The Tech Brief

GAIA-X. France and Germany's bid to create a European cloud infrastructure ecosystem to stave off US and Chinese competitors in the data business was launched today, after Ministers Bruno Le Maire and Peter Altmaier revealed more on their ambitious Gaia-X project.  

As Europe readies itself for a public consultation on the upcoming Digital Services Act, US President Donald Trump has adopted a no-holds-barred approach to social media this week, threatening to impose strict regulation or close down Twitter after the platform fact-checked one of his tweets.

EU needs app uptake. The European Commission has said this week that the ‘largest possible participation’ of EU citizens is required in order for coronavirus contact tracing applications to work effectively.

Earlier this week, the executive's VP for Digital, Margrethe Vestager, suggested that coronavirus contact tracing apps could play a vital role in cross-borer travel this summer.  Welcome to EURACTIV's Digital Brief Podcast, where we'll look into this issue further, in addition to giving a lowdown of the week’s biggest European tech news stories in the world of politics and policy.

Digital Tax. The debate in Brussels is once again heating up over whether a EU-wide Digital Services Tax could be one of the answers to the economic fallout resulting from the coronavirus.Welcome to EURACTIV's Digital Brief Podcast, where we'll look into this issue further, in addition to giving a lowdown of the week’s biggest European tech news stories in the world of politics and policy.

The divergent approaches of EU member states in their privacy protocols for coronavirus contact tracing apps are about to be laid bare, as nations adopt different technologies with different standards, despite the EU attempting to harmonise guidance on the use of such apps. This week EURACTIV digs deeper into the controversy surrounding the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) project consortium and surveys the rest of the week’s news in the world of European technology policy and politics.

The European Commission has warned against the processing and storage of location data in the use of mobile applications designed to trace the potential spread of the coronavirus across the bloc.   EURACTIV Digital Editor Samuel Stolton looks into this issue further, in addition to giving a breakdown of the week’s biggest European tech news stories in the world of politics and policy.

On Monday, the EU’s data watchdog said that the bloc should establish its own “pan-European COVID-19 mobile application” due to divergences in current app developments across the bloc. EURACTIV Digital Editor Samuel Stolton looks into this issue further, in addition to giving a breakdown of the week’s biggest European tech news stories in the world of politics and policy.

In a desperate attempt to gain some of a sense of control over the spread of the COVID-19, governments across Europe are looking out to the far-east for lessons on how to trace the spread of the virus. EURACTIV Digital Editor Samuel Stolton looks into this issue further, in addition to giving a breakdown of the week’s biggest European tech news stories in the world of politics and policy.

Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders talks about regulating Artificial Intelligence technologies, as part of a European Parliament Civil Liberties discussion on Tuesday 21 January 2020.