In a high-level hearing hosted by the European Political Strategy Centre, Daniel Castro outlined how important technology trends will affect Europe's ability to protect its strategic interest.

Europe
As Joe Kennedy writes for Fox Business, the danger of EU countries subjecting U.S. companies to discriminatory taxes remains high because individual European countries are free to pass their own national laws, even if the EU doesn’t do so as a bloc.
The United Kingdom shows that dynamic injunction orders and the use of technology together can help combat the piracy of live sporting events through set-top boxes.
Despite some wishful thinking by its proponents, it was widely predicted that GDPR would hamper European technology firms’ ability to compete globally. A recent study has validated that prediction.
A new report by ITIF finds that the fact that U.S. workers are 16 percent more productive than EU-15 workers is largely attributable to Europe’s failure to invest in information and communications technologies (ICT), which drives labor productivity.
To restore robust productivity growth, Europe must fully embrace information and communication technologies (ICT) throughout its economy.
Policymakers tend to give an outsized share of attention and credit to small businesses, touting their role in entrepreneurship, but in doing so they often conflate small businesses with new businesses. Start-ups are important for their contributions to creative destruction and innovation, but small businesses are less efficient because they cannot take advantages of economies of scale.
The collection of large amounts of data alone does not present a threat to competition and shifts in competition policy that would treat it as such would negatively impact data-driven innovation.
The European Commission is pursuing major initiatives in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. AI provides attackers new cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but it is also a powerful tool for automating cyber defenses.
The lesson for EU policymakers is clear: do not get seduced by the idea that stringent privacy regulation is a shortcut for digital growth. Enacting even stricter data protection rules, such as the pending ePrivacy Regulation, will come with costs that will hurt not only the EU digital ecosystem but also EU digital consumers.
EU policymakers created the GDPR to protect an individual’s right to privacy—a right that they see worth protecting at any cost. However, its creators did nothing to prevent these costs from being levied on non-Europeans. Policymakers around the world should step in to ensure that if Europe wants privacy, it must pay its own bill.
The Internet economy requires new rules in some cases. But these rules need to be carefully considered. Where changes are needed, policymakers need to ensure that they do not impair the tremendous innovation and value that the Internet has enabled writes Joe Kennedy in Innovation Files.
The European Commission should be wary of meddling with the mobile market. The wrong choice would hurt competition, diminish quality and security, and leave consumers worse off writes Daniel Castro in Innovation Files.
Only a third of online news published in France is original content, writes John Wu in Innovation Files.
Article 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Directive is a reasonable proposal that protects intellectual property, preserves consumer interests, and fosters the European digital economy, and the European Parliament should proceed with this reform writes Daniel Castro and Nigel Cory in Innovation Files.
ITIF's Center for Data Innovation hosted a conversation about data sharing in Europe and the steps policymakers can take to make more data available and reusable in Europe.
In order to fully capture the benefits of the emerging production revolution, EU policy makers and the European public must embrace, rather than slow down, the emergence or artificial intelligence and the transformation of most EU industries.
As Nick Wallace writes for EUobserver, over-regulating artificial intelligence now risks the EU’s chance for global influence over the technology's future.
Boosting transatlantic cooperation on ICT policy would allow Canada, the EU, and the United States to address global ICT challenges and support their domestic economies by raising productivity.
Please join ITIF and a panel of experts from Austria, the European Union, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom as they discuss how their countries are approaching innovation policy and regulation.
Based on prior experience, the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation will likely result in revenue decreases across online services firms, writes John Wu in Innovation Files.
The GDPR imposes such tight restrictions on the use of personal data that the EU will be unable to keep up with the rest of the world using AI to streamline their economies, Nick Wallace writes for Euractiv.
Organizations are scrambling to comply with the GDPR, sending out alerts to shield themselves from liability even though in many cases it’s not necessary. This is emblematic of a core problem: It is a confusing and impractical set of rules to comply with, and it offers consumers little to no benefit.
As Daniel Castro and Michael McLaughlin write for Fortune, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will harm not only the organizations that must comply with it, but consumers—the very people the new rules are intended to help.
South European countries increased productivity much slower than Germany due to a lack of IT management know-how, writes John Wu in Innovation Files.