On Jan. 1, France took over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union — for the first time in 14 years — and has made digital transformation in the region one of the key priorities it will be focusing on during its six-month tenure.
As part of these efforts, a conference dubbed ‘Building Europe’s Digital Sovereignty’ has unveiled the four pillars that make up Europe’s digital sovereignty.
These include ensuring the European Union’s role as a “power for innovation” by attracting foreign investors and foreign talent, as well as ensuring the role of the EU as a “power of openness” by encouraging free, open and shared digital standards, a conference report noted.
The two-day event, which took place from Monday to Tuesday (Feb. 7 to 8) in France, also highlighted the Scale-up Europe initiative, which was launched in March 2021 in partnership with the European Commission, to create 10 home-grown technology companies each valued at more than 100 billion euros ($114 billion) by 2030.
Developing “world-class disruptive tech firms” was identified as one of the areas of action to achieve the goal, which will be done with support from the newly created European Innovation Council (EIC) that has an allocated budget of more than 10 billion euros ($11.4 billion) to support “breakthrough innovations.”
The conference also analyzed how public policy measures can help start-ups and scale-ups to gain access to higher levels of funding because “European venture capital funds are not consistently able to finance the largest investment deals.”
And access to higher levels of funding will be critical to enable Europe to reduce its dependence on foreign tech giants, France’s Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, said in an opening address, according to media reports.
Read more: Meta Warns of Facebook, Instagram Service Interruptions Over EU Data Rules
Le Maire’s statement came on the heels of remarks he made at a news conference in Paris on Monday (Feb. 7) alongside German Economy Minister Robert Habeck, during which both EU politicians dismissed Meta’s recent threat to close down its social media platforms — Facebook and Instagram — in Europe over strict data privacy rules.
Read also: French President Macron Warns Big Tech To Align With EU Rules
“After being hacked, I’ve lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years and life has been fantastic,” Habeck told reporters.
Le Maire added: “I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook. Digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty.”
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Last September, PYMNTS reported that the European Union is planning to make a multibillion-euro investment in technology development by injecting about 20% of the region’s 750-billion-euro ($887 billion) pandemic recovery fund into blockchain, data infrastructure and high-performance computing.
The move, supported by several European countries, is part of an initiative to boost semiconductor manufacturing in the wake of the global shortage that slowed automobile production lines and will see the funds invested in data infrastructure, low-power processors, 5G communication, high-performance computing and secure quantum communication, among others.
According to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, digital technology is a “make-or-break issue” for the region, further highlighting the need to ramp up efforts to put Europe on par with U.S. and Asian rivals.
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