tried to find out if the coalitions’ “Dare More Progress” promise, a slogan of their commitment to progressive governing, holds up when it comes to digital and technology policy. Let see where the coalition stands on civil rights, digital platforms and artificial intelligence.
Digital civil rights
After roughly two horrible decades for digital civil rights, it is instantly noticeable that the conservative party, who prevented any progress for online rights, is not a part of the agreement. As a result, some long required positive adjustments can be expected. First and foremost, the coalition expressed their full support for the individual right to encryption and wants to preserve the possibility to use online services anonymously and pseudonymously. This is a major step away from the surveillance focused agenda of the last governments and alone would be enough reason to celebrate, but the coalition is just getting started.
The coalition also specifically objects to any surveillance or identification duties when it comes to private communication and calls for the universal use of end-to-end-encryption, instead of calling to break it. And if all that wouldn’t be enough, the coalition also wants to adjust laws in order to enable private security research, while aiming to direct public agencies to focus on closing security breaches, instead of buying or using them as they’ve been doing so far.
As another cherry on top, the coalition agreement again and again states the need for Open Access to public data and that code financed by public money should be open-sourced. Security researchers might soon not only be allowed to test the public infrastructure, but also help make it better. The agenda on civil rights in general and the internet infrastructure specifically really holds up to the “Dare More Progress” promise.
Digital Platforms and content regulation
Today, most of the current issues surrounding digital policy in general and big platforms specifically are approached both on the European and on the national level. The coalition acknowledges this, seems to support more harmonization at the European level and plans to adjust the national legislation to new, harmonized European rules. The coalition agreement specifically states support for the currently pending major regulation on digital services (EU-DSA), on digital markets (EU-DMA) and the E-Privacy-Directive. Even though support for the ambitious European Legislation is explicitly stated there, the agreement does not go into much detail on how the coalition partners envision this ambitious framework on the practical level. The coalition does not want European legislation to fall behind existing national laws, strongly supports interoperability requirements and wants strong user rights, protecting the freedom of expression while still effectively fighting disinformation.
It is worth noting, though, that there may be at least some small directional decisions on two highly disputed regulatory tools.
First, I could not find a clause about “harmful content”. This could be a major hint on the direction regarding online speech. Harmful content is a newly created legal term that includes not just unlawful speech, but also lawful speech that might harm or offend others. Some proponents want to extend the strict rules regarding take-downs for private platforms on harmful content, while many civil rights activists caution and warn that this could lead to extensive filtering efforts by online platforms. Not mentioning the term could be seen as a decision against the inclusion of harmful content as a new category of speech and that the new government errs on the side of caution when it comes to the protection of free speech.
Second, the ideas on fostering competition in digital markets are a little more concrete. Next to the general call for an ambitious Digital Markets Act, the coalition states some key points regarding the content of such. The coalition agreement states clearly, that the possibility to break up companies that repeatedly harm competition is supposed to be a tool of last resort. Before breaking up Meta, the coalition wants to update anti-trust rules to avoid the emergence of dominating market players in the first place, make it easier to prevent killer-acquisitions at the European Level and strengthen the federal anti-trust agencies when it comes to digital platforms.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is one of the trending buzzwords in politics as well as in business for a couple of years now. Everyone is scared of it; every startup seems to be developing it, but nobody really knows what the term means. The traffic-light partners don’t even try to define what artificial intelligence is, but still agreed on how to regulate it(s use). The coalition, again, explicitly supports a European approach and the Artificial Intelligence Act proposed by the European Commission. Within this the coalition calls for a risk-based approach, meaning that not the technology itself should be regulated, but its specific use. While implementing regulation of high-risk applications, the coalition wants to protect the citizens civil rights, prevent discrimination as well as ex-ante requirements for service providers. With the clearly stated opinion on the limited need for pre-approval, the coalition makes clear that the German Government will err on the side of innovation and not treat every use-case of a multi-purpose technology like a nuclear plant.
Besides the general innovation-friendly approach towards artificial intelligence regulation, the coalition acknowledges the need for civil rights protection in the context of artificial intelligence. The agreement stipulates several times, that both biometric surveillance in public spaces and social scoring by states should be banned on the European Level – another win for progress.
