Good afternoon to you all. I hope you're all keeping well and staying safe. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the IIE way. Very warm welcome to you all to today's seminar on European digital sovereignty and the transatlantic relationship. This is a very timely webinar as the first council meeting of the transatlantic trade and technology council took place yesterday. And we're particularly pleased to welcome our distinguished speaker, Frederick Erickson. Frederick is the founding director of the European Center for International Political Economy. Very warm welcome to you, Frederick. In fact, it's a welcome back to the IIEA. I think it's about 10 years since we last saw you in person, but we're very pleased to welcome you today. You're very welcome and thank you for your time that you've given us to be with us today. This is the sixth event in the IIEA project entitled Europe's Digital Future, which is supported by Google. This project explores the topic of digital sovereignty in Europe, what the concept means and what it might hold for the EU and for small economies like Ireland. Frederick will speak to us today for around 20 minutes and then we will go to questions and answers to your audience for your questions. The Q&A function, as you know, is at the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to send in questions during the presentation. Today's presentation Q&A are both on the record and we would love if you would join us on Twitter using the handle at the IIEA. As I said, today's webinar is very timely. Yesterday, the US-EU Trade and Technology Council had its first meeting and there were, as we know, tensions on a range of issues. Frederick himself has commented that the inaugural meeting of the Trade and Technology Council is a constitutional moment where the EU and the US need to define what they can agree on and I'm sure he will touch on that in his presentation. But we hear that the US and EU officials have pledged more coordination and tech and trade at their first council meeting and that it did get off to a good start taking into context the situation that prevails. In relation to digital sovereignty and transatlantic relationship, Frederick will argue that Europe's quest for digital sovereignty is unrealistic if it requires Europe to cut its dependence on the rest of the world by substituting foreign suppliers with local ones. Instead, Europe's relative economic decline means it will become more dependent on innovation and technological breakthroughs happening outside of the EU. In his view, Europe needs to deepen collaboration with the US and other like-minded countries to help shape the global norms and rules guiding digital markets. Frederick has healthfully categorized EU member states into digital managerialists, digital convergers and digital frontrunners. You'll be glad to hear that Ireland is included in digital frontrunners as is Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Estonia, all members of our think tank network. Digital frontrunners are really important because they have a clearly articulated vision of where European policy should be aiming in the promotion of digitalization and also foster collaboration to try and influence the European policy agenda. Frederick is an economist from Sweden, a distinguished writer and researcher. He's written on trade, regulatory policy, technological change and European relationships with North America and Asia. His latest book, which I think Frederick has a really fantastic title, that's the innovation illusion how so little is creative by so many working so hard, which I enjoyed very much. Frederick has advised several governments in Europe and worldwide and the FT has ranked Frederick as one of Brussels's 30 most influential people. Frederick, we look forward to your presentation. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Joyce. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction and also thank you to you and the rest of the team at the IIA for this opportunity to connect with you again and discuss matters of common interest and common concern. I'm also glad you brought up a very old paper by me sort of on categorizing European countries, including Ireland as a digital front runner. And that we did ahead of the establishment of the D9 group between EU member states. And I think the last time I was in Ireland, which was a few years before the pandemic started was actually at one of these D9 meetings and had the great opportunity to also get a lot of positive and constructive input from Irish officials, which are very good on these matters. So I'm what I'm going to do now is that I'm going to share my screen. I have a PowerPoint presentation and I'm going to run you through a presentations with many different slides where I don't have time to spend so much. I don't have time to spend so much time talking about at each slide. So I'm going to set up my my analysis and my arguments and I'm going to end with a couple of thoughts on the transatlantic relation, especially in light of what you just mentioned, Joyce, the Pittsburgh summit that ended yesterday between the EU and United States and the establishment of the transatlantic trade and technology council. But I think sort of in order to both go into that issue and to go into sort of discussion around digital sovereignty in Europe, we also need to have a much greater understanding about what type of economy that we're talking about, what type of consequences for the economy that various policy alternatives are going to have. So that's very much where I'm going to start my presentation today. All right, I think you should be able to see my screen now, right? All right, so I mean, I think we can sort of categorize two different approaches to digital sovereignty and so there's one approach which I'm arguing against very strongly, which is that digital sovereignty should mean that we are reducing our dependence on