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..
© 2019 ACM 0001-0782/19/4 $15.00
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
e Comparison website cable.
co.uk; http://bit.ly/2DsPBYH