The German Government is evolving its strategy on digital platforms, as we had already reported earlier (Digital Sovereignty - Participate! Contribute!, Whitebook Digital Platforms in the Makes). The expected White Paper has been published in March 2017. In4com.de has reviewed the paper and summarized the most important results with respect to digital sovereignty being at the core of in4com.de agenda. The civil society has to stay alert due whitepaper shortcomings. Also, ongoing international trade negotiations may have huge negative impacts on privacy and digital sovereignty (in4com.de has commented on this).

Manfred Reitenspiess, owner of in4com.de, has provided extensive comments on the greenbook „Digital Platforms“ (Grünbuch „Digitale Plattformen“) as published by the German Government (we had pointed out the opportunity to contribute in „Digital Sovereignty - Participate! Contribute!). The received comments were summarised by the German Ministry of Economy and Energy BMWE. In4com.de comments were cited a number of times and are completely available for download. In a follow-up step (beginning of 2017) a whitebook is to be published as a step toward a German digital agenda. The whitebook shall come up with specific recommendations and calls for action with respect to the evolution of digital platforms (see the official webpages of the BMWE).

We have already shown in Architectures for Secure Internet Services,  how decentralization, anonymity, and resilience can help to assure digital sovereignty (the what and why is discussed in more detail in"Digital Sovereignty - What is it?", "Digital Sovereignty – why we need it", "Giving up Digital Sovereignty?"). In this report we will introduce two more foundational and necessary architecture principles – object orientation and  need-to-know principle.

Real World Role Model Offset in the Digital World

Living together in our society as well as the functioning of a corporation depend on a clear role model and people acting according to a given role at a certain point in time. A number of roles are assigned to each of us, depending upon the environment in which we are acting: mother, pilot, chancellor, software programmer, trucker,…

Today’s data center focused and organized Internet services are just like dinosaurs – they were very successful at their time, but eventually vanished in a continuously changing world. If services shall be successful in the future, they have to take data sovereignty of their users/consumers into account. Being decentrally organized, local operation (in personalized devices such as smart-phones, smart home servers, PC and others we currently do not even dream of), anonymity, and resilience are their immanent characteristics.

"Do Not Put All Your Eggs into One Basket"...

...an ancient proverb, which is fully applicable to Digital Sovereignty. If we want to become sovereign of our data again, we have to replace the currently predominant approach based on centrally managed data and the accumulation of a person’s information items in one place.

The ”Greenbook Digital Platforms (Grünbuch Digitale Plattformen)”, published by the German government in May 2016, is a clear proof that digital sovereignty is recognized as a necessary requirement for a successful digital transformation in Germany and Europe. Important issues with particular reference to the use of data, their economic value and the protection of individual users’ rights are explicitly addressed, looking for solution proposals. A call for action is sent to the public (see https://gruenbuch.de.digital/de/kommentieren/ to contribute and participate actively in the ongoing discussion).Resulting recommendations for follow-up actions are planned for 2017.