Germany aims to boost its international competitiveness with a new digital strategy, while experts have warned of a growing geopolitical race for technological supremacy and the need to defend liberal values and human rights in the digital space.

Read the original German story here.

On Wednesday (18 October), the Bundestag’s Digital Committee held a public hearing to discuss with experts the international digital strategy, which Germany’s Digital and Transport Ministry will present before the end of the year.

The strategy, which spans several ministries, is intended to increase Germany’s international competitiveness on the digital front, for which, according to the experts, Germany should pay particular attention to better promoting international technical standards.

“We are amidst a geopolitical competition for technological supremacy between the US and China. This is a major challenge for Germany and the EU, but also for countries in the Global South, which are often the pawns of these interests,” Geraldine de Bastion, founder of the international network Global Innovation Gathering, told the committee.

To counteract political power struggles at the international level, the German government should promote the development of digital technologies “in line with democratic, liberal values and stand up for the observance of human rights in the digital space”, said Julian Ringhof, a policy officer at the European Commission.

Geopolitical struggles

In recent years, Germany and the EU have been caught in the crossfire of technological and trade disputes between the USA and China.

“Authoritarian states are using digital technologies to consolidate their power. Some of them, most notably China and Russia, combine this with the goal of reshaping the global digital order to their liking,” said Daniel Völksen of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) during the hearing.

As part of these tensions between the West and authoritarian regimes, international organisations for internet governance and technical standardisation have become the playgrounds for political power struggles, said Ringhof.

“It is often about the competition between liberal-democratic and authoritarian approaches. All this, of course, has enormous implications for Germany and the EU,” he said.

Some countries are even trying to use the United Nations to reshape the global digital order in a more authoritarian way.

“The United Nations is becoming increasingly deadlocked, and the willingness for global cooperation is extremely low. Looking at this international environment, it becomes even clearer why Germany needs a clear strategic line here,” Völksen said.

“On the one hand, it is about preventing the weakening of human rights protection mechanisms, for example, in the context of the current negotiations on the so-called Cybercrime Convention,” Völksen said.

The Convention, proposed by Russia in late 2017, was adopted in November 2019 despite opposition from EU countries, the United States, and others, with support from Belarus, Cambodia, China, North Korea, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

In April, the two camps clashed again as human rights groups raised concerns that the Convention would become a free pass for law enforcement agencies to access personal data without independent or judicial oversight and to violate privacy rights through electronic surveillance.

“In the current situation, however, it is really a matter of first preventing a further strengthening of authoritarian ideas of order and of preserving the institutional preconditions for more demanding forms of cooperation for the medium and the longer term,” said Völksen.

EU norm-setting 

The aim of the strategy is, among other things, to establish uniform technical norms and standards.

“We should definitely make sure that we integrate a German international digital policy strategy into the European solutions that are being worked on,” added Klaus-Heiner Röhl from the German Economic Institute.

In addition to Germany, the European Union is also trying to counter growing international competition in standard-setting with its new standardisation strategy.

Nevertheless, the US and China continue to gain ground in international standard setting. For example, Bejing’s ‘China Standards 2035‘ plan seeks to shape international standards for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and 5G.

“But it also means, especially from our point of view, providing financial support for SMEs that want to get involved in these standardisation bodies,” added Christoph Tovar, Bitkom’s international and innovation policy officer.

De Bastion added that research and innovation programmes such as Horizon Europe should be opened to cooperation and collaboration with partners from the Global South and that joint data spaces for research and innovation should be established.

Dr Julia Pohle of the Social Science Research Centre Berlin suggested that if Germany and the EU want to make a clearer commitment to democracy and self-determination, then “German international digital policy should consciously set accents and bring these more strongly to bear at the European level”.

[Edited by Oliver Noyan/Luca Bertuzzi]

Source: Euractiv.com