Sandra Barthel 1:51 All right. 1:51 Welcome back. 1:54 My name is Chad Kohalek. 1:55 I'm from the Protocols for Publishers project, which you might have heard of. 1:59 Oh, excellent. 2:00 Wow. 2:03 Welcome to the afternoon section of the Media and Civics track. 2:08 We're going to spend the next 3 sessions talking a lot about social media. 2:10 Sovereignty and what that means. 2:13 And I, uh, you're not gonna hear from me too quick. 2:15 I'm going to pass off to our speaker, our first speaker, right away. 2:18 Um, there is a lot of, you know, for the people that are double screening, just want to point out that there's chatter on the Streamplace, and we got a lot of Streamplace folks here, so I just want to say hi to y'all. 2:28 Uh, thank you very much for tuning in. 2:30 Um, there's often questions and commentary going on there, so feel free to like be in there and be chatting away and just be socializing like crazy. 2:37 Uh, the, uh, AtmosphereConf hashtag on Bluesky has also been popping off. 2:41 I'm sure you all know I mean, I'm talking to the right people here, so you guys all know what's going on. 2:46 And yeah, so let's just keep the conversation going. 2:49 And I'll just turn it over and you can self-intro and everything. 2:52 Thank you very much. Speaker B 2:53 Yeah. 2:54 Hi, welcome everybody. 2:55 I hope you had a good lunch break. 2:58 Welcome back to our afternoon session. 3:02 Hi, I'm Sandra. 3:03 I will speak about digital sovereignty and how that goes advocating for it in Europe. 3:11 I'm very thankful for New Public because I'm one of some speakers that could make it to AtmosphereConf due to the sponsorship by New Public. 3:20 So, thanks very much for having me. 3:23 I feel honored. 3:23 Oh, sorry. 3:25 No. 3:26 There it is. 3:30 Okay. 3:31 Okay. 3:31 Okay. 3:32 Sorry. 3:33 I should use this one. 3:35 Yeah. 3:36 So within the next 30 minutes, I will speak a little about what's going on with digital sovereignty and what concepts in Europe are discussed about this. 3:47 And the goal really is to exchange knowledge on framings, what people use in Canada, in Europe, but also on a more global perspective, because I think it's very important to exchange knowledge and get to know each other and everything. 4:05 And I also think that we need to speak more about our political demands. 4:09 It's good and relevant to build things and to use existing infrastructure, but I think it's also very important to be more present about what we demand, actually. 4:22 And if we have a little bit time left, I would like to speak a little bit about cross-protocol cooperation. 4:30 So that's me. 4:32 I'm Sandra. 4:34 I live in Vienna and Berlin. 4:37 My professional background is within political science, but I also worked in communication and the policy field on several projects. 4:48 And as you can see by my different handles, I'm not only active within AT Proto, but also I'm coming from the ActivityPub field. 4:59 So, @thepinguin is my handle within Mastodon and ActivityPub. 5:05 And that being said, besides my professional background, I'm engaged since more than 10 years within the digital rights environment. 5:17 So, I advocate for freedom of information in Austria. 5:22 By now, we finally, after more than 15 years, have a Freedom of Information Act. 5:27 And it's always about openness and digital user rights. 5:32 So this is my perspective. 5:36 But I'm also active with the Chaos Communication Congress. 5:40 I don't know who of you heard of this. 5:43 Yeah, okay. 5:44 So, and they're putting up some ethical principles they commit themselves to. 5:53 I feel very connected to those. 5:57 It's not only about making public data available but also protecting private data and stating that information should be free. 6:06 But there's also one, the third one, which brings us to our topic, which is promote decentralization, right? 6:14 So how did I come here? 6:18 We had in Europe exactly one year ago, we had something called Ahoy, which was our European social Web Day together with the INDIESKY, and that's where I met Boris and Ted and also Sebastian from EuroSky, which we had the launch in November, which was a very valuable day, and you can rewatch all the videos on that presentation as well. 6:45 And then by now, I'm lucky we're here, and I hope there will be many more atmosphere conferences and maybe soon one in Europe. 6:53 I think that will be something to look for. 6:59 So let's get into it. 7:02 So I think I don't have to speak that much about it while we're here. 7:10 But just to maybe bring some attention, digital sovereignty is— since the last year a topic not only for Europe but also in Canada, right? 7:24 So, and at EuroSky I met Jen from Ganda who spoke also about their discussions about digital sovereignty. 7:33 And we also had like several incidents, I would call them, with regard to international organizations but also threatening governments and their societies. 7:46 With different outcomes, let's say it that way. 7:53 So if we speak about digital sovereignty, the main idea is to develop an own technical stack so you overcome relying on providers that are subject to foreign jurisdiction. 8:13 The other biggest, the other second idea is that you need to support European corporations in order to reach digital sovereignty. 8:25 But I would like to highlight that with this approach, I think the danger of sovereignty washing, just as we have open washing, is growing. 8:37 Therefore. 8:41 So digital sovereignty and the agenda around this is also intertwined with the efforts to build alternatives to centralized big tech social networks, right? 8:54 And we need to have a space for our public discourse. 