EIF News

13 July 2010 marked the anniversary of the European Internet Foundation. The birthday was celebrated with a lively interactive event, and featured a special guest appearance by European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, the publication of an EIF survey about 'Europe's Digital Future', and a live poll from Mrs Kroes about the digital Single Market in 2015.

Pilar del Castillo MEP and EIF Chair welcomed guests and friends at the event. She called into memory that 10 years ago the world was (mostly) analogue: iPods and WIFI did not exist. Today, policy making for the Internet is in full swing and EIF plays a substantial role in European, Transatlantic and global platforms for creating Internet policy in the 21st century.

Vice Chair James Elles recalled former governors of the European Internet Foundation and the crucial role they played in its creation. Several of them were present and spoke a few words congratulating EIF with its successes. Piia-Noora Kauppi, former MEP and EIF Governor sent a special video message to congratulate EIF.

Accolades were also sent by US Congressman Bob Goodlatte and by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

Mrs Kroes then was invited to take the floor and reflected on Europe's digital future and the results of the EIF Online Survey. The survey asked respondents to rank a set of 20 questions for the Commissioner from low to high interest. 189 people responded to the call to fill out the survey.

Mrs. Kroes asked for the help of the attendees to shape Europe's Digital Future. Malcom Harbour, MEP and EIF Governor, together with Mrs Neelie Kroes conducted a live poll (part 1, part 2, part 3) using a mobile voting system in the room to test the knowledge about the European Digital Agenda. Some featured questions: is it feasible to get 50% or more of European Households subscribed to high-speed broadband by the year 2015? Is level pricing across Europe for mobile Internet access a possibility in 4 years from now?

Ajit Jaokar of FutureText then discussed the way EIF shared its survey via a policy bloggers network to receive feedback from the blogging community. He advocated that such processes are highly useful for policy formation as they involve real communities outside the political framework.

The event ended with a giant EIF cake celebrating the next 10 years of building synergies within the Internet policy community.

Click here for more info on this event.

ICT will in many instances enable the development of future services and applications. EIF’s breakfast debate on 23 June focused on how these can drive growth and European competitiveness, and what technology is needed to be successful.

Future and emerging technologies for the Internet first and foremost require standards. That is what the IETF, the Internet Engineering Taskforce does. IETF is one of the stakeholders in the IGF debate and responsible for making the Internet work better, to phrase it in a popular way.

IETF is an open community, not industry led, where anyone with a bright idea can find a platform to help build that better Internet. People participate in IETF mostly on an individual basis and want to help the Internet architecture evolve. The group has a voting system to get consensus on the best ideas.

IETF has been responsible for some of the most widely spread Internet standards and protocols such as DNS, email, and IPv4 and IPv6. For Olaf Kolkman, an active participant at the IETF, it is almost impossible to predict the future of the Internet. In the 1980s people said that the Internet would never ‘make it’ as a commercial platform, similarly nobody could predict the success of VOIP (Internet telephony) before it took off. The main way for the Internet to grow is to maintain an open environment.

It is important that technology and standards developed today are interoperable. The technology needs to work worldwide. Also, industry should have a choice to opt in, but not create the technologies itself.

You can never be sure if a technology will take off before it is actually being used (look at the GSM standard that is currently being used by over 4 billion people). However some patterns can be identifies. There is a strong convergence between mobile and fixed Internet. One of the consequences of this is that mobile devices need to become more energy efficient. Hence, the circuits in the equipment have become an important part of future Internet technologies. Last but not least, security is becoming – ever more – a point of major importance because networks have become critical to countries, people, and wealth.

The good news is that Europe is not lagging behind. Europe is at the forefront of these technologies according to Emmanuel Darmois of Alcatel Lucent. Europe is a global and regional actor setting the pace for standardization.

The European Commission’s plans to double the budget for “Future and Emerging Technologies” research by 2015.

For more information on this event, click here. 

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