Why it is crucial to defend the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programme for an ethical and open internet
Since its creation, the European Next Generation Internet (NGI) programme has supported hundreds of innovative projects to build the Internet of tomorrow: more respectful of privacy, more open, more inclusive and more ethical.
The Open Food Facts project has been fortunate to benefit from funding from the NGI initiative, for which we are extremely grateful.
However, the future of this programme is under threat. Nearly a hundred players in the free software ecosystem have already expressed their support for the program and are concerned about its future. The French Union of Free Software and Open Digital Businesses (CNLL) also sounded the alarm a few months ago: ‘The CNLL is alarmed by the abolition of the NGI programmes in the new Horizon Europe plan’.
In view of the urgency of the situation, Open Food Facts is taking its turn to defend the NGI programme and protect this unique ecosystem that sustains many digital commons.
NGI’s impact on Open Food Facts
NGI has enabled Open Food Facts to advance important initiatives such as :
- Folksonomy Engine: a categorisation tool that allows users to help organise the data in the Open Food Facts database by adding tags or keywords to products.
- Personal search: the possibility for everyone to search according to their preferences and dietary restrictions: ingredients, allergens, vegan products, kosher, halal, etc., all while protecting the user’s personal data.
- Search-a-licious: a new search engine that significantly improves the accessibility and usability of our database.
- Pomme d’API: a project aimed at making the Open Food Facts API accessible to as many people as possible in order to increase our impact on the food system.
- Open-Everything-Facts: the integration of the Open Food Facts databases (food, beauty, sundries and animal feed) into a single mobile application to bring greater transparency to consumers.
NGI has also contributed to an ecosystem of European projects that share the values of openness, transparency and the protection of users’ rights. From online security to digital inclusiveness, NGI has enabled many organisations to build solutions that are consistent with European values.
Why is NGI now under threat?
Due to changes in budget priorities, the NGI programme may no longer receive sufficient funding to continue to play its role. This situation represents a real threat to many digital commons and other ethical digital projects contributing to the creation of a more responsible internet. Without this support, many projects will lose a vital source of funding and risk seeing their ambitions curtailed.
How do you defend the NGI programme?
If you are a player in digital innovation or a beneficiary of NGI, share your experience and testify to the importance of this programme in your projects. Publish posts on social networks and relay the open letter below.
Initially published by petites singularités, you can sign this letter by following these 2 simple steps:
- Publish this text on your website
- Add yourself or your organisation to the table on the original site.
>> Open Letter to the European Commission
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission’s Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NGI0 Commons Fund). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to supporting the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure.
Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organisations.
Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 million euros to:
- “Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe” ;
- “A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life” ;
- “A structured ecosystem of talented contributors 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, backed by 18 organisations managing these European funding consortia.
NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope – from hardware to application, operating systems, digital identities or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.
Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the Euro zone countries as well as “widening countries” [1], currently both a success and an ongoing progress, likewise the Erasmus programme before us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding does. It encourages implementing projects funded as pilots, backing collaboration, identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and setting up development