The Internet of Things and The Internet of Bodies. Which strategies for Europe?

Deep re-engineering processes have started on digital networks under the new tech hype of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). The promise of a Smart City and the domotic dream are shaping visions, policies and implementations of a new kind of cyberspace. Actually there are more than 10 billion interconnected objects, with 30 billion expected by 2020. Chips, sensors and antennas, embedded in a variety of devices, are coupling more and more the cyberspace with the physical world of everyday life. And with the human body too. Mobile appliances, organic interfaces and wearable net-technologies are gradually achieving Licklider’s vision of a man-computer symbiosis. A process that is involving more than a half of the world population. A mass-computer symbiosis that is reconfiguring all the areas of cyberspace: access, transmission, protocols and standards, storage, content, source codes. These tech trajectories are also raising geopolitical and biopolitical issues, affecting political key-concepts such as sovereignty, authority, law and rights. In this context, some institutions of the European Union have recently started to pay a more systematic attention to issues such as cybersecurity, technological dependency, Internet regulation, data policy and online rights.

This paper aims to identify European key actors involved in the cyberspace regulation, to track their activity and to analyze their visions, their goals and their relations with extra-European actors (foreign governments, corporations, agencies, organizations) and with European political institutions. In other terms, we will address questions such as: who is representing Europe in the increasingly conflicting arenas where the deep architectures of cyberspace are to being governed? What are their power relations with the other cyber authorities in the global scenario? What sort of commitment with European political institutions? And finally, is there a recognizable European strategy to face technological transformations occurring nowadays? Is there a European idea of the Internet?

L’abstract di un mio paper per la XXII International Conference of Europeanists che si terrà a Parigi a Luglio 2015.