Freely subscribe to our NEWSLETTER

In addition, digital commons challenge the enclosure strategies pursued by some governments and
major digital service providers. Additionally, they provide affordable and ethically governed digital
systems to associations and democratic initiatives. Digital commons constitute a significant lever for
setting up multilateral governance - in the sense of mutual and mutually accepted constraint - of our
data and the tools that use it, and for recovering a share of digital strategic autonomy. In the context
of an increasingly digitalized world, commons can become a pillar of Europe’s digital sovereignty.
Our economy and daily use of digital tools rely on a multilayer Internet infrastructure build with
countless software components. Many are made and sustained by citizen communities on a voluntary
basis, often with limited resources. The discovery on December 10, 2021, of a vulnerability in Apache
Log4J – an essential building block of the Internet broadly used in technology services and products
and maintained by a few citizens – brought into sharp focus the critical importance of digital commons
communities in the protection and resilience of a global, open, neutral, non-fragmented, and secure
digital architecture. Incidents like this one have enhanced our collective understanding of the
challenges we face and how they can be addressed.

The French Presidency of the Council of the European Union calls for a new initiative for digital
commons in Europe, to support and accelerate their development as well as their
internationalization.
The initiative would build on existing programs and initiatives that have proved efficient like the
Next Generation Internet to fund commons and open-source technological components on strategic
segments, both at the European and at the national level. By facilitating a change of scale in the use of
open-source solutions and digital commons in public tenders, the European initiative for digital
commons will complement ongoing national programs and will build on existing European structures
and projects to provide recurrent aid. In this regard, Member States are warmly encouraged to identify
quality and security-and-safety-by-design digital commons projects which would benefit from public
procurement to foster their development and uptake across the European Union. This initiative should
(i) steer efforts towards the identification and the Europeanization of existing national digital
commons and open-source software, (ii) promote the use of digital commons within European
institutions and Member States’ public services, and (iii) set up a framework for contributing to
strategic commons by allocating human resources or financial support, or by participating, formally
or informally, in their governance.

The Presidency calls for the establishment of a provisional working team gathering Member States
participating on a voluntary basis to discuss: (i) opportunities to mobilize funding available in the
European Union; (ii) a European incubator for digital commons, either virtual or hosted in a physical
location; and (iii) the means or a structure to provide guidance and assistance to Member States in
addition to funding for digital commons. This last activity would entail a close cooperation and be
established hand-to-hand with digital commons communities to combine public and plural forces.
Some digital commons communities have specifically expressed their need to (i) access expertise
(legal, governance, organizational); (ii) receive funds to maintain – and sometimes extend – the digital
commons they hold; and (iii) further connect with other communities to share expertise and
recognition of value. The working team will deliver its conclusions at the Digital Assembly from 21 to
June 22, 2022.
This initiative is aimed at enabling Europe to take a step forward by meeting the needs of digital
commons in order to unlock their full potential for Europe’s economy, security, resilience, and
democracy in line with the Union’s values and principles.