H4cked off: Neelie Kroes' €2.5bn for an EU big data push - Potemkin Village policy making

European Commissioner Neelie Kroes wants to splash €2.5bn developing big data in Europe - in a scheme reminiscent of the old 'national champions' policies of the 1970s

Europe has always had an inferiority complex when it comes to technology. Despite the best efforts of SAP, ARM and, err, others, technology remains a US-centric industry in terms of the latest developments, while Asia dominates manufacturing and easily pushes the European Union into third place in semiconductors.

It is not due to a lack of effort. European governments have repeatedly sought to push their respective technology industries, with little success. Take such "national champions" from the 1960s and 1970s as ICL, Groupe Bull and Olivetti. They were favoured with protected home markets, but struggled to develop much of a foothold beyond their home shores.

Yet it seems that Europe's politicians choose not to learn from history. Indeed, it seems they just can't help themselves when it comes to distributing taxpayers' money to industry, like a Lord or Lady Bountiful, in a bid to make technological innovation somehow happen.

The latest piece of digital interventionism comes from Neelie Kroes, who is eager to promote a €2.5bn scheme to push big data - kicking off the project with a generous €500m contribution from the European Commission.

Kroes claims that big data will be fuel for the "digital economy" - the EU's economy could certainly do with some high-octane fuel - and that Europe is falling behind and must catch up.

As she unveiled her big initiative, she tweeted, "#Bigdata is the foundation and fuel of a new economy. Offering €2.5bn to make it work for a competitive Europe", adding: "#Bigdata growing 40% a year; boosting productivity and performance by 5% or more. Time for Europe to catch up."

Kroes' initiative is billed as a public-private partnership in which the EU will put together an organisation to invite bids for various big data projects. The public money will need to be matched four times over by private participants, according to Kroes, although how that private contribution will be accounted for was not explained.

Kroes, who billed herself as @NeelieKroesEU in the press release, in reference to her Twitter handle, said: "Data is the motor and foundation of the future economy. Every kind of organisation needs the building blocks to boost their performance, from farm to factory, from the lab to the shop floor."

The trouble is, big data has so far been driven very successfully by the (US centric) technology industry and readily adopted by organisations for very sound business reasons - to better sell to customers, to improve efficiency and to make systems work better. Technology with a logical business case doesn't need public money for promotion or research.

Of course, when governments are dispersing money like a farmer scattering seeds in a field, there will always be flocks of willing takers. After all, who doesn't turn down free money? But the post-war history of economic interventionism in Europe is largely one of wasted money.

What has been left by the wayside, however, are principles of personal privacy: what, exactly, should be the limits of big data and how can those limits be practically enforced? Can an up-to-date equivalent of the Data Protection Act really protect individual consumers from the very real potential misuses of big data?

These are just the kind of questions that the European Commission should be expending energy on, and it doesn't require a public-private partnership to achieve. Indeed, anecdotally, big data is an "anything goes" technology with commercial advantages for any project far outweighing either the risk of getting caught under existing data protection legislation, or the cost of any fine if an organisation were caught.

Going nowhere fast

Kroes' big data initiative is just one of a number of public-private partnerships in technology research the European Union is promoting under its €6bn Horizon 2020 programme.

The other targets of its ever-watchful eye and firehose of taxpayers' money including "green" vehicles, photonics, robotics, high-performance computing, 5G wireless networks and "factories of the future".

Take green vehicles, though. In the US, Tesla is making headway with real electric vehicles that appeal to an elite strata of the right-on and well-healed, who are happy to drop an eye-watering amount of cash on a status symbol. It is making real products, and cutting costs and prices with each generation that it introduces. Likewise, Smith Electric Vehicles, based in Newcastle, has commercial electric vehicles on the road all over the world.

The European Green Vehicles Initiative, meanwhile, has produced a glossy PDF, a web site and funded a number of disparate, ad hoc projects - most of which involves already wealthy companies, such as Italy's Enel and Fiat, the UK's BAE Systems, and Germany's Bosch, who could afford to fund such research themselves, if they wanted to.

By 2020, there's no sign that it will come close to emulating the work of Tesla or Smith Electric Vehicles. Indeed, by then Tesla will have moved closer to producing a mass market electric vehicle, while the EGVI will just have made a handful of elite companies a little bit richer - with no apparent return for EU taxpayers.

The EU's 5G wireless initiative, 5GPPP, is even more of a mystery. Kicked off in February 2014, it's most high-profile activity so far is Networld 2020, which would appear to be little more than an events and publications organisation. After nine months in existence, it still hasn't alighted on a single research project to fund.

Elsewhere in the world, meanwhile, companies like Qualcomm, Samsung, NTT (of course) and others are already developing and testing the raw technology that 5G networks might require.

Some might describe such EU initiatives as corporatism - setting up schemes to direct taxpayer funding to sclerotic establishment companies, which only helps them at the expense of younger and, perhaps, more energetic competition, who across Europe are crying out for the kind of venture capital funding infrastructure Silicon Valley enjoys.

It may be kinder, perhaps, to describe Kroes' approach as Potemkin Village policy making: a façade intended largely to look good as EU Commission officials sail by.