8:57 We need to be able to exchange freely and have a pluralistic information ecosystem. 9:04 And— oh, sorry. 9:06 I would argue, and I will argue, that we need to do this through building and using existing public social networks that are based on open protocols. 9:18 And what we see right now within different developments for European social networks, there are very different approaches. 9:29 Let's say it that way. 9:31 So we have European locked-in social networks. 9:34 That was just the start of Readium, a German one. 9:39 But also, as you probably know, we have other open protocol-based ones that connect themselves to age verification and ID scans like WeSocial. 9:52 And then to put even more one aspect of an idea, and not very valuable one in my eyes, for state-run digital infrastructure and social networks. 10:05 So the French president Emmanuel Macron gave a speech last autumn where he analyzed the situation right, I think. 10:19 But when it comes to saying that anonymous accounts are the problem, I think that is not that right because hate is spread as well with full names in the internet field. 10:35 So that's why I'm very much pro-right for anonymity and we have that right and we should still fight hard for that right also against our authorities, against our national governments. 10:52 And just a little bit short, I have to speed up a little. 10:56 This concept of state-run digital infrastructure, in the academic field it's called digital public infrastructure, DPI. 11:04 And in the European context, it's mainly thought about European digital wallet, ID systems, payment systems. 11:12 But the focus is state-run, state-controlled, so it's state control over their citizens. 11:18 And I think, or I hope, what we all here are more in favor of is public digital infrastructure. 11:26 So digital infrastructure for the public and also run by the public, but public funded as well without state control. 11:36 So this is the concept of public digital infrastructure. 11:41 There's already some conceptual work around it. 11:45 I put the references here, so I hope if you're interested you can check that out even more so. 11:54 Yeah, so the first association I think one has speaking about digital sovereignty in Europe is of course you do it by legislation, right? 12:07 You probably heard about the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, and the more younger ones, the digital service Act and the Digital Markets Act. 12:19 And the DMA is more there to make sure that our digital markets function well. 12:26 So the European Union established themselves the goal to have functional markets, right? 12:32 And they acknowledge that this is not there yet, so the DMA was put up for that, to fight against oligopoles and to make sure that European users have choices. 12:48 And then the DSA is more consumer rights function. 12:51 So there are the rights included that how you can delete stuff or your general rights against digital corporations. 13:04 And I would say that was and is a success story. 13:10 You have on both ends, you have people arguing the enforcement of the DSA is still too weak. 13:17 And on the other hand, you have, I will come back to that, voices that say we need to deregulate even more and we need to have the so-called digital omnibus that want to get rid of a lot of user rights on the premise of then our economic standards in Europe have become more powerful, so to speak. 13:45 Just shortly, we have also European threats against our own legislation, I would call them. 13:53 We have the case of a former lobbyist of Meta who is now a member of our European Parliament and by the EEP was nominated as the appointed rapporteur on exactly this digital omnibus. 14:07 So I think it's clear what the problem is. 14:10 And also within European jurisdiction, a lot of digital companies put their head offices in Ireland because they have the lowest taxes there, but also the enforcement of the regulation is somewhat unsatisfactory. 14:29 Max Schrems and his None of Your Business Association is trying to enforce more and more of the DSA also against Irish pressures. 14:42 A different aspect is also that it's very unequal forces. 14:48 So this is a study by Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl, and it's stating that just in 2025 just for Brussels. 14:59 So it's not about Berlin lobbyists or lobbyists situated in Berlin or in Paris. 15:05 It's just for Brussels. 15:06 It's €150 million just this year. 15:10 So you can see it's of high relevance what digital policies are about, the digital policies we have in Europe. 15:22 Yeah, so a little bit deeper on what's going on in Europe. 15:29 Last May we had an election on our European Parliament, and what's relevant there is that we had a change of majorities, and by now we have a conservative right majority within the European Parliament. 15:46 And also what is very important for this year is that we have the negotiations on the so-called Multiannual Financial Framework, more or less the budget of the European Union. 15:58 And this is also an indicator why right now it's very important to put up our political demands, because what's not now in the budget won't be there for the next 6 years. 16:11 So we have like— this year is really, really important, and that's why I make all the effort to spread the message, because we need to be loud, because money-wise we don't even get there anyway. 16:23 All we have is the power of us. 16:25 And I would like to spread some ideas of what political demands could be so we all can repeat them and spread them. 16:33 So, yeah, I hope you join me in this effort. 