EESC CORNER: EESC new contribution to the EU information society

The EESC has recently adopted two opinions related to The Proposal for the Council Regulation on establishing the High-Performance Computing Undertaking and the Proposal for Regulation of the EP and Council on the implementation and functioning of the .eu Top Level Domain name respectively, prepared by the specialized Section for Transport, Energy, Infrastructure and Information Society.

High-Performance Computing: High-performance computing (HPC) has been used in most other scientific fields, from biology, life sciences and health, high-fidelity combustion simulations, and material’s sciences to social sciences and humanities. In industry, HPC has been widely used in oil and gas exploration, aeronautics, the automotive sector and finance, and is becoming crucial for ensuring personalized medicine, developing nanotechnologies and enabling the deployment of renewable energies.

The EESC endorses the EC initiative for a Euro HPC Joint Undertaking as a concrete step in line with the European cloud strategy as well as part of a wider EU strategy aimed at recovering Europe’s digital sovereignty and independence. This initiative brings clear EU added value with a key technology which will help to tackle the most challenging issues of our modern society and will ultimately be beneficial for our well-being, competitiveness and jobs. The EESC recommends strengthening as much as possible the social dimension to the digitalization process as a fundamental part of the European Social Pillar. The implementation and use of high-level machines must have an evident and measurable positive impact on all citizens’ daily lives.

Modernization of the regulations establishing .eu top-level domain name (TEN/663): .eu top-level domain (TLD) is the domain name of the European Union and its citizens. It is assigned to the EU and is managed by the European Commission. .eu TLD was established with the aim of boosting the Internet identity of the European Union and its citizens, promoting the EU’s image on the global information networks and raising the profile of the EU’s internal market on the virtual marketplace of the Internet.The EESC wishes to underline the fact that due to the importance of an Internet identifier for EU citizens, companies and organisations, the .eu domain name has to be considered as a Service of General Interest (SGI). All the registry selection criteria should be clearly defined well in advance, in particular if the registry could or could not be a commercial company. In any event, it requests that the entire process is made wholly transparent. The EESC supports the creation of a Multistakeholder Council. These are among the main messages of the EESC opinion on the “Modernisation of the regulations establishing an .eu top-level domain name”, adopted at the EESC Plenary session on 11 July 2018.