What was your digital life like five years ago?

Data storage Digitization THE EU Innovation Integrity
 

You probably didn't have a smartphone, apps didn't exist and cloud services were probably something to do with the weather. You bought the SL ticket from the bus driver and checked the journey on a PC or with a sluggish GPRS phone.

Today, you check your bus journey with an app developed by a private individual whose service retrieves all data from SL's computer system. Of course, you do this with a sluggish 3G smartphone. But that's mostly because the use of smart mobile services has grown so fast (since 2008, 35 billion, 35,000,000,000, apps have been downloaded from the Apple and Google app stores alone) that the upgrading of the mobile network hasn't quite kept up.

So why mention this. It's nothing new, is it? No, it shouldn't be. The point is that five years ago, we had no idea what our digital lives would look like today. And we have no idea what usage will look like in another five years. Which is the minimum time for the implementation of an EU directive.

After a few days in Brussels and meetings with various politicians, institutions and organizations, it is clear that network-related regulation is often developed on the assumption that we know how the network will be used in the future.

For example, traffic data retention would help police deal with terrorist threats in the shadow of the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and the use of SMS by bombers. Now that the directive is in place in 2012, both its purpose and content have been broadened despite uncertainty about its usefulness, privacy risks and the consequence that the state now stores all data about our increasingly connected lives.

During the Pirate Bay year of 2009, the Telecom Package was in the process of inserting ambiguous language that risked shifting responsibility for what individuals do online from the user to the provider of the traffic. This would certainly have had an impact on the ability of the open web to deliver innovation and growth.

And so it goes on. Individual current events in our world risk hampering tomorrow's users and the development of our increasingly important digital economy.

What Swedes and Europeans should be asking is whether we can afford to risk the fantastic contributions to economic growth and societal development that the open web has made and continues to make.