IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

€120m funds under WiFi4EU scheme will be allocated on a first-serve basis to help local public administrations promote access to wireless connectivity in public spaces

European Members of Parliament (MEPs) today approved a “WiFi4EU” scheme to finance free wireless connections in centres of public life, including outdoor spaces accessible to the general public in local villages, town and cities, hospitals, and libraries.

The European Union is setting its sights on online commerce, supposedly in a bid to help remove barriers to cross-border trade across the EU - just two months after introducing VAT rules that have widely discouraged small traders from selling outside their home geographies.

Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said that the investigation into online commerce, announced this week, would examine the barriers to the growth of e-commerce across the EU, and could lead to action against companies that deliberately block online sales, according to newswire Reuters.

Negotiators from the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council reached an agreement to launch the WiFi4EU initiative aimed at bringing high-quality wireless internet access to at least 6,000-8,000 local communities. It has a total provisional budget of upto €120m until 2020 and will provide internet access for locals, visitors and tourists in parks, squares, libraries or public buildings.

“This agreement shows that Europe can be practical and useful in citizens’ everyday life”, declared MEP Anne Sander, the EPP Group’s spokeswoman in the report ‘Promotion of Internet connectivity in local communities’.

Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, said on Friday that Europe must use the opportunities created by huge advances in digital technology.

Tusk made the remarks at the Tallinn Digital Summit which was held on Friday by the Estonian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), in cooperation with the President of the European Council and the European Commission.

Europe has drawn up the Riga Declaration, which sets out 10 principles to unlock the potential of e-skills to boost growth and job creation across the continent.

Governments, industry and academia have joined forces with the European Commission to address the digital skills shortage and to build a single market for tech jobs in Europe.

The 2017 Digital Economy and Society Index shows that the EU is making progress but the gap between top digital players and lower-performing countries is still too wide. More efforts and investments are needed to make the most of the Digital Single Market. The use of e-government as a tool to fight corruption is still overlooked.

The European Commission published last week (3 March) the results of the 2017 Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) on the performance of the 28 Member States in a wide range of areas, from connectivity and digital skills to the digitisation of businesses and public services.

European Union & EFTA nations recognize open source software as a key driver of government digital transformation.

It was thus fitting that Estonia, the current EU presidency, brought together Ministers from 32 countries (under the umbrellas of the EU and European Free Trade Association) to adopt the Tallinn Declaration on E-Government, creating a renewed political dynamism coupled with legal tools to accelerate the implementation of a range of existing EU policy instruments (e.g., the e-Government Action Plan and ISA² program).

Europe is rapidly embracing the concept of smart cities, where advanced technologies are leveraged to enhance the quality of life for its citizens. One crucial component in this transformation is the deployment of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) chipsets. These chipsets play a vital role in enabling the seamless connectivity and communication between various devices and systems within a smart city infrastructure.

“We have the philosophy that technology is not the purpose as its own -not technology for technology, but technology to make life easier for citizens,” says Mayor of Ghent, Matthias de Clercq.

As digital technologies profoundly transform the way we interact with each other and with the environment, they are also radically changing the way cities are organised and built.

On May 6, 2015, the European Commission unveiled a long awaited “Digital Single Market Strategy” (the “Strategy”)—a broad plan with the stated intention of breaking down barriers between European Union (“EU”) nations in the hopes of moving from 28 separate national, digital markets to a single one. ⁶ The webpage unveiled along with the strategy, http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market/, cites economic figures that such a single market would create 3.8 million jobs and contribute 415 billion euros per year to the collective EU economy.⁷

In February, the European Commission proposed the biometric entry and exit system, as itnews.au reports. In 2008, the commission began working on automated systems to track visa-exempt travelers, relying on eGates, rather than the existing stamp system.

Last week, on 21 January, saw the first for the year meeting between representatives from the Committee of the Regions (CoR) and the EU Commission dedicated to discussing and finding solutions for one of the major socio-technological problems today – that of the digital divide.

The meeting itself was conducted virtually and involved those CoR members who conform a specialized Broadband Platform team, whose work is to generate ideas and opinions which are then presented twice a year to the Commission as a way of helping it in the formation of its relevant policies.

European Union leaders last month announced a plan to invest more than $127 million to provide free Wi-Fi services in thousands of cities on the continent. Dubbed WiFi4EU, the plan calls for providing funding to between 6,000 and 8,000 cities in order to deploy free public Wi-Fi.

“Everyone benefiting from connectivity means that it should not matter where you live or how much you earn,” said Jean-Paul Juncker, president of the European Commission and former prime minister of Luxembourg, last year during his state of the union address. “So we propose today to equip every European village and every city with free wireless internet ac­cess around the main centers of public life by 2020.”

The threat of terrorist attacks and illegal immigration are pushing the use of electronic identity (e-ID) cards as a means to quickly validate the identity of citizens. In spite of financial constraints governments across Europe are investing in new e-ID management technologies, such as contactless chips, biometric identification, and public-key infrastructure, as they consider e-services a cost-effective way to help mitigate security concerns that affect nations all over the globe. Nonetheless, official e-ID deployment will take a while as the technology is still expensive and the market fragmented.

One of the biggest obstacles to deploying energy efficiency solutions is the part of it you can’t see – the lack of data interoperability between various components. Europe is struggling to ensure smart energy efficiency is truly interconnected.

Today, Europe finds itself at an energy efficiency crossroads. There are more digital applications using household, company and transport energy more efficiently. But at the same time, the various systems are not able to communicate with appliances and utilities effectively, to make switching to smart energy simple for consumers.

To discuss potential for cooperation to create smart cities

India and the European Union (EU) on Wednesday forged a new digital partnership and discussed potential for collaboration in the fields of technology and innovation besides cooperation to create smart cities.

The first India-EU Strategic Dialogue Series, organised by UK-based policy platform India Inc. alongside key players like Microsoft and McKinsey, focussed on 'Delivering Smart Communities' as part of the Narendra Modi government's Digital India drive.