 It's in Italy, but today I am in Washington DC. So I hope the connection is fine. Can you see my slides? I think I can. Thank you. My apologies. I have to make a layout change because you have slides in the usual place, one moment. Yeah, I just applauded them. Sorry. OK. There you go. No, that's it. So thank you for the introduction. Yes, I mean, this is a presentation that I've been giving sometimes in Europe, especially at FOSDEM. But I really wanted to share it with an Asian audience. Because, of course, this could be the example of what would happen in several Asian countries and other countries of the world in terms of regulation for the digital platforms. And so I will briefly recap. First of all, why is Europe acting? So what's the problem that Europe is trying to address? And then how? So which regulatory items are coming? And then maybe we can have a discussion and see if we have questions. So, well, who am I? You already introduced me. I'm working for an open source company. Possibly people know Dovcott, which is our best known product and the most widely used IMAP server in the world, or PowerDNS. So let's get into what they call Hotel California. Hotel California is basically the current situation in most of our online digital services and devices, in which we, at least with the exception of China, of course. But in the rest of the world, especially in Europe, we are mostly stuck with the services offered by very few companies. And so this is the scenario in financial terms. I mean, this is what I now updated it, but basically it never happened before in the history of the world that we had five tech companies being the five biggest ones. Now there's been some change. I mean, Facebook has become meta, has lost some value. But I mean, the biggest of these companies now is Apple. Their market cap is almost $3 trillion, which is basically the Francis GDP. So even in European terms, some of these companies are becoming as big as the biggest Europeans countries. And so this was a contraction. Because this implies a lot of power. So for example, in the smartphone market, I mean, there's been a lot of consolidation. And nowadays, if you get a smartphone, basically it's by, the operating system is made by one of the two of these companies. You can just choose between two. And even the apps, as you see, for example, the social and messaging apps are very consolidated into the hands of basically a single company. And the same with the cloud. I mean, the move to the cloud has also been consolidating the internet and the market for internet services a lot. Well, we have some Chinese companies in this space, but again, the biggest ones are the American ones. And together, they basically have most of the market and it's getting worse. The market is getting more and more consolidated. And so the same for revenues, one of the issues that Europe is trying to address is taxation. There is the perception that these companies do not pay enough taxes in the place where they make business in European countries. And in fact, I mean, this was an analysis that was made on Google revenues, but you could do the same with other companies. I mean, these companies tend to invoice your revenues from a different country and then move the biggest chunk of the invoices into international places, sometimes tax havens, sometimes simply their home country. And so what gets taxed in local countries is really a limited amount. And governments, of course, in Europe are absolutely not happy about this. And then there's more. I mean, you do see that this has an effect in terms of wealth transfer. So there is a general concern that the digital market is now basically a way to transfer wealth out of Europe into, well, in this case, the US, but could be China, I mean. But in general, countries that are outside of Europe. And so there is a concern in how can we keep this wealth here, keep the wealth local, keep the growth local, the jobs and make it so that we can, as Europeans, we can use more and more European services. Not because we dislike the Americans, but because we need to grow our own internet market and services. And so you see this transfer wealth. I mean, this is one possible anecdotal indicator, but you see the value of houses going up in, I mean, like 2.5 times in seven years in San Francisco. It's really a sign of movement of wealth across the planet. So this is what I call, I mean, Hotel California, because these are services where you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. So these are services in which you get into the services, you start using whatever, WhatsApp, Google, one of the Google services, whatever. And then it's very hard to switch to another one. And so you're locked in. And there are a number of devices that are used. And basically the assessment in Europe is that these are devices that Trump competition, in that Humber competition, and I mean, a fair chance for European companies to compete for these markets. And there are several ways to show this, but the example I like to make is the comparison between the original internet services, like email or the web, and the most current services. I mean, so email, for example, is a fully compatible interoperable service, which means that you can get your email address from, and your email service from any provider, and you will be able to exchange email with any other user or any other provider, anywhere in the world. So there's just one email service. You get it from, you can get it from different providers, but it's just one global service. And this makes it easy for people to offer email services. There are, I mean, the standards are open. There are many free software implementations, so anyone can just run their own email service and immediately be connected to the rest of the plant, with some issues sometimes. But in general, it's very easy to compete for email services if you want to compete on email services. Well, on the other hand, the newer services were not made this way. So we have what we call siloed services. And instant messaging is a good example because in theory, it works exactly like email. There's not a lot of difference in conceptually and even technically between email and instant messaging. But the way the market has developed is very different because here, in more recent times, where venture capitalists and dreams to conquer the world were involved, I mean, the services were developed as wall gardens. So if you get a WhatsApp account, you can only exchange messages with other WhatsApp users. You cannot exchange messages with telegram users or with Skype users, with line users, with whatever. And so you are logged in. You need as a user to install each and every application and have an account on each and every service if you need to communicate with people in different services, which is an inconvenience. You don't know which application you're using to talk to whom. And you cannot really move because if you move, you lose your contacts. If a new, I mean, someone comes up with a new brilliant application, including an open source one. And maybe it's better than the previous ones, but if you move to it, then you don't have anyone to talk with. And so this makes it very difficult to switch to a different instant messaging application. Not impossible, but very