Europe’s technophobic governments
Recent events in Europe increasingly justify the term “old world” to describe the continent. A growing number of governments are displaying the symptoms of what can only be called technophobia, and seem set on stifling any of the possibilities that the new technologies offer.
As an academic who teaches innovation, my attitude toward the new tends to be “try and see what happens”, rather than “help, this is unthinkable”. Sadly, the latter attitude is far more frequent, and there are many over here who, if they could, would “uninvent” recent innovations.
Resistance to change is like friction in physics: a constant. But the problems start when that resistance comes say, not from individuals, which may have some impact, even at national level, but from governments, and in this case it affects an entire continent. So when Belgium says it is to take legal action against Facebook for “systematic and flagrant violations” of the country’s privacy laws, the outcome, in the medium term, can be to delay the arrival of new technologies to Europe. When the Spanish government tries to buy the silence of the media by sharing out cash from an absurd tax on news aggregators, it prompts the departure of Google News, and this despite the European Parliament ruling that such taxes are against the public’s interest.
And when Spain and Italy decide to throw Uber out, two of the world’s biggest tourist destinations are suddenly seen by millions of people as locked in the Middle Ages when they discover that their favorite app doesn’t work.
Sure, there are always counter arguments: Facebook is a “threat to civilization because it shares data left, right and center and carries out experiments on its users, potentially damaging them psychologically in the process. And Uber is breaking the law on the licenses required to drive a taxi and is apparently threatening workers’ rights it took many years to achieve. Fine: I can believe all of that, some laws are being breached, but laws are not written in stone, they can be changed, and frequently are.
Instead, what we really need to be asking ourselves is whether we want to be protected to this degree by our governments. Are Europeans or Belgians crying out to have their privacy protected so much that they will end up being denied some technology-based products? Is it really true that taxi users only want drivers with the right paperwork to take them from A to B, or is it perhaps that those who have tried Uber know that cities where the service is available work much better? Do the majority of Uber drivers really want to be considered employees, even though we know that they prefer the flexibility that comes from not being one? In how many of these cases would we actually like to say to our governments, “please stop protecting us so much”?
One thing is to address excesses, abuses, and mistakes through the use of the law, but quite another is building walls to keep out technology and the change it brings.
Governments tend to work on the basis of inertia: they protect already established interests. And this is because incumbents usually have some kind of lobbying system set up to represent their interests. But the truth is that incumbents’ interests are the very last that should be protected: the “terrible dangers” come with disruption are never that terrible, or dangerous, and jobs are going to be lost in all sectors sooner or later (proof, again, that technology cannot be uninvented), while the downside of closing the door to technology soon becomes evident. Technological protectionism, like its other tariff-based variants, is a losing game.
For many people, using this or that application, being able to get into a car, or stay in somebody’s apartment when on holiday is not that important and not worth any hassles doing so may cause. But we’ll soon start to see the importance of these trends. And that is the risk of being not so much the old world, but a kind of theme park, with outdated infrastructure, undesirable privileges for some sectors, and absurd perks. One thing is to want to provide protection, and quite another to try to stop the unstoppable or to try to prevent outsiders and newcomers from operating here.
There is no evidence that countries which have opened their doors to new advances have encountered any problems or social unrest, at least no more than we have here. And my impression is that if you live in a country with a technophobic government, you will end up losing a lot more than you might gain.
(En español, aquí)
