Towards Public Digital Infrastructure: A proposed governance model.
On today’s internet, power is concentrated in the hands of a handful of actors who increasingly control what we read and what we see. The tendency tends to be towards ever more concentration, both within and across layers of the technology stack. Attempts by both governments and large technology companies to take back control are an important source of internet fragmentation – recent events have us teetering closer to the splinternet than ever before – and leave citizens with little agency and choice.
In her latest report Towards Public Digital Infrastructure: A proposed governance model, Katja Bego, principal investigator at NGI Forward, outlines how Europe should provide an alternative vision to these top-down approaches and support Public Digital Infrastructure by:
- Create an ecosystem of alternatives through collaborative interoperability and open protocols.
- Launch a Public Tech Fund.
- Support data commons and identity.