difficult. It's a big barrier to competition. And also in general, these are closed deployments. So there's no openness. Sometimes the standards are open, but the deployment is closed. You're not allowed to interoperate. And there's other tactics that are used also by these companies to establish this domination and they are now addressed by Europe. And one is bundling. I mean, this is very difficult. You get one service, you get the mobile operating system and you already get the apps from the same maker pre-installed and they work better than the others because they have better access to the operating system and they are selected by default and so on. And if you want to use one service, you have to use the others. Like, I mean, for some cases of the commerce platforms with Amazon, it used to be like that. Or in general with Apple, if you use Apple's, if you want to distribute an app on Apple, you have to use their app store and you have to use their payment system and pay a 30% commission. So this is where basically the result, it's a system that gives control to these companies, sometimes not just to these companies, but to the government that has the authority to control these companies because they are based there, as we saw in the Google Huawei case. And so this is a concern, a geopolitical concern for Europe. And in the last few years, we've seen activism and by the European Commission to address this situation. And the last danger that I wanted to mention that now I'm seeing is that now we're, these companies are building what I call the Internet of Other People's Things because we are filling our homes with devices, even the computers, the mobile phones, but then also the IoT devices, the smart TVs, whatever, all these devices now encrypt everything, which is a good thing for privacy, of course. But it means that you as a user don't know what's going on. You do not have any way to control the flow of traffic which starts from one of these devices or from one of the apps on your mobile phone and goes directly to the cloud or to the server of the maker. And so you have to trust these companies, they could gather any data on you, they could actually spy on you if they wanted. And there's no way you can check, evaluate or stop this. So encryption is being used as a form of control to move points of control, traditional ones from the ISPs, the governments that use to block stuff and whatever, maybe it's better if they don't do it. But on the other hand, now control is fully into the hands of the makers of these devices and services. And so this is also a big concern now. And so in general, this is not a problem just about money and competition, it's much more than that. And so the concern about the big platforms is also about other things that we shall not related to making money or transition. And it's really about surveillance and privacy. So we're saying it's about political power. It's about the national security. I have some examples here. So in general, all these things were, I mean, for example, when President Trump was censored by Twitter, Merkel, the chancellor of the Germany was concerned that she made a concern, a concern declaration, not because she liked the Trump, but because she was concerned about basically a sitting US president being censored by a private company. So this kind of struggle of power is what also concerns the Europeans. And there's all the discussion, for example, about the US Cloud Act, which allows US companies to access the information of private citizens anywhere in the world. So this is how Europe has been responding. This concept of digital sovereignty has been developing in the last few years, two or three years, is now generally accepted, but we are not really completely sure what it means. It's still under development. There are two main meanings in the idea of digital sovereignty. One is more like digital autonomy. It's about becoming self-sufficient so that you do not depend on foreign products. Whatever might happen in the future, any kind of geopolitical tension or even commercial tension, or even just one of these companies deciding that they don't want to make business in Europe anymore for whatever reason, you must be able to survive. So even if tomorrow Google became unavailable, Europe cannot stop, the economy, the society cannot stop. And so you need to have alternatives. And so this is mostly about developing local know-how, a local industry, economy, and being able to be autonomous. Another part of this concept is really about sovereignty. I mean, the autonomy one is more German. The sovereignty one is more French. The sovereignty part is about enforcing rules for internet services. So being able to basically tell these companies what they have to do here and a number of public policy relevant issues, like content moderation or whatever. So of course there's also taxation, but in general it's about ensuring that you as a country have control of the use of the internet by your citizens and in your internet market. And together these two sides from the European digital sovereignty concept. And so where open source is into this? I mean, open source is actually the subject of a lot of promotion, at least in words, not always in facts, but in Europe in the last few years, we've seen multiplying calls for adopting open source, promoting open source and public procurement and so on. And this is because this is really interesting. I think it's also interesting for several parts of Asia that the open source model is much better and much more fit for Europe than the American or Chinese model of a few very big companies. Europe does not produce very big companies because Europe is an archipelago of countries that we have 27 countries in the European Union, 26 languages and societies and markets. Yes, this is about the European Union because we're talking about European Union regulation. So that's the, so basically, if you want to have this kind of services in Europe, you will get alliances of small companies, mostly open source companies often. In each country you will have a company and they will exchange services and help. And even relatively bigger companies, my company is German and has 250 people, which for Europe is a pretty big internal company, at least in the software sphere. But we do, when we have to go to other European states to some of these states, we employ local partners. And so that we have a cooperation with local companies. And so in the end, this is why open source is also useful to this concept of digital sovereignty. So what we need to get out of this, it's what I call regulated openness. So we're trying to establish a mechanism of cooperation between the European institutions and the open source world industry, so that the open sources, the open standards provide the technical building blocks that are necessary for competing services to these ones. And we need regulation to force them onto them because the problem is that the dominant platforms, they have dominant market positions, they will never open up if they are not forced. And so this is why we need regulation. The regulation in Europe will be aimed at forcing these companies to open up services to competition. So not to disadvantage them, but to prevent them from unduly advantage. And so this is the list of all the