Dare more progress?!
When it comes to digital and technology policy, the traffic-lights coalition has indeed planned to “Dare More Progress” and fix long lasting problems in the digital sphere. I personally would have loved a little more detail about the use of the blockchain-technology to empower users in the upcoming web3-era. Nonetheless, by making user civil rights, openness and innovation guiding principles, as well as ending harmful practices like the governmental use of security breaches, the coalition agreement seems to be starting a new epoch in digital and technology politics towards more progress.
For a long time, I defended Apple’s rigors App Store and Platform policy due to their commitment to privacy and security.
I supported them when they did not decrypt the phone of a terrorist because it would harm the security of every iPhone in the world.
I embraced critic of the proposed EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) for the forced interoperability that might harm the overall security of the system and every iPhone in the world.
The latest announcement for their capability to decrypt and remotely access the physical storage of every phone, forces me to reconsider my opinion on the companies positions, policy, and values. If the company itself hampers with the platform’s security on this level, there is no good argument left to make life for vendors on the difficult and charge horrendous fees.
Seems like their advertisement slogan “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone“ was not a statement of conscious or values, it was nothing more than an (untrue) catchy slogan.
I guess, it’s time we fund a decent open-source Operating System for phones…
Anyone a good recommendation for a secure phone that doesn’t snoop on your privacy?
“The best way to be equipped to speak to, engage with and apply cryptocurrency to your life and your workplace is not to read about it, but rather to start working with it directly.”
Global Future Council on Cryptocurrencies
The Crypto-Council of the World Economic Forum was so kind creating a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide on the workings of Cryptocurrencies and how to get started using them. Highly recommended read for everyone!
A recent study found that today 67% of the energy used by the Members of the Bitcoin Mining Council is sustainable energy, higher than for any country and probably any industry worldwide.1 So, maybe bitcoin is not the climate killer some people deem it to be but actually helping the fight against climate change?
Yes, the bitcoin-Network consumes a lot of energy and no sane person would try to argue with that. The more relevant question is if the energy is used efficiently and creates benefit or value. The comparison to banks and their infrastructure would be accurate to judge on that since the bitcoin network provides a similar service and an honest assessment compares bitcoins carbon footprint with the services that are substituted. We only know how bad bitcoin is, if we know what the energy consumption of the traditional financial system is – or if you see bitcoin more like digital gold, how much energy is used to mine, store and distribute gold.
On the other hand, the energy used for bitcoin is exceptionally clean. The biggest cost position for Miner is electricity – they have an unprecedented incentive to buy the energy as cheap as possible and are insanely mobile at the same time. Clean energy is in most, if not all places, significantly cheaper than dirty coal and that’s why Miners mainly adapted innovative approaches like changing production venues each Season or buying otherwise wasted energy. This way the network today has a cleaner energy mix than Germany as one of the greenest countries in the world and will probably net-zero emitting by the mid of this decade. All without any subsidies or pressure from regulators. The help for climate doesn‘t come from the energy consumption, but the innovation around it.2,3
Having said all that: Besides bitcoin as digital gold, I strongly favor more environmentally friendly consensus-mechanism like Proof-of-Stake and more efficient blockchains like Cardano and hopefully soon Ethereum.
PayPal announced the launch of the a new „Checkout with Crypto“ enabling its users to pay with cryptocurrencies they hold on PayPal accounts. This means that US consumers can use their cryptocurrencies to pay at millions of global online merchants and another big step for the normalized use of digital assets in day-to-day life. While the news are undoubtedly good for widespread adoption, they come with a grain of salt for merchants. Other the Tesla, which will keep the bitcoin used to buy its cars, PayPal will convert the digital assets at the Check-Out into fiat-money and pay the merchant in USD or EUR.
Thanks for visiting my personal website. On the website you can get to know me a little better and read a few of my thoughts.
In the past I mainly published in German but will publish more and more in English in the future. You can find all English-posts here or use DeepL to translate the German-posts to the language of your choosing.
