Chloe Teevan Investigadora do European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), Maastricht
I
think that after Pedro’s very interesting and stimulating introduction I will end up in much the same place, looking at the European governments but I’ll come at it from a different perspective which is that of the geopolitical competition that we are seeing in the world today. The USA and China are driving this competition which we see across all kinds of different arenas, most notably in the economic but also in multilateral institutions and the tech sector where we see a lot of concerns and where we are seeing the beginnings of what is becoming a deeper decoupling of the USA and the Chinese economies. This has been most famously exemplified by the case of Huawei with the USA first banning Huawei in the country and then increasing pressure over European, African countries and others around the world, to ban Huawei. Today, actually few have banned it, but what we see is very much that there is a decoupling happening between the digital actors and the internet as a whole between these two great powers with very different models being promoted by the USA and China, and each of them seeking allies to work alongside them. From the European perspective, there isn’t really an interest in following one of these actors, and in decoupling from the other, and so the EU has resisted the USA’s demands to de-
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Conferência de Lisboa – 4 _ 2020 Lisbon Conference – 4
Researcher at the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), Maastricht
couple from China, but at the same time we do see that there are perhaps more areas of agreement between the US and Europe than between China and Europe, when it comes to internet governance in particular. But, ultimately, the EU has its own geopolitical considerations and doesn’t want to be caught between the two other actors, and this has led to a growing focus in the EU on what we are calling digital sovereignty, this is part of a bigger consideration around how the EU can be a more sovereign actor in the world, can have a stronger economy, can be a leader on the green transition, but also how the EU can develop its own governance model for the digital sphere, that takes the fine balance between the surveillance capitalism that very much comes from the USA and the state surveillance that is increasingly becoming evident in China and in some of its allies. But so far this model is very much in its early days as Pedro mentioned, there are very big aspirations but so far what we have seen with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was a very important first step towards regulating personal data but there would be many other questions to deal with in the months and years to come. One of the big initiatives that is expected in the coming months is the Digital Services Act which is expected also to look at how online platforms deal with disinformation and also look at competition and at competitors' practices by some of
A ACELERAÇÃO DAS MUDANÇAS GLOBAIS THE ACCELERATION OF GLOBAL CHANGE
