Communications of the ACM

for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), a multinational institute that would be devoted to AI research. The concept is modeled on CERN, the particle physics lab created after the World War II to stem the flow of physicists across the Atlantic. Although it is not clear whether ELLIS will get off the drawing board, the EC has promised to spend an additional $1.7 billion on AI research between 2018 and 2020, which it hopes will stimulate a further $2.8 billion investment by public-private partnerships.

That comes on top of a pledge by the EC and EU members states to spend $1.1 billion building world-class supercomputers, after recognizing that Europe is also falling behind in this area. “We do not have any supercomputers in the world’s top 10,” Andrus Ansip, EC Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, said in January 2017. “We want to give European researchers and companies world-leading supercomputer capacity by 2020—to develop technologies such as artificial intelligence and build the future’s everyday applications in areas like health, security or engineering.” However, both China and the U.S. are also investing heavily in AI research and supercomputing capacity.

Commercializing
Quantum Computing
and 5G

The EC is also anxious for Europe to commercialize quantum computing.

Blogging about its new $1.1
billion Quantum Flagship
initiative, Ansip wrote:
“While Europe has many
world-class scientists in this
field, there is so far little in-
dustrial take-up or commer-
cial exploitation here.” After
the Graphene Flagship and
the Human Brain Project,
the Quantum Flagship is the
third large-scale research
and innovation initiative of
this kind funded by the EC.

At the same time, Europe wants to lead the development and deployment of

5G wireless technologies. In 2018, the non-profit European Investment Bank has lent

$580 million to Nokia and

$300 million to Ericsson to further R&D related to 5G. To help build a global consensus on future 5G standards and spectrum requirements, the European Commission has established Joint Declarations on 5G with Brazil, China, Japan, and South Korea. Cooperation agreements are also being discussed with India and the U.S.

Trailblazing on
Global Collaboration
and Regulation

With 50 countries packed into one continent, Europeans are well accustomed to international collaboration, as evident in its major strategic alliances, such as Airbus, CERN, the European Molecular Biology Lab, and the European Space Agency, which are all backed by multiple countries within Europe. European businesses also tend to be supportive of international standards: Europe was the birthplace of GSM, the technology that brought mobile communications to the world.

Furthermore, Europe’s regulators are highly influential. EU directives

HOME TO APPROXI- MATELY 740 million people, many of them affluent, Europe spends a
lot of money on information
and communications tech-
nology (ICT). The European
ICT market was worth $769
billion in 2017 (up 1.8%
from 2016).a
Yet, despite the best ef-
forts of the European Union
(EU), Europe is not one mar-
ket. There are major cultural
differences and economic
disparities between north-
west Europe and southeast
Europe. Whereas Germany,
the U.K., the Nordics, and
a The European IT Observatory;
http://bit.ly/2FGV2FQ

Consumers | DOI: 10.1145/3309921
Europe’s Well-Connected
Consumers
BY DAVID PRINGLE

and regulations often form the basis for government interventions in other markets. The General Data Protection Regulation (see Laurence Kalman’s article on p. 38) and the second Payment Services Directive, which both came into force in 2018, provide consumers with sweeping new rights to protect and extract their personal data. This radical legislation, together with the multibillion-dollar fines levied on Google, underlines the EU’s readiness to try and exert more control over disruptive digital players from outside its borders.

David Pringle is a London-based writer for Science|Business Publishing Ltd., covering the telecom, media, and technology sectors..

the Netherlands tend to at-
tract migrants from all over
the world, many countries
on the eastern and southern
rims of Europe are seeing
an exodus of young people
and low birth rates. Indeed,
the continent as a whole
is aging: One fifth of the
people in the 28 members of
the EU (the EU28) are now
65 or over, compared with
17% in 2007.b In the U.S., the
equivalent figure is 15% and
in China 11%.c
The vast majority of
Europeans are online. It
is relatively cost-effective
b Eurostat; http://bit.ly/2 TaeXQs
c The World Bank: https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/
SP.POP.65UP.TO.ZS
for the region’s telecoms
companies to provide con-
nectivity: Europe is densely
populated and heavily
urbanized—three quarters
of the EU population lives
in cities, towns, or suburbs.
Across the EU28, more than
87% of households had In-
ternet access and 85% broad-
band Internet access at the
end of 2017.d Moreover,
the broadband is relatively
quick: Of the top 50 coun-
tries ranked by broadband
speeds worldwide, 36 of
them are in Europe.e Sweden
has the fastest broadband in
Europe, offering an average
d Eurostat; http://bit.ly/2sHEpB8