other countries, on other countries' markets for the supply of technology and digital services in Europe. This would be sort of an independence-oriented policy that would include that we raise trade and investment barriers that we would use regulations in a much more targeted way against foreign companies that we would spend a lot more resources on industrial policy, etc. My alternative view, which is going to infuse my presentation here as well as a paper that I'm currently finishing for the IAA, which hopefully is going to come out before long, is that my case would be that Europe should improve its autonomous capacity to understand, access, use, and develop new technologies and business models. And underlying that thought is that the problem isn't really foreign innovation and competitiveness. Our problem is not that there are brilliant minds in Asia, America, Latin America, and Africa that are now generating new breakthrough technologies that we want to have. That is not our problem. Our problem is that we lack the, or at least we could approve our autonomous capabilities to use access in the first place, understand and develop a similar type of technologies on our own. And in sort of line of that thinking, my policy choice would be to look much more at issues like human capital, the innovations of firms, and capital markets. So that's my, that's my offline thinking. So let's begin by talking a little bit about the new type of economy and the new type of world that we are having. And me and my colleagues have framed this in, in sort of the, the framework of new globalization. As many of you would know, we've had a development over more than 10 years right now, where we have seen declining globalization when we look into the trade, to trade in goods. That volumes of trade in our good sector didn't really manage to grow very far after the recovery from the global financial crisis. As a consequence of that, we have seen more regional, even national sort of forms of the supply of goods compared to what we had before the financial crisis. But none of that means that globalization has, has peated out, or that it's about to die, that we can sometimes hear from some commentators. It's just that globalization shaping is changing face and that we are moving from a globalization, which has been crucially dependent on trading goods to a globalization that is, is now driven by ICT services and trade in ideas. And by trading ideas are basically mean trading new technologies, new innovations, the sharing of knowledge, the fact that our workplaces right now in the economy is organized in a way we almost have constant collaboration with different, different people in different parts of the world that are supplying different inputs that we need, or that are part of, of the actual development that takes place inside an organization. What this chart is showing is an attempt to try to charge this particular development, but it's a bit difficult because trading ideas is not a category that you're going to find in trade statistics. So what we, what we should basically showing here is that since 2014 trading ideas have been growing faster than any other forms of trade, but this is only when only looking at IP royalties. So when we make a much more vital definition and try to understand how much more integration we have with the rest of the world right now in the way we work and in the way we transact, the growth of course have been faster than that. If we look at some standard metrics on trade production and try to figure out sort of the role that trade plays for, for our economy, we'll find that in manufacturing industries we're being sort of on a declining path for, for a pretty long time, meaning that trade in goods haven't really kept up with, with production. So in terms of our dependency on, on, on either exports on or imports have actually gone down over time. It looks very different if you look at information industries, including both telecom equipment producers and telecom, some telecom services where we have a trend going in, in the different direction, which is that trade and economic integration is becoming an increasing part of, of the total value of, of our production. Europe is, is generally speaking pretty well positioned for, for this development and this is some of the, one of the issues which I have some problems with when it comes to European policy making on, on digital services more generally is that we often take to start that discussion from the viewpoint that we don't benefit from it or that other benefits more than we do. What I'm showing you here is, is, is a comparative advantage analysis of the EU 27 in United States when we use a very broad definition of digital services, we're not just looking into specific digital services, like for instance, cloud services or search engines, here we take a broader picture and we look at all services that have a high digital intensity where digital forms of production and supply are, are crucial to the operation of the service overall. And then we're going to find sort of that Europe is actually in a very good possession that we have a revealed comparative advantage that is significantly higher than in America. And that's a reflection of the fact that Europe's economy is very global already and that we have a vibrant services sectors that trade substantially with the rest of the world and generates a very significant current account surplus in, in, in, in these areas. So the point here is, is, is basically to say that the type of economy which is now growing the digital economy, the technology based economy is increasingly dependent on trade and integration with the rest of the world. We see a declining path for trade and integration in traditional goods but, but sort of in the growing part of the economy, it's basically booming globalization right now it's, it's, it's getting stronger and moving, moving up what's stronger, much