Open Source and Open Knowledge as Geo-Economic Object in EU Digital Policies

Keywords: Digital Geography, Ioen Source, Open Knowledge, Commons, European Union, geoeconomy, geopolitics
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Since the establishment of the Internet, open collaboration has been associated with great promise: Open source, open knowledge and wider digital commons were seen as means of fulfilling the libertarian promises of the early Internet: to work together on a new world.

However, these promises have not been fulfilled: Large monopolies emerged, especially in the USA and China, precisely because they use closed code and privatize knowledge to act out their competitive advantages. For some time now, there have been efforts at the EU level to strengthen the European digital economies and to restrain the monopoly power of non-European big tech. In this context, the EU increasingly attempts to use open source/knowledge as an instrument of geo-economic competition.

We show through two case studies that this process is complicated and contested: First, we demonstrate the consequences of the participation of non-European monopolies in the European cloud project GAIA-X, which was founded to create open digital standards "Made in EU". Second, we present how the open knowledge project OpenStreetMap, which sees itself as a crowdsourcing geodata project and has a strong core in Europe, deals with the growing involvement of Big Tech.

Disputes around these cases show an evolving strategy to frame open source/knowledge as part of a European way of digital transformation and that open source/knowledge is becoming object of geo-economic and -political struggles for the profits of the digital transformation.