regulations. Many of the regulations that Europe is working on because there are really many, many. So the first one is the digital services sector, which is about content. I will come to this in a minute. And the second one, maybe the most important one is the digital market sector. I will also come to this a little later. This is about competition. But there are more. I mean, now there's discussion starting on a data act, which means, I mean, setting rules so that the public data that these companies gather through their platforms can be shared, can be accessed through public policy or objectives. And so this will come out, that there's now a computer chips sector because somehow Europe has decided we need some, at least a bit of computer chip factor is back on our territory, there are some. I mean, but of course, as we know, most of the chips are now produced in three Asian countries. And so in any case, we want to be able to produce chips locally because during the COVID crisis, there was, I mean, the car factor is stopped because there were no chips and this is not something we want to see again. There's a minimum corporate access. There's an effort to establish a minimum tax everywhere in Europe so that companies are not enticed into moving into specific states that will let them pay a few taxes. There's EIDAS, which EIDAS is the European Identity Project and so we're trying to offer open identities to European citizens. There's GAIA-X, which is a funny project. I mean, hard to describe. Basically, it's a sort of private consortium blessed by the European Commission that is trying to establish common data, for example, common ontologies, if you want to cooperate among different companies in the car sector, for example. You need to have common ontologies to understand each other's data. So this is the work that they are doing. So there's a lot of work going on. And as I was saying, I would focus on the Digital Services Act, which is, I mean, basically, it's the old e-commerce directive. All of the world has this kind of laws that establish that intermediaries have a limited liability. They are not fully responsible for the content, for example, that they get from users and publish, because otherwise it would be impossible to have user-generated content. But now, I mean, this concept is being a little eroded that there's especially for the so-called very large online platforms like Book of course, that there will be strong transparency and accountability requirements. And there will be, I mean, attempts to ensure that they do not close accounts and do not close accounts when it's necessary. So this kind of guarantees around content, which is now very important in Europe because there is a lot of sensitivity about the political propaganda, especially by foreign countries, especially foreign countries in which there's a war. And so there are attempts to make sure that there's a way to control the content, which is flowing on, which is maybe not the best of free expression idea, but it is not necessary in this environment. So let's come to the Digital Markets Act, which is the most recent one. Actually, the text was, it's not final yet, it's still to be approved, but the final text was basically agreed at the political level two weeks ago. And there's open source industry and digital rights organizations. We did a big campaign to get, especially the interoperability requirements. So the idea is that Europe will define gatekeeper platforms, for example, those that have a market value of 75 billion euros. And so basically the names we've seen before and very few others, like it's going to be like six, seven, eight companies, mostly American, maybe one European.com. And the idea is to have to establish a sort of non-traditional anti-prust instrument to ensure that there can be competition with these mega services. And so there will be a number of services. This is a list. So basically only these services are covered. So if you're doing other services, you're not covered. But as you see, there's the biggest, I mean the most common online services from including the operating systems and then social media, marketplaces, search engines and so on. Browsers are now covered. And so whoever is a gatekeeper in one of these services will be subject to these provisions. And this is the kind of stuff that is now prohibited, will be prohibited once this comes into force, which will happen possibly in a couple of years when all the process is completed. And so for example, there will be the attempt to stop a forced diet integration. You will not be able to exchange data between different services. You will not be able to require people to buy a second service from you if you have one of the dominant ones. So again, spandling against, for example, you will be required to let users use different identity systems, not just your own and so on. But the most interesting ones are the ones bundling and interoperability, which are just the key concerns that I mentioned before. So the idea is basically in terms of bundling that we still have to see the final text, but this more or less should be there, that there will be the prohibition basically to force users to use multiple services. So you have, USI business user have to be able to use, for example, Amazon's marketplace without being forced to use Amazon's delivery service and so on. So this kind of bundling will be prohibited. And in terms of software, when you will install a mobile phone, you will have to be asked which search engine you want to use, which email application and so on. So the idea is that you will favor the choice of different apps by not allowing a default. And then there's the interoperability clauses. Unfortunately, we lost interoperability for social media, exactly for the concerns in terms of content control that I mentioned before. But we got the interoperability for instant messages. So WhatsApp and other dominant messengers will be required to open up interfaces and allow at least third parties to interact with an API and exchange messages and so on. And then there's also the same for auxiliary services. So stuff like identification payments, you will be required, I mean, they will be required to let you use different login systems, different payment systems and so on. And this was a great victory. It took a lot of effort by the European open source community, but apparently we got there. We still have to see the final text. Sorry. Why is interoperability so important? Because interoperability allows competition. So if the original internal services are competitive because they are based on interoperability modularity, so you can separate different services and you can replace individual blocks. And so you can, as a company, as a start as an individual, an open source project, you can make a new, for example, block of identity and then you plug into it in place of the dominant one. And this enables competition. So this is why we are aiming to get into our system of interoperable apps in which you just have one. You pick the one which is best for you. So there's competition, maybe one which is more privacy friendly and is not spying on you and you're able to communicate with all the other users. So thank you. This is the end of the presentation and I'm happy to take comments, questions and whatever.