The EU is at a crossroads regarding its digital infrastructure. For decades, European institutions and businesses have outsourced their infrastructural provision to American providers. Is this a viable model? Policymakers, academics, and professionals seem to doubt it. Given the current developments in tech and policy – including the development of AI and the second Trump Administration – calls for Europe to develop its own digital infrastructure are multiplying. But, while there is a widespread consensus around this idea, how it can be realized is still very much up for discussion. This talk will bring together some of the leading voices in this debate to discuss the future of European digital infrastructures, which sorts of approaches and values should we embrace, and how do we get there.

Panelists

Seda Gürses
Seda is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, and an affiliate at the COSIC Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven. Her work focuses on privacy enhancing and protective optimization technologies (PETs and POTs), privacy engineering, as well as questions around software infrastructures, social justice and political economy as they intersect with computer science. You can read more about her work on the Programmable Infrastructures Project here.

Robin Berjon
Robin Berjon is a technologist specialising in the governance of digital tech. He is deputy director of the IPFS Foundation. Previously he was VP of Data Governance at The New York Times, where he worked on privacy and safeguarding media independence, and Vice-Chair of the board of the World Wide Web Consortium. His work focuses on building durable democratic governance of technology so that our digital sphere starts operating in the public interest at the planetary scale.

Edemilson Paraná
Edemilson Paraná is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at LUT University, Finland, where he leads the Research Group on Economy, Technology and Society (GETS). Edemilson has lectured and published extensively in Political Economy, economic sociology, and Social Theory. His research interests include the Digital Economy, Digital Finance, Financialisation, and the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence.

[Moderator] Corinne Cath
Corinne is Head of Digital at Article 19. She previously worked as a postdoc at the University of Delft in The Netherlands with Dr. Seda Gürses and Dr. Prof. Linnet Taylor, in the context of the AlgoSoc Gravitation Program. She works on questions of computational infrastructure (cloud computing and mobile devices) in the context of the administration of justice. Her research focuses on how cloud computing and AI are transforming society, the consequences of these transformations for public institutions—and the adequacy of existing technology policy efforts that touch on cloud computing.

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