Reflecting on Europe’s digital future

I recently took part in an online conversation by The Economist, entitled "The Path to Europe's Digital Future." It's a big topic, and it clarified how the ideas for the continent’s digital transformation are starting to take shape. We're seeing how new digital-era businesses and established companies from across sectors are moving forward in exciting ways, promoting growth while preserving important social values and a few guiding principles.

I was lucky to be joined by a number of thoughtful leaders, including Bernd Leukert, Head of Technology, Data & Innovation at Deutsche Bank; Maria Martin-Prat, Deputy Director-General at the European Commission (DG Trade); Hubert Tardieu, Chairman of the Board of Gaia-X; and Eva Maydell, a Member of the European Parliament for the European People’s Party (EPP), who is closely involved in proposed rules concerning data usage.

It's clear that our increasingly digital world presents many new opportunities, sometimes extending business models in new directions -- for example, many startups have models that require mobile payments or new privacy and security systems, all scaled over thousands of transactions a day. Who owns that data, and how it is handled at all stages, must be clearly understood and protected.  

There are many other such examples across all industries, with new use cases being invented every day. Some of the key technologies that enable this kind of innovation are powered by cloud computing, through AI and other applications, that provide insights beyond anything technology has done before. At Google, we believe in a Transformation Cloud, where it’s not just about making an infrastructure decision, but instead truly embedding the need and capability to transform throughout your company -- across every person and every team. This also helps customers respond quickly to changing markets to modernize the way they collaborate, operate and innovate -- while still maintaining the highest levels of data security and privacy. 

Balancing data control with innovation 

The participants of the panel hosted by The Economist’s senior editor, Kenneth Cukier generally agreed that protection of data rights and property is not the same as protectionism, or the closing of borders to trade. This, I believe, gets to the heart of the issue that businesses, regulators, and other interested parties in Europe and elsewhere are so focused on. One necessary step is that companies control how they deploy their data -- just as security involves awareness and control over your physical and digital assets, innovation is awareness, control, and thoughtful experimentation with data. 

Many policymakers seem well aware of the good this can generate, aiming to ensure that data is used for the best possible purposes, and that businesses can both retain control of their data, and share their data on their own terms. As technology advances so will the rules and regulation for governing the technology, which is an invitation to explore alternative ways to empower customers’ control over their data. 

While conversations around data sovereignty today focus on where data is stored, this could change in a world where customers have more choice and control over their data. If data is encrypted everywhere under customer control, so that cloud providers access data only with explicit justification and permission, the focus may become ownership and location of encryption keys and where the decryption happens, and not where the encrypted data resides.

The value of an open cloud 

Working at Google, I've long seen the value of innovation in the form of open source software. Within open source, information around a software project is shared freely, with the maximum possible number of people working on it to make improvements and improve security. It is, I believe, a key part of a strong fundamental infrastructure and applications framework upon which to build data sharing capabilities. 

Over the years, Google has created and contributed to thousands of open source projects , helping us and others move quickly and affordably to create countless innovations. One of our most exciting recent projects that builds on Open Source projects such as Kubernetes is Anthos, a multicloud technology which we believe will increase the ability of sovereign entities to better control their innovative potential -- in business terms, their digital destiny. 

Supporting Gaia-X ambitions

As I wrote last November, Google Cloud is a Day One member of Gaia-X,  which describes itself as "a secure, federated system that meets the highest standards of digital sovereignty while promoting innovation." In practice, Gaia-X intends to give companies a means to understand, control, and benefit from their data. Open source and open systems can play a leading role in the operational basis for healthy data sovereignty, and we are committed to using open standards to make sure that engineers in Europe and elsewhere have the best, most widely applicable tools and training. 

Let me give a very practical example why I believe open platforms and open standards are critically important to support innovation across borders and continents. The core technologies and protocols for the Internet that are still in use today, TCP and IP, were invented in the early 80’s by my friend and colleague Vint Cerf together with Bob Kahn. The work was done in the U.S. as open standards. About 20 years later at CERN in Europe, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide-Web and based the implementation of the very first web server and the very first web client on top of TCP/IP. Sir Tim was able to focus on the innovation in the upper layers (HTML, HTTP) only because the foundation that TCP/IP provided was open. 

I see this very similarly in Gaia-X. It’s important we set clear rules for Gaia-X based on European law and values, while still maintaining openness. This will ensure the lower half of the X can leverage the best possible cloud infrastructure as its core foundation (similar to TCP/IP) to then support transformational innovation by European business in the data spaces layer, i.e. the upper half of the X (similar to the World Wide Web). This combination has the potential to not only truly accelerate Europe’s digital future but to also establish global standards for the future of sovereign cloud technologies.

Europe has long been a positive, proactive force in fostering a healthy digital future. Before Gaia-X, there was the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, a European law on data protection and privacy that has gone on to be a legislative model for many parts of the world. More than anything, what these processes are about, comes down to one thing: Technology is not an impersonal force of nature. It is the product of human values, aspirations, and hard work. How these things work out is up to us, as individuals and societies, and that often begins at the very start of how we think about deploying new technologies.