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2025 URCEU: Never Waste a Crisis: How the EU Uses its Digital Policies to Become More Innovative, Competitive and Safe

The European Union was born out of a crisis. After WWII, six countries agreed to pull together coal and steel procurement to make war between them “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible”. 70 years later, the European Union pulled together procurement of vaccines to address the pandemic, and introduced the digital Covid certificate that revolutionised travelling across the EU 27 member states. The EU Single Market rules removed obstacles to the circulation of people, goods, services and capital, allowing businesses to operate more efficiently across national borders. This not only increased consumer choice and lowered prices, but also improved consumer protection, ensuring safer and higher-quality goods for all European citizens. With the unprecedented speed of technology developments in the last two decades, business and communications between people have shifted online, sparking tremendous opportunity growth while also increasing risks. To help harness opportunities and foster innovation while protecting the fundamental rights of people, the EU devised a digital policy strategy with one consistent set of rules for 27 countries to allow companies to scale-up easier across the EU. The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act aim to create a safer online environment, bring more transparency and accountability, and foster competition in the digital market, opening up opportunities for smaller companies. The recently signed EU AI Act governs artificial intelligence systems, prioritizing ethics and trustworthiness. To boost AI innovation, the EU is investing in supercomputers and established AI factories, providing researchers and companies access to compute power and data. And somehow, when you ask people about the EU, the narrative that Europe is held back by its “over-regulation” still prevails. Will the EU digital policies be enough to help its companies thrive? How can it leverage its strengths to create a unique value proposition in the global tech landscape?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER; Joanna Smolinska is Counsellor for Digital and Deputy Head of the EU Office in San Francisco. She focuses on AI policy and regulation, online content moderation, policies promoting digital markets openness and innovation in the context of transatlantic relations, forging cooperation with California civil society, business, academia and government. Before coming to SF, she had worked for 15 years in the European Commission in Brussels across a wide range of policy areas, including digital and green transformation, digital services and copyright regulations, tech standardization, blockchain, and technology start-ups/scale-ups. She was actively involved in the development of the EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Of Polish nationality, Joanna graduated from Warsaw School of Economics, holds a Master’s Degree in Finance from the University of Geneva, and a Master’s Degree in European Law and Economic Analysis from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. Joanna is also a Non-resident Fellow with the Transatlantic Leadership Program and the Digital Innovation Initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a Tech Policy Fellow of the 2024-25 cohort at UC Berkeley.
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