It has become commonplace to discuss the ubiquity of digital technologies and their ever creeping influence over even the minutiae of our day-to-day lives. The ways in which most of us work, play, learn, socialise, eat, sleep and have sex are increasingly intertwined with digital platform technologies and the algorithms that structure their influence in our lives.
Access to public goods like education, welfare payments, healthcare, financial services and contact with local government increasingly rely on both hardware and software to which citizens have widely varying levels of access, but which are also designed and built in different social, political and legal contexts where the reach of European laws and values has a weak hold.
The European Commission has made ‘A Europe fit for the digital age’ one of its policy priorities from 2019-24. But, as the commission acknowledges, the challenge isn’t just to make Europe fit for the digital age but to ensure that the digital age fits European laws and standards. A significant test for the EU in the upcoming decade will be to summon the political will to use the regulatory power derived from the size and wealth of the European single market to make sure the ‘digital age’ is not something that the EU has to fit itself to according to standards set in Beijing, Washington and Silicone Valley. Rather, if it’s not too late, the EU can try to mould the “digital age” to address the needs and well-being of its citizens.