faster than, than most people would think. So, and this of course is a, is an economy and it's a trade performance which reflects the broader underlying structural changes that we have in, in all our national economies where these economies are more dependent on, on new ideas, new innovations, new new forms of producing and supplying different, different products to, to the economy. And this is where I would like to spend some time talking about the development of the economy and where the concept of digital sovereignty basically sits because here I think we have a problem in Europe if we pursue the idea of going for more sovereign supply of, of digital innovations and, and digital services. Let's start by, by looking at this chart which is known to you it's more, more as law, which is the doubling of chip capacity every second year and we can see this, this trend line here which has been enormously consistent over many, many decades since the early 1970s that we've had some fantastic development with doubling of the chip capacity every second year. Now, what is interesting here is not to, to just look at the output but also trying to look at the input and trying to see what type of economic capacities are required in order to achieve this, this magnificent, magnificent change of the time. And then we're going to see that there has been a huge change in the inputs required in order to achieve this particular outcome. So if we compare the early 1970s with the development in around 2015, we'll find that in 2015 it required 18 times more researchers in order to generate that doubling of chip capacity every second year compared to the number of researchers that were needed in the early 1970s. And this has led sort of to a greater understanding sort of of, of the ideas based economy, which is that this is something which is extraordinarily input dependent and input sensitive. If we look at this chart we're seeing two different developments. One is looking at the number of researchers, which is the right scale, you see the green line and we can see from the 1930s that the number of researchers are basically now probably close to 30 times bigger than the number of researchers that we had in the early 1930s. But then we look at the other side, the left scale and we look at the blue line where we can see decreasing research productivity, basically a measure on how good our research capacity is at generating new innovative technologies. And this is a trend which, as you see, have been going on for a very, very long time, which basically tells us one thing, which is that in order to generate the innovation outcome that we want for the economy, that to some extent we have grown accustomed to, we need to throw in more and more input resources for every year in order to achieve the same outcome. So for me, I mean this is this is an incredibly important starting point for understanding where the concept of digital sovereignty can take us. So if we look at Europe itself, we are a shrinking part of the global economy. It's estimated that by 2050, the European Union is going to represent less than 10% of global GDP. We're all in an hour in a situation where 85% of all growth happens outside of the EU. And what this basically means is that more and more new ideas, more and more brilliant people that generate new ideas will be based outside of Europe. The less significant that Europe is in the total global economy, the more we are going to get dependent on the supply of new technologies and new ideas from outside of the EU. This is a natural reflection of the fact that the world and the world economy has equalized remarkably over the past 40 years, and that we are now in a situation where already now a growing part of new innovations are coming from other parts of the world than the Atlantic region. Our own demography isn't exactly going in a direction which is helpful here, because we have a general demographic development which leads to, in some countries, a nominally shrinking population. More generally, for many of the countries we are having a development where the relative share of the working population in relation to total population is going down. So we are confronted with the development of either nominally or relatively shrinking labour forces, which means that cost and shortages of staff is going to go up. We are already now in a situation where there's a global undersupply of human capital, especially of talented human capital that is required in areas like IT engineering, AI, etc. There is an ever stronger competition for getting access to these talents, which make situation much more difficult for Europe when it comes to attracting talents from the rest of the world to come to Europe when we are facing supply constraints domestically because of a shift in demography. And this is, in my view, sort of a part of a broader trend where we're moving from a labour shock type of economy, highly dominated by the rise of China and other emerging markets which supply the economy with a lot more labour. And now we're entering a phase which is probably going to be more like a labour shortage type of economy, where most economies in the world are going to be competing to attract talented labour. So coming back here then to my initial point, in this context, I don't think it's possible to have a policy which is going to lead to the pursuit of digital sovereignty for the simple reason that we don't have enough autonomous capacities to substitute what we would get from foreign supplies of technology in the future. We already have supply problems right now and given our own sort of relative economic decline and giving our demographic situation, we will be faced with more constraints in the future of supplying the type of inputs we need in order to generate the economy we want to have and that would make us competitive. So again, our sovereignty problem isn't for innovation and competitiveness, it's