16:40 And as I said, we need to fight this deregulation and simplification approach. 16:44 And what's a hopeful aspect of it The DMA probably will be expanded for social networks as well. 16:54 And the debate for expanding interoperability is also strong but needs more commitment, I think. 17:02 But those are two positive things. 17:06 And this picture here shows our panel discussion which we had at FOSDEM, a very big developer conference in Brussels. 17:14 Alexandra Geese is a member of the European Parliament and she's very active in pointing out our approaches as well, that open protocol-based social networks are relevant for democracy and they need funding as well. 17:31 So I want to give a shout out to her and her whole team. 17:40 As I told you before, the main tool for how European Union thinks they will achieve digital sovereignty is by the idea of implementing EuroStacks. 17:52 There are different approaches on this, but more or less it's the idea of we need to buy European and then we will reach digital sovereignty. 18:00 So more or less, and that's my critical stance point of it says we just need the same infrastructure, just make it European, and then our problems are solved. 18:14 And I think that's obviously not the case. 18:17 So I come up with 3 critique points that would broaden the concept of digital sovereignty. 18:25 Right now it's very narrow, and I think it makes a lot of sense to broaden it up because then digital sovereignty will help us solve, anyway, their societal problems on a long-term basis. 18:40 Yeah, so what are my critique points? 18:42 So, the first critique point is that making it European is not enough, right? 18:50 It needs to be open and public benefit as well. 18:53 Those are, yeah, indicators that will help achieve real digital sovereignty, real digital autonomy also for the users against their authorities, so to speak. 19:06 And also it helps bringing people together, working collaborative on ideas. 19:14 It's in many ways beneficial, I would argue. 19:19 And just to give a little bit spotlight on European initiatives, the Open Forum Europe took up on the idea of a European sovereign tech fund. 19:30 Which is a very, very, very valuable concept in my eyes. 19:34 That's why I want to highlight their work. 19:37 Nick Gates is the one working on this. 19:43 The second critique point is that buying European, of course, will be done with public money, right? 19:51 And so if the idea is that you spend a high amount of public money buying European private products, I would argue from a user rights-based approach that of course some amount of this public money then needs to be spent in order to buy and establish public digital infrastructure. 20:18 It's so obvious for me, it's always very hard for me to state that because in my eyes— Yeah, and if you don't know it by now, the Free Software Foundation Europe has this long Campaign for Public Money, Public Code, which we refer to as well. 20:36 And Matthias Kirschner is the president of this organization. 20:41 And as this topic is debated within the German parliament quite well, we found out that just on the federal level from the German state, they spent around €750 Canadian dollars per year just for Microsoft licenses. 21:04 Yeah, okay. 21:09 So public procurement is like a very relevant level, leveler. 21:15 And another very recommended organization, the Public Future— the Open Future Institute by Aditya And Susanna Rosso just published this some days ago. 21:29 But I recommend reading all of their policy briefs. 21:31 It's very valuable knowledge. 21:34 They pointed out that we need to focus more on public procurement. 21:40 And exactly that's also what's happening. 21:43 More and more governments or state entities decide to procure open source-based software. 21:51 Software. 21:53 But, and, and just to name some, so the Austrian— one Austrian ministry started to using Nextcloud within the hybrid version. 22:01 The Austrian Army uses OpenDesk. 22:04 OpenDesk is a tool that was, as written there as well, developed by the German Zendes. 22:15 The German Army uses Matrix. 22:19 And so the list goes on. 22:20 But still we have other approaches like the state of Bavaria buying Microsoft products again for 1 billion euros. 22:33 Yeah, a lot of money without a legal right to do so actually. 22:41 And this is especially relevant, like we already have several building blocks of public digital infrastructure. 22:48 They're all open source based and they are there and they could be bought, so to say, if not at least funded. 22:57 And that's what we should do, I think. 22:59 And of course interoperable social networks are a relevant part of such a stack. 23:07 My third critique point would be exactly that. 23:11 If we want to achieve real digital serenity, social networks need to be understood as a relevant part of that. 23:18 And social— like, we can't achieve digital serenity without social serenity. 23:24 And Hannah Albury, who is the community director of Mastodon, published a blog post on that if you want to read further. 23:34 So all of this critique I addressed also to politicians themselves. 23:42 In autumn, there was this summit on European digital sovereignty, and when it was announced and the program was announced, it was obvious that the main topics circle around AI and cloud infrastructure and stuff. 23:57 And we sat together and tried to find a way to bring our demands to the table. 24:04 So what we did is I co-founded the alliance called Open Networks in Democratic public spheres. 24:11 By now we are supported with more than 30 other organizations. 24:16 We come up with 4 demands that interact with each other. 