Smart Industry 1/2020

Editorial
Europe Takes
the Lead
Tim Cole
is the editor of Smart
Industry – the IoT Business
Magazine. His latest book,
Wild Wild West – What
the History of the American
Wild West Teaches Us
About the Future of the
Digital Society is published
in German by Vahlen/Beck.
The Internet needs fixing, there’s no
doubt about it, but whose job is it?
Much can be left to the IT industry itself,
which has shown itself quite competent
in the past to self-regulate, standardize, and
hold itself to high moral standards.
Unfortunately, that is not enough. The invisible
hand of the market needs help from national
and international legislators. In the old Wild
West, they would have called it Law ‘n’ Order.
The logical body to regulate a transnational
network like the Internet, you might think, is
the United Nations but, given the diversity of
economic and political systems with their competing
and, more often, conflicting goals and
ethics, that hardly seems likely. So, who else?
The Internet was born in the United States and
for decades US authorities exercised a selfassumed
authority in cyberspace. Then regulation
became the watchword – of conservatives,
at least – and the current administration
is more likely to loosen than tighten things like
antitrust regulation, much less put Big Tech
on a leash for things like hate speech, child
pornography, or unfair business practices. The
other big player, China, is more interested in
putting the Internet under the control of party
apparatchiks, which is unacceptable to Western
liberal democracies.
Only one remains: Europe. The third-largest
economic bloc in the world is powerful enough
to enforce rules and regulations on its own
turf and influential enough to persuade other
countries to follow their lead.
More important, Europeans appear to be the
only ones willing to tackle the many problems
in the digital realm. In 2016, the European
Commission fined Google $5 billion for abusing
its mobile operating system to ensure the
popularity of Google apps and services over
others. Last year, the EU hit Google again for
$1.6 billion for abusing its market dominance
by imposing a number of restrictive clauses
in contracts with third-party websites which
prevented Google’s rivals from placing their
search adverts on these websites. European
authorities also have forced the likes of Facebook
and Twitter to remove extremist or sexist
content – or face the consequences. And, in
2017, Amazon was ordered to pay the EU $294
million in unpaid taxes.
Europe, it seems, is the only authority in the
world willing to take a hard line. Add to that
the unfairly criticized General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR), which turns out to be the
only strong attempt by any national regulation
system to solve the problem of data ownership.
California is reputedly considering introducing
its own legislation following the lines of
Europe’s new data law.
The European Union, it seems, is just getting
warmed up. In June 2019, the new EU Cybersecurity
Act came into effect. Once more, critics
were quick to denounce undue government
meddling and overregulation, but any serious
student of the new legislation will have to admit
that, for the very first time, manufacturers
have a standardized framework to guide them
in implementing security across their products
and proving to their customers that they have
done so.
In fact, the act will not make life miserable for
ICT product manufacturers, but instead make
it easier. Companies doing business in the EU
will only have to certify their ICT products, processes,
and services once to see their certificates
recognized across all of Europe.
A better way to understand what is going on
is to consider what happens when buying a
fridge. For years there has been a universally
accepted energy-efficiency scale (A+++ down
to G) that lets buyers compare products from
many manufacturers. The EU wants to make
this available also with security.
Once again, it can be expected that the EU cybersecurity
act will lead the rest of the world,
triggering similar legislation in the US and Asia,
moving security standards and certification
methods across borders and applications.
After all, somebody has to do it!
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