our lacking autonomous capabilities, especially human capital and capital, which leads to different absorption gaps when it comes to Europe's economies ability to actually adjust to new technologies. So this is where I'm going to end my presentation, spend some time thinking about these issues and my policy preferences are that we should spend a lot more resources and energy talking about how we can improve higher education, especially to make sure that we can supply our economy with more computer engineers, AI engineers and of course other type of human capital is needed. We have too little research spending in Europe, we have no world-class university in the EU, we need to find ways to build up a lot more top-notch capabilities in Europe, not just to supply the economy more generally with human capital but also be able to supply with world-class human capital and with sort of environments of knowledge that generates new technology and new ideas. And lastly, we have too few EU countries that have financial markets that are deep enough in order to fund entrepreneurial projects and fund the type of firms that are going to grow as a consequence of that and both these problems are most likely going to be exacerbated in the future. Here is a chart which comes from the German Business Association for IT companies, BITCOM, and it shows Germany's gap of AI engineers. In 2019, there were 124,000 AI engineers which weren't supplied when they looked at static metrics of what was demanded and what the supply was. They also in their study looked at the substitution rate for an AI engineer. So from the point that a company starts to look for an AI engineer, it now takes around nine months in order to find one that is free and available to go into to work in their organization. If we look at our population pyramid, we will see here sort of that our pyramid is getting squeezed in the middle, meaning that the working age population in relation to elderly is getting smaller and smaller. This is for the EU as a whole. Some of these problems are more acute for some countries, countries like Italy, Germany for instance. Other countries have sort of smaller challenges on this front but broadly speaking, we are facing sort of development over the next 80 years which is going to lead to exacerbated problems with labor supply. Now let's look a little bit at finance and the capital markets and the ability of the market to fund the type of new entrepreneurial digital companies that we want to see. This is a chart showing you the share of GDP that goes into different stages of funding, seed funding, startup funding, later stage funding, and total. And as you can see here, these are not nominal volumes, these are share of GDPs. European countries trail America with a very, very good distance. To dig deeper into that particular issues and look at where eventual capital comes from, looking at the type of funding, we can see that Europe has two very big problems compared to America, which is that the supply that comes from capital markets, you can see this at the lower end of this part chart, is much lower in America compared to in Europe and we can see that the funds that comes from pension funds is also much lower here than it is in America, which of course reflects a development where an increasing part of pensions are tied into different type of funds that have difficulties participating in the funding of entrepreneurial projects. And I think this is a challenge that basically the entirety of Europe is confronted with that. We have problems turning savings into entrepreneurial funding and this is something we truly need to work on in order to improve our autonomous capabilities. Now, looking at absorption gaps more generally, this is a chart we're showing you three different lines. The blue line is the OECD technological frontier, the orange line is the EU technology frontier and the gray line is the frontier of a leading EU economy called Germany. And this is based on basically you take a couple of indicators of where the technological frontier here, the frontier is in this case consumer oriented type of indicators and then you try to position different countries to that frontier and understand sort of how fast the absorption process has been. And as we can see here, there isn't much of a difference between the OECD and the EU frontier and there isn't much of a distance between where Germany and advanced economies are more generally. But this is for consumers. If we look at businesses and we look at the absorption of digital technologies from businesses, we see a different development. Again, the blue line is the OECD frontier, the orange line is the EU frontier and the gray line is Germany where we can see that the absorption of technologies and the gap between where Germany is in relation to the OECD frontier or where the EU frontier is compared to the OECD is bigger and bigger. This is something which is expanding over time, meaning that the growth of absorption of new technology in the European economy moves slower than it does in other types of economy, meaning that Europe is getting increasingly distant from the frontier over time. So let me end on a few final notes on the transatlantic relations and I'm not going to spend that much time on this issue, partly because we've sort of had sort of the Pittsburgh results coming out overnight, need to chew on that a little bit more before coming to sort of any conclusions around it. So what I'm going to do here is basically setting a couple of frameworks for that particular conversation, how Europe should think about its transatlantic relations. An independent strategy is effectively means that we're going to cut the dependence on America. That's what an independent strategy means more generally because right now we do rely on American technology to a substantial degree. However, that reliance itself needs to be put in perspective. If we look for