24:25 Yeah, and again to establish long-term solutions. 24:30 That's the goal. 24:32 Yeah. 24:34 And I will present only one demand of those that we had. 24:39 And I think that's a very impactful one. 24:42 Ralph Stockmann, who is the head of the digital affairs within Berlin Library, came up with the so-called Plus One Principle. 24:52 And this Plus One Principle is addressed at public institutions because again, they are funded with public money, so they should feel a higher I say that they should feel responsible to make wise decisions, and if they're doing social media communications, they should feel obliged to publish their communications in at least one open protocol-based social network, right? 25:30 And as this was presented at our Berlin FETI Day, It has the Fetiver logo, I hope you don't mind. 25:36 But the argument is, yeah, if they say, we need to stay on those big tech platforms, we can't leave because there are the people, whoever that then still is, that makes a bridge to say, okay, if you think you have to stay there, at least do one other social network. 25:59 Yeah, and I want to highlight also to Lauren's blog about connected places. 26:09 He writes about both protocols and is very critical, which is good. 26:15 And he says lawmakers should not only speak about digital sovereignty, but they should use the networks that are already there. 26:25 Otherwise It's just birds, right? 26:28 And I think he's right on that one. 26:31 It's not only about social networks. 26:34 I think, again, the interrelatedness is also— should be important for media systems. 26:42 And maybe you have heard of this Public Spaces Incubator, which is an initiative not only for European public broadcasters but also non-European ones. 26:55 Besides their prototypes, they want to implement both protocols within their network services. 27:05 And I think this is something to look out for. 27:10 Okay, 5 more minutes. 27:14 Another initiative I want to highlight is SafeSocial. 27:18 They came up with 10 demands on their own. 27:22 And what their latest initiative is, the so-called Digital Independence Day. 27:28 So the first Sunday every month, they call for Digital Independence Day. 27:33 And the idea is at least on this one Sunday, you can try to switch over from one big tech services to one non-big tech. 27:45 And so they come up at D.Day with several cookbook recipes which are differentiated between is it easy or is it hard, how hard is it. 27:56 And they tell you step by step what you need to think about and how you can do that. 28:00 And I think that's only not from an individual user's perspective, but also again for public institutions. 28:08 It's like very helpful to have examples of initiatives that have done that. 28:13 So for example, The University of Innsbruck is hosting their own Mastodon server, right? 28:20 Their own instance for all employees and they will extend that to students as well and making services as Pixelfed, for example, usable for those. 28:34 So please check out D-Day. 28:36 I checked yesterday and there will be one event on the 5th of April, the 5th, 5th, 5th of April will be the next one in Colorado, I think. 28:45 But maybe in Canada we'll soon have events as well. 28:48 That would be nice, right? 28:51 So to sum up, what are some demands that I think are valuable for not even— not only Europe? 29:02 I think we need to push further that interoperability is expanded and portability will be established. 29:09 So not only data portability, but of course interoperability of identities and feeds, right? 29:16 It's to make real choices available. 29:20 And we need to call for funding for public digital infrastructure and implement the one-plus-one principle, at least for public institutions. 29:31 So, 3 more minutes left. 29:33 That's good. 29:40 As you have heard, my background is within ActivityPub, so I'm active there since some years. 29:49 And not only because of my nature of I want to get to know more people and their ideas, and I think that's the strength for us to get to know each other and learn from us. 30:08 I think we have, within the open protocols, I think we have some fields that I think would make perfect examples where we can work together or at least talk to each other despite differences. 30:26 I think the field of moderation is such a topic as well as Trust and Safety, and the one I'm here for, Policy and Advocacy. 30:36 So if you're working in that field around policy and advocacy, please let us talk later. 30:44 And yeah, I just want to make the point that we need more cooperation, and I hope such events at ATMOsphere make that possible. 30:59 For us. 31:01 Yeah, one example, I was invited to join just Michael from IFTTTIS and Aaron from BlueSky to speak about trust and safety exactly in Canadian Embassy in Berlin. 31:15 So yeah, hopefully we have more meetings like this and yeah, work together. 31:24 So, I would like to call to work together, get to know each other, learn from each other in order so we can achieve a better digital future for all of us, no matter if we are in Europe or elsewhere. 31:45 And yeah, I hope we can get to know each other better, repeat our messages together, build together in general. 31:55 And yeah, please let's do that. 32:00 So if you want to stay in contact or reach out, those here you can find me, but also I will be here till Monday as well. 32:07 Thanks so much. Sandra Barthel 32:07 Thank you very much, Sandra. 32:14 Find Sandra around. 32:16 There are other policy folks around here, public spaces, if you're interested in that. 32:19 We got some people over here that— yeah, thank you for raising your hand— that know all about that, and you