Federal Digital Minister: "The cards are being reshuffled"
Clearing hurdles to advance digitalization – but "not encroaching on fundamental rights," demands Digital Minister Wildberger in an interview.
For Federal Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU), who has been in office since May, the next few years are crucial for Europe. "We must use the next few years to build digital sovereignty. We have the talent, and we are simply not present in many business areas of global platform models," he calls for action in an interview with heise online.
Wildberger sees opportunities for a race to catch up, particularly due to the emergence of artificial intelligence. "AI is not a new form of digitalization. The cards are being reshuffled," says the Federal Digital Minister.
He wants to use an EU law planned for the fall to simplify regulations. "It is incomprehensible to me that we are overburdening young companies with so many regulations before they have even built the product," says Wildberger.
He is not prepared to accept the fact that German medical researchers have to fly to the USA to train algorithms with data from Germany. "That can't be true," he comments. There needs to be a recalibration here, which is why he advocates a revision of the rules.
"Protection of privacy is sacrosanct"
Wildberger does not share the fear that this would lower the level of protection for citizens. "Personal rights and the protection of privacy are sacrosanct to me," he emphasizes. In his view, however, the current practice is not suitable for guaranteeing protection.
"In many parts, it is overly complex, and it doesn't even deliver the result. This means that what we are proposing is based on the values that we do not want to infringe fundamental rights," he explains. The coalition agreement stipulates that data protection supervision should be centralized.
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Digital sovereignty as a procurement criterion
In order to strengthen European and German alternatives, the Digital Minister is also relying on the state as a central player. The federal government will not only launch the AI Gigafactories very soon, but will also continue to invest in data centres and especially inference data centres, which are necessary for the further training of existing models.
Wildberger wants to boost the economy and reduce dependence on non-EU countries. "The aim now is to set a dynamic, a movement, in motion in a short space of time." However, he does not want his goal to be understood as setting himself apart from others, such as the USA – but above all as standing up for European values.
In order to promote this momentum, the minister also calls for a change in the way the state awards contracts. For example, the procurement criteria should be expanded to include the aspect of digital sovereignty. This is important for very specific contracts that are soon to be awarded by the state.
The price would then be just another criterion. And this also needs to be reconsidered: "We need to consider the total cost of ownership," demands Wildberger. "Our current calculation of how we define 'price' is complete nonsense in economic terms."
We conducted the interview in Berlin on September 11. Listen to the full interview (incl. transcript) as a special edition of c't uplink:
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