By ; Mohamed El Kholy – Nahla Makled
The GSMA, on behalf of its European members, presents the mobile industry's vision for 2021 and beyond, outlined in a white paper titled "Sovereignty, Resilience and Trust" published today. Top priorities include delivering on the European Commission’s 5G Action Plan, building a distributed cloud and edge infrastructure and shrinking the digital divide.
As the European Commission envisions a Digital Decade, implementation of Europe’s digital strategy is more pressing than ever. Acknowledging connectivity as “the most fundamental building block of the digital transformation,” the strategy identifies a range of measures to strengthen Europe’s digital economy, generate value in alignment with European values and establish greater sovereignty in the era of Big Tech. Digital sovereignty is a central tenet; Europe must ensure that digital infrastructure and services are not defined exclusively by overseas companies whose interests are not its own and over which it has limited authority.
The European mobile industry applauds these aspirations. We believe that Europe can emerge from the COVID-19 crisis stronger, and connectivity will play an essential role. In the short term, digital solutions will allow people to return to work more quickly by facilitating social distancing. Longer-term, we will need to consider where investment should be targeted, recognising that economic activity might not return to pre-crisis levels for years to come. Some global supply chains might never fully recover, and this will introduce inefficiency to the system.
Supply-chain disruptions may present an opportunity for Europe to regain sovereignty in some strategically important areas. On the other hand, a telecoms sector weakened by chronic overregulation could be exposed to greater foreign control.
A robust and resilient telecoms sector will also play a critical role in Europe’s ability to meet its environmental commitments. Through what we call ‘the enablement effect’, increased use of smart, connected technologies across all economic sectors will make a manifest difference in greenhouse gas emissions.
The future will require us to be more resilient and more digital, and this calls for rapid and bold action. By increasing the pace of digitalisation, Europe can achieve new efficiencies linked to the new attitudes and behaviours we see taking hold across society.
The new GSMA report highlights three areas: telecom infrastructure, digital economy, a new social contract, where decisive policies are needed to propel Europe towards greater digital self-determination and technological leadership — for the benefit of all
