Deutschlandfunk: Martin Hubschneider calls for digital sovereignty
The annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (Society for Information Technology) was special this year for a number of reasons: firstly, it was its 50. anniversary and secondly, it was the first ever virtual annual meeting. The leading topic of this year's meeting was the relevancy of digital sovereignty in Europe.
"What is so important about digital sovereignty? Data protection, self-determination, technological competency – this is especially valid for companies –, resiliency, redundancy, a digital infrastructure, a trustworthy network and adaptivity", these were all issues Martin Hubschneider raised in his keynote speech at the opening of the 50. annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Informatik. As a patron of digital sovereignty, he busies himself with the question of what exactly the central aspects of digital sovereignty are, and what is required for a company to conduct themselves in the spirit of digital sovereignty. With this statement, he hit the proverbial nail on the head, at the annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Informatik 2020.
Society needs digital sovereignty
"In my view, at least, the platform economy is a threat to both our market economy, as we know it, as well as to society at large", explains Martin Hubschneider emphatically. With this, he was hinting at the power of the large monopolies, many of which wield money to determine society. His address also included suggestions for the reorganization of digital platforms.
The conclusion of the annual meeting: Europe's dependency on the big players of the digital economy such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple is enormous. This dependency has to be stopped, the public infrastructure is no place for monopolies or oligopolies. According to Martin Hubschneider, platform operators should not be huge corporations, but companies which belong to the employees, customers and partners themselves.
Significant number of registrations on the occasion of the anniversary
The outreach of the the virtual meeting was enormous this year with 1600 registrations. With the benefit of 50 years of experience, the event looked back over the comprehensive history of computer science. Under the motto of; "Back to the Future" a number of virtual meetings took place from September 28, to October 02, topics included science, the practical application of technology and society. There was a broad spectrum of contributions, for example, in the areas of artificial intelligence, mobile systems and IT security.
Among others, there were several workshops on the topic of digitalized teaching. Topics also included what digital methods should be used and what challenges have to be overcome. One result, was that organizations of every kind are often not sovereign in the way they deal with digitalization, so that hurdles are often created when implementing digitalization.
You can read the full article on Deutschlandfunk.