Malta has a good strategy of inclusion in making all citizens part of the information society and local businesses are confident of their digital assets. However it is questionable whether these digital tools remain sharp enough in terms of high-speed internet access.
This is the assessment of Robert Madelin, the director general at the Directorate General for the Information Society of the European Commission, in an exclusive interview with i-Tech during his recent visit to Malta to discuss the progress in the implementation of the EU’s Digital Agenda strategy.
“My sense is that the digital environment is the information society. So a dynamic, resilient, educated and imaginative society will always do well if it has the tools. I think that in Malta you can see a strategy to make sure everybody is part of that society, and inclusion is very important. You can obviously see a resilient self-confident business community with information society assets. Therefore the question is whether the tools will continue to be sharp enough with high-speed broadband, good connectivity across the water and so on. But I think on that condition it could be a very good thing.”
Mr Madelin spoke about the different aspects of the implementation of the Digital Agenda, which has the ambitious goal of putting every European citizen online by 2020, and how some of its aspects and new technologies are impacting Malta.
“We feel that progress is being made in terms of the development of offers that are leading households to want better services. The number of households using ISP broadband in Malta is going up quite rapidly and this is happening also in Europe. Why is that happening? It’s not just the offer from telecoms but also content, more countries have some streaming offers of music, you can get more fun things online, and on that we are trying to work on copyright to make it easier.
“What we are trying to do quite fast is to enable the online tools to manage copyright licensing more quickly. We have launched the LinkedContentCoalition which is trying to tag every piece of content, for example music, with its own copyright data, so the machine can work out how to give you a license for as many countries as you like. I would say that the offer side is getting better.
“The second good thing is e-government. We have launched an innovation partnership on active and healthy aging, we had a very important meeting in Poland lately and we have also discussed interoperable e-ID so that when Maltese citizens get it, it will work across Europe,” revealed Mr Madelin.
However an area where a greater effort is needed is high-speed internet access to reach the target of getting ultra fast 100-megabit connections in half of the households in Europe by 2020.
“Broadly a lot of things are going right but high-speed needs a push. There are two problems we are working very hard on. One is pushing hard to get the regulatory mix right, and Malta is on time for that, but also make sure the rules are correctly calibrated, with the right costings,” he said.
The issue of copyright remains hot on the digital agenda and within the Maltese context. In the last few months this newspaper has reported on the issue of illegal satellite viewing in Malta and when i-Tech interviewed Mr Madelin last year he acknowledged that it is a Europe-wide problem. However there has been one important development this year, when the European Court of Justice pronounced itself in the case involving a bar in Portsmouth, UK, and said that the owner could buy a satellite viewing card from another country and then use it in the UK.
“The rule of law sometimes helps us to understand what the law meant. What the ECJ is doing makes legal, I would say, part of what European citizens do. The court said if you have a legitimate satellite access card it’s ok to use it anywhere in Europe. Companies can’t partition the market. That doesn’t mean that piracy is ok or hacking into a signal is ok.
“But it basically shows you that the court is still in favour of the single European economy and that the court understands that new technology gives citizens new rights and the owners of power should not be given a privilege over the rights of the individual citizens. So it’s good news but that does not mean anything else. It doesn’t affect football rights of course. You still have to pay for them.”
Asked about the crisis in the eurozone and its impact on the ICT industry and research and innovation in Europe, the top ICT executive in the European Commission said that consumers are a bit hesitant to spend but the situation was worse in 2010 than this year. On the research side, the Commission’s proposals for spending are to keep in line with budgets until 2013 but beyond this date increase the share of spending on research in the overall community budget. When times get tough you have to invest more in the long term.
Earlier this year Malta transposed the new set of telecommunications rules and just a few weeks ago Malta implemented its digital switchover in TV, as part of Europe-wide process to better manage wireless frequencies. Mr Madelin appreciated Malta’s efforts on both counts, and indeed, Malta was one of just nine EU member states who carried out the transposition of the new telecoms package on time and without problems.
“Citizens probably don’t notice that we have moved from the second to the third telecoms package and that’s as it should be. Malta has done its job with transposition. Quite a lot of member states are late but not hugely late. Some of them got some things wrong but they are not hugely wrong. It’s also a process that enables the basic policies to become embedded in the local reality and it is doing all right. We are not waiting for all member states to transpose before implementing detail.”
A new phenomenon, which is taking shape at a fast pace, is cloud computing, whereby a company uses the computing power from a source which is not its own computer on its premises. Europe has a role to play here but, once again, it has to respond in the right way so that the benefits of this new technology are harnessed.
“What we are doing is trying to keep the market honest even between the biggest users of computer services and the providers. What the big companies, the big airlines, the big retail companies are telling us is that they want the cloud provision to be designed with us in mind. This is a big risk for us. We are going to put outside our walls stuff that we used to have inside. We used to have filing cabinets and services in the basement and put it somewhere else.
“We need very good business models to be offered. European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes is working a lot with companies to understand how this works and we are also working on the regulatory side, data privacy, liability, data breach notification and these sorts of elements to be cloud ready. Next year we will probably try to pull that together and make a strategy paper.”