Amazing. So much for “digital sovereignty”.Europeans, it’s not final.
What you can do to help
The budget decision is not yet official - so there is still a chance to allocate funds for NGI. It is therefore very important to contact Ursula von der Leyen (President EU Commission), DG Connect, to ask them to make the funds available.
Pressure is also needed from member states. Contact your National Contact Point (NCP) and persuade them to also advocate for the NGI funds to be made available.
They diverted the funding for AI? AI is already a way for rich crooks to steal and make money off public information, if not an outright hype that grifters employ to attract funding for their devious pursuits. None of this is AI’s fault. But politicians should understand the type of people they are funding, instead of ignorantly falling for buzzwords.
Sad news. Here is a link to an impact study (PDF), which describes many (all?) of the projects that benefited from funding. But a few you may recognize include Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon:
The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside. Meanwhile, the EC has thus far declined to comment to share its official reasoning for striking this funding from its budget.
Investing into AI seems/feels more speculative and inefficient. I think you can get a lot more value by investing the same into actual, practical projects. Training AI, and training it well, is very expensive. And the gains or results are not necessarily even predictable, let alone certainly useful or used.
This is what happens when people get to make decisions about things they know nothing about.
It’s like if a bunch of funding was allocated to studying harvestman venom on the basis of a Snapple cap claiming they’d be dangerous if they could bite us versus like, asking some actual entomologists.
This is bad.
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That is a crying shame.
