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Open Letter to the European Commission
Since 2020, the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs, part of the European Commission's Horizon program, have funded free software in Europe using a cascading funding mechanism (see, for example, NGI0 Commons Fund). This year, according to the draft Horizon Europe program detailing funding programs for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is no longer mentioned as part of Cluster 4.
The NGI programs have demonstrated their importance in supporting European software infrastructure as a generic funding instrument to finance digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, especially when NGI has proven to be efficient and economical in supporting free software as a whole, from the smallest initiatives to the most established ones. This ecosystem diversity supports the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of global innovation is key to reinforcing the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate in European programming communities rather than North American ones, and are mostly initiated by small-scale organizations.
The previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 million euros to:
"Human-centered Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe";
"A thriving Internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, allowing better control of our digital life";
"A structured ecosystem of talented collaborators driving the creation of new Internet commons and the evolution of existing Internet commons".
In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, supported by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.
NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to third-party funding through open calls, to structure commons covering the full scope of the Internet, from hardware to applications, operating systems, digital identities, or data traffic monitoring. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects without resources for research and innovation in Europe.
Moreover, NGI enables exchanges and collaborations across all Eurozone countries as well as "expansion countries" [1], currently both a success and a continuous progress, much like the Erasmus program before us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding. It fosters the implementation of funded projects as pilots, supporting collaboration, identification, and reuse of common elements between projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and establishing development models that mix various scales and types of European funding schemes.
While the US, China, or Russia deploy massive public and private resources to develop software and infrastructure that massively capture consumers' private data, the EU cannot afford this neglect. Free and open-source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential vectors of foreign interference. It allows us to keep our data local and favors a community economy and knowledge while enabling international collaboration.
This is even more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological sovereignty is central, and free software allows us to address it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.
From this perspective, we urge you to advocate for the preservation of the NGI program as part of the 2025 funding program.
According to Horizon Europe, the expansion member states are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The associated expansion countries (under the condition of an association agreement) include Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Faroe Islands, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The overseas expansion regions are: Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Réunion Island, Mayotte, Saint Martin Island, Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands.