instance at core digital services, like the one I mentioned before, for instance, cloud services, they aren't that many core digital services, but when we look at them we'll find that Europe's trade deficit with America isn't very substantial at all. If we look at the three core categories of digital services, we'll find that Europe's trade deficit with America equals 1.8 billion US dollars. That's the amount we're talking about here. When we expand the concept to include services and sectors that are digitally intensive, we're of course going to come to a conclusion that Europe most likely have a trade surplus with America on digitally intensive or digitally enabled output simply because Europe has a substantial trade surplus with America more generally demands to almost 140 billion US dollars per year. But if we pursue then, if we look at technology and the supply of technology not sort of trades statistics, cutting the dependence on the EU given the contextual points I've already given you on where the economy is going and supply constraints in European economy, that means we're going to grow the dependence on someone else. The alternative is basically that we're going to reduce access to frontier technology for European companies and for European consumers and I don't think that would be a very good choice because that's going to have a knock on effect on productivity and economic output. So that raises the point. So if we want to cut the dependence on the United States, so who do we want to grow our dependence on because cutting the dependence on the United States doesn't mean by any degree of automaticity that we're going to increase our independence our own sources for supply of technology, it's most likely means that we're going to grow the dependence on someone else. And the question is who is that someone else that we want to grow the dependence on. I'd also be careful with that particular policy on that sort of old dictum that source for the goose is source for the gander, which means that if Europe is going to cut its dependence on United States for the supply of technology, then United States is going to cut its dependence on the EU for the supply of technology. And that is also going to include digital or AI sectors where Europe tend to be strong. For instance, digitally enabled services, robotics, industrial AI, etc. So if we if we make a deliberate move in order to reduce our dependence on technology from America, America is going to do the same to us. And that's going to basically means that there will be lower output for for the companies that are now being able to supply America with these type of goods. I would rather hope that we are going to move forward in the transatlantic relationships on the basis of a constructive engagement. And I would look very much if I look at this from a European point of view, on what I would call areas of brilliance, basically areas where Europe need to increase its performance. And that's going to be in top R&D in universities and in venture capital capabilities. The other part I would go a lot for is on the rules and norms for free and fair competition in the digital economy here looking at what Europe and American can do together in order to shape the standards for the global economy in the future. This is very much part of the conversation of the Transatlantic Trade and Technology Council. The working groups that now have been established are quite often connected to exactly these issues. They have been decided not so much to deal with bilateral frictions between United States and America, even if of course they are included in there. You can clearly see that this is an attempt by Europe and America to avoid sort of the strong forces of relative economic decline that both sides are confronted with and see if stronger collaboration between them can arrest this development of shrinking influence for both Europe and America on the design of the global economy here. My take on the Pittsburgh summit is that I think this has been a good moment to start this. I think what came out from it was quite okay. I think they managed to do what was required to do in order to sort of at least give indications that they are prepared to invest in a trustful relation between each other. I think now comes the hard work and the work that we need to see what's going to happen in future to make sort of a judgment whether this is an exercise which is going to be consequential or not and that of course is going to be critically, it's critically going to depend upon the interest on both sides to let this collaboration be influential in the type of regulations they are going to shape domestically for digital technologies, for digital services and for a host of other new technologies in the future. And there I'm not so sure. I think my expectation would be that sort of the convergence that we have seen transatlantically over the years will continue and in order to break that trend and move towards more convergence I think there will have to be a lot more political capital invested in this in order to make sure that it means something for both sides when they are in their own processes of trying to come up with the regulations and the policy choices that are going to define how they approach new technologies in the future. So we'll see. But I'm going to stop there so thanks for the time so far Joyce. Thank you so much, Frederick. That was an excellent presentation and a very stimulating analysis and observations about where we are now and putting it in the context of this new globalization. I think that's a very compelling concept and offers a lot of positives, particularly when you talk about the cost and power of new ideas. And as you said, that means there needs to be much more investment in research and development in universities and an understanding of where that comes from. So it strikes me that all that you talked about in contributing to the debate