We believe in a technologically sovereign Europe, where Europeans make their own decisions about their data, platforms, and innovation. Our data should belong to us, our private conversations should remain private, and our publically-funded innovations should belong to the public.
European Spring will harness the power of technology to serve the people.
We will introduce legislation that enshrines a right to open and uncensored Internet.
To provide more universal access to the Internet, the legislation will attach responsibilities for EU member-states to develop and expand digital infrastructure.
To ensure that all people have the capabilities to navigate the Internet, we will revive the EU’s “Lifelong Learning Program” to help build digital literacy and digital capacity across Europe.
The EU’s “Horizon Europe” invests billions of Euros each year in research and innovation. But European citizens have no say over the direction of these funds and even less control of the products and patents that they yield.
We will democratise Horizon Europe, mandating
European Spring believes that public money should deliver public knowledge, public ownership, and common wealth.
The same principle applies for the development of artificial intelligence. The EU must invest in open AI to promote machine-learning and technological progress in Europe.
And all ethical issues stemming from the rise of Artificial Intelligence should be settled democratically and debated at the European level.
We will work toward mandatory open standards for online platforms.
These standards will allow all users to interact with social media platforms without giving away their data, and they will allow users to switch platforms without losing all the data that they have stored.
By allowing users to migrate off of these platforms, we will reduce the monopoly control of large tech platforms and encourage new digital ventures, both public and private.
Corporate control of patents and copyrights limits innovation and prevents free expression. We will build the digital commons by restricting the power of copyright.
We propose to
We believe that all people are entitled to cyber security rights that protect them from state surveillance and private data trading. We believe that citizens have a right to know who collects data about them, for which purposes, and using which algorithms.
Public authorities must retire pre-digital practices that prevented the public from overseeing their work. We are calling for the introduction of free and open-source software at all levels of public administration and publicly funded institutions.
And we are calling for all records that are available to the public to be digitized and published in an open online database.
Technology can and should be a vehicle for transparency.
The current structure of the Internet is far too centralized. Much of the “cloud” that stores and manages our data is privately owned and perfectly structured for government surveillance.
We propose a new European Autonomous Data Network (EADN): a decentralised, anonymous,and encrypted network of devices that protects our data and prevents surveillance.
All public services should be based on the EADN, and all citizens should be granted a Citizen Digital Identity that allows them to access government websites and participate in public forums — verified but anonymous.
Please find all our policies as PDF here.