Urgent - Help until 10 April to influence how 750 millions will be spent

We were notified of a very interesting consultation by the European Commission. The European Commission is about to allocate 750 million Euro over the next years on the "future internet", but the really important subjects (like: everything we learned from Edward Snowden) are not on their radar - yet.

However, if we bundle our efforts that is something that is definitely within reach. At the moment we are told there are only a couple of dozens of submissions from mostly the usual suspects, so your response would (at least on paper) count for influencing a few million Euro of this budget. It really makes a difference if you submit something, even if it is really short.

For more background you can check out Michiel Leenaars' blog post.

What do you have to do?

Submit your ideas by Sunday 10 April on the European Commission's website.

Do not get distracted by the subtext of the questions. For the first question there is no problem to just answer something like:

"The internet is very broken at the architecture level, which lies at the basis of mass surveillance and the current security and privacy problems. A significant investment from Europe in better standards and Free Software implementing those standards is needed to fix that."

The second question is more tricky, but just add some quick notes, either your positive vision or your negative one how it will look like if certain things are not fixed. Possibly repeat the importance of the issues in the previous question being addressed as a prerequisite for any improvements of the security crisis between now and then.

The third and fourth question are the important ones, here you can submit your ideas. You can start your submission by flagging that the top priority is to repair the fundamental design issues of the core of the internet in the post-Snowden era. Possibly add that new funding strategies are needed which are more agile and responsive to grass roots improvements than the large consortia used in other EC projects, in order to better profit from the deep expertise and strong motivation of the Free Software movement and the technical internet community.

Additionally I suggest to upload papers, articles, with former project proposals, analysis of problems, etc. you wrote as additional files and submit them.

Do not hesitate to forward this information to other people and groups who might have good ideas how to improve the internet of tomorrow.