about digital sovereignty is to look at, you know, in many ways it's an abstract concept, but when you peel away the past, there's very, very concrete things we can do to develop Europe at each member state by, as you very clearly say, through collaboration, through understanding of what's going on and through making very positive decisions in that area. And I just wonder, Frederick, just to start off, there's quite a lot of questions coming in, but if I might take the first one, if the cost of new ideas for breakthrough innovation is going up, how can Europe respond to this? Should there be greater public investment? I think you'd say there would and support for research. And when you look at the digital agenda and the discussion with Ursula von der Leyen early in January, February last year, there was a really positive outflow of we can do this, we can move forward. But is the investment there in Europe and is the investment in member states adequate? I think the answer to that is an obvious no. I mean, if you look at trend line, corporate investment in R&D as a share of either output or as share of GDP is going down. If you look at public investment into R&D, the trend line is the same as a share of GDP, it's going down. I applaud what Ursula von der Leyen has been saying, but in this case, I mean, she is more sort of the chief chair leader for Europe than she is sort of the chief executive officer who can actually manage to get this to change. What's worse me is that sort of the political compact that's arising in Europe right now, as we saw, for instance, in the negotiation over the new budgets with the next generation EU facility, we're actually reducing the amount we spend on R&D in the EU budget as well. And that worries me. And it worries me that so few policymakers are understanding the seriousness and the sort of the problems that we're confronted with that. We have a general problem with supply of human capital to the economy. And we have a problem that we don't have the top university and knowledge environments in Europe. So the last time I look at the university ranking, I think the first European university that came on top of this was a German university. And I think it came on place number 27 or 28th. We have a lot of American universities, a few UK universities on top there. But we also find that universities from other parts of the world, especially China, is improving themselves very fast. And of course, that is a combination of the ability to put money from governments and corporations into this understanding sort of the necessity for R&D in the 21st century. But it is, as you say, an understanding. Is there a lack of understanding? And how can we get at a European level, but also at member state level policymakers to respond to this? And we've got our budget coming up fairly soon. And in discussions, higher education institutions, research and development isn't at the top of the list at all, because there's so many other priorities. But how do you get the real understanding of the issues that you've raised across in a policy context? That's a very good question, Joyce. I don't think I have a good answer. I mean, it's one of those issues where the consequences of underperforming levels of investment and output, they show over time. They're not going to be visible in a short period of time. So it's a slow moving development in that sense, which means that perhaps policymakers aren't incentivized to respond to them very, very quickly. And of course, giving all the pressures that are on governments right now with on the fiscal side, it's easy to ignore or sort of prioritize other things to spend on instead. But I think, I mean, one thing which I think was pretty optimistic is that there was a business roundtable in Pittsburgh yesterday. And the president of the Business Federation, Digital Europe, was asked there. So if there's one thing you can mention as the top priority for for what needs to happen transatlantically, she said, well, it's not going to be anything around norms and policies for the future of the economy. It's skills, it's digital skills, and capital. That's one issue. And I think we need to hear sort of a lot more from businesses too on these issues that this is a bottleneck right now. And it isn't. And a lot of the areas that you've shown in AI and other emerging technologies, there's shortages in every member state, Europe, and in fact, as you say, the world. But just to finish maybe on this, you know what I find interesting, the concept of talent discussion around talent and around skills is seeing perhaps not at the level you're discussing it at it's immediate long term planning workplace planning for growth probably doesn't exist because there's been an assumption that, you know, we'll be all right on the day. But in fact, that's now become a real planning isn't that forecasting for the future and building a pipeline, both in European and member states and looking looking to in many ways underpin the development of our society. It's come back to the human talent now rather than other issues, as you say. Absolutely. That's exactly the development we have. There's a question here now that may go to our audience. And thank you for sending it in. It's Paul O'Doober. And he says it's changed. It's changed the topic. What about the situation where the US exercise its foreign policy by restricting certain countries access to its technology, including indirect access via EU? Can Europe break out of this? Yeah, no, indeed. I mean, this sort of I think comes back to conversation that we had previously Joyce, which is that when we look at sort of specific areas where there are strategic vulnerabilities for Europe, we'll find sort of that there are around between sort of 50 to 60 goods, including technologies, where we have some of these for vulnerabilities. Most of them are going to relate to raw material supply, predominantly from China, but not exclusively from China. There are a few other countries as well. There will be some problems related to imports we have right now where we're highly dependent on the Gulf or Turkey. And then there will be a few technology issues where we are dependent on the United States. And if and when the US decides to basically stop the export of these technologies to Europe, there will be knock on effects on the ability of Europe to use that technology for productive purposes. And I think sort of it's this is an area where which is obviously on the agenda in the Transatlantic Trade and Technology Council. I think this is also probably an area where there will be able to find some common ground in order to avoid these situations. But none of that sort of takes away the necessity for Europe to think about its own autonomous capabilities here, which includes how do we make, how do we improve our own capacity to be competitive in these technologies so that we don't have these strategic vulnerabilities. We're not going to be less vulnerable by cutting particular supply or using sort of border measures in order to deal with it. It's mostly about how do we create the environment necessary at home in order to make sure that we are going to have in all these sectors, European firms that are going to be part of the frontier development. They aren't going to dominate it, but they're going to be part of the frontier development and make sure that at least we have sort of a full understanding of what is going on. We have enough IP in the area to make sure that well, if you know, if shit hits the fan, it's going to be possible to find some diversification solutions to it. But again, we are coming back to autonomous capabilities. None of that is going to happen just because we say we have a vulnerability. It's crucially comes down to our ability to foster that development internally. Yes. And you know, in that area, Seamus Allen, a researcher here at the IA asked the question, how divided are the EU member states when it comes to these policies? Do we speak with one voice in a way? No, I think there's a significant degree of divergence internally in Europe. And it's not just sort of on technology issues with relation to America, it's technology issues with relation to Turkey, with relation to China. Overall, however, I would say there is a growing convergence in Europe in understanding these issues and the importance of that we deal with them. But when it comes to policy choices for how to deal with them, I'm not seeing sort of enough convergence yet. And you mentioned that you spoke, was it before the D9 group was set up here a few years ago? How do you assess if you like the work of the D9 group of countries influencing EU policy? And you would have seen those as frontrunners, really, digital frontrunners? Oh, absolutely. No, I mean, I think they are really punching below their weight in terms of policies. And I think they're punching below their weight, not just in areas of digital policy. I think this applies sort of to many other issues in Europe where there has been sort of a shift in recent years where new policy proposals coming up reflect more the sort of the concerns that are specific to large economies than concerns that are smaller countries and general for the EU. But I mean, sort of the good news is that, I mean, if you look at any type of indicator on digital performance, it's the same type of countries that perform well, which means that I mean, sort of if you have a discussion around Europe about choices where they want to go, there are not, at least very few people who are going to point to Germany and say, look, whatever they're doing, we want to do the same in terms of the digital penetration or digital performance. They're not looking at France and say, you know, my God, they have really, you know, made it here and what can we do the same? I don't hear anyone saying that, but I hear sort of a lot of people pointing to other economies trying to understand what is it that they have done which have worked well and that we can learn from. And these economies are going to be very much the D9 economies relate to that. I think we are also downplaying the significance of central and Eastern European economies here on sort of various type of digital readiness indicators on, you know, the telecom network, broadband penetration, they are not at the same level as sort of the front runners in Europe. But what they have done is they have gone through a process of strong structural economic change in the economy, which led to the decline of many legacy firms. And in their place, they have seen the growth of many new firms and growth, especially of firms that are pretty skilled at using digital technologies to serve companies in other countries with a different type of digital services. And they're pretty good at it, which means that given the sort of inputs they have in the economy, the investments they have made, they're getting a lot of output for it. And I think that's another mix to bring into the discussion here is that we need to understand the relationship between input and output, but we also want to have an effective use of it. So whatever we are investing into digital capacities, we want it to generate more growth as well. And these economies have been very good at that. Yeah. And then, you know, you've said about other countries and given the common values and democratic system, the question of working with democracies like South Korea, Japan, India and Taiwan to create a rebalance in our dependencies is very attractive. Why is it that we're slow to move outside that ambit of the US and so on? You know, why do we do that? So I mean, I think there is much work that goes on which are not reaching sort of the newspaper headlines. I mean, this is what we see. It's working different working groups that have been established that includes sort of western countries plus liberal democracies and other parts of the world that have an interest in this particular development. And a lot of that is going on I think sort of one of the problems is that and this is not just Europe. It's also other countries that are trying to figure out. So what's the political model? What's our own framework for these issues going to be in the future? What extent do we need to sort of move into a new type of globalization where we increase our dependence on other parts of the world in the same time as they increase their dependence on us? And lacking sort of the confidence and the trust that we had 20 years ago that this was a model which was going to generate net benefits to all of the participation economies. I think we're now sort of stuck in trying to find. So what are the alternative mechanisms going to look like? Can we make them important consequential or is this just going to be sort of detailed work going on in the back rooms and on the ground, but it's not really changing in any way that we think about how to deal with these issues? So in that sense, I think if we place the transatlantic trade and technology council into that context, I think it can be important. It can sort of invest more confidence and trust into the notion that while you know what, we actually on technology issues, as in every other issues, we share the world with many others and we need to figure out solutions that are actually going to work for all of us in the future. And we'll see. I mean, if we can take sort of a few steps in that direction with the TTCC, I mean, I think that would be a positive development. And you know, what do you think in that that might be the other priorities working in truth to the through that framework? You mean in digital or more generally in the world? Well, in digital and more general, probably because the two are interrelated probably. Yeah, no, indeed. I mean, I'll I mean, sort of I think the first the first thing which is important is that if if this development stops at the borders of Europe and America, then we are missing an opportunity to to do something more. This is not to say that the membership of of the TTC is going to increase now. But I think it's it's it's a point which is that we need to think about measures to internationalize whatever is going to come out with these discussions and anchor them in in forms of collaboration, which is going to be useful for the future to include many other countries. I have always thought sort of that we are grossly underestimating the usefulness of the UECD as as a sort of a platform to have good and constructive discussions about how we move forward in countries that share similar type of economic structures and have have similar type of political beliefs. So I would say I would sort of invest a lot more into into sort of increasing the usefulness of the UECD as as a mechanism in order to negotiate and establish new forms of unnorms, perhaps even agreements that are going to guide us in the future on these issues. But I think none of this is going to happen. And from a European perspective, Europe's role in all that is going to be diminished if if we also sort of continue this development of trying to hide ourselves from the rest of the world. We need to have sort of a lot more constructive engagement with other parts of the world to demonstrate that we're not just there in order to preach or to sort of pursue various type of mechanistic interests we have. We come with a broader idea for how we can establish institutions and norms that will be helpful for other things in the future as well. And that's going to include these climate change and a host of other different issues. And now, I mean, given the development with AUKUS and what happens in the Indo-Pacific, this is what I would like to see Europe go a lot more political investment into that particular region. It's the commercial pulse of the future. It's where a lot of the technology will arise in the future. And we have something to bring to that region, which is different type of capacities, different type of powers, and we should use them. But now we are, we are almost hiding from that world. We think we can sort of, you know, if the development in the Indo-Pacific is going to be sort of the big story of the 21st century, we often get the feeling that Europe thinks they can sit this one out and see what's going to come afterwards. Well, Frederick, unfortunately, time has come up on us. And thank you so much. We could go on talking about it. I think you've given us a great perspective on not only digital sovereignty, but going, looking to the world with this new globalization. What are the implications for us? But perhaps more importantly, that we have the power ourselves to change the agenda, to look and work collaboratively. And that really, I think is a very positive note to end on. And we look forward to receiving your paper, which will be published before Christmas. So thank you so much for your contribution today, and the generation of new ideas, new models, and the emphasis on the cost of ideas. That's what, in a sense, you can see the IIAA is about sharing ideas and shaping policy. And on your behalf, on my behalf, I'd like to thank the audience for their participation, for your questions. We look forward to seeing you soon again. And to our production team, Logan and Sarah, thank you for all your work. And I'd like to mention our network of think tanks who've been with us today at our earlier meeting with Frederick, Adrienne, Venables, Andrew, Gilmore, Brigette Decker, and Katrina Sorison and Seamus Allen. So thank you for all the discussion we had today. It's been a stimulating morning, Frederick. Thank you very much. We look forward to welcoming you back and hopefully in person in the future. So goodbye to everybody. And thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you in the future. And stay well and keep safe. Goodbye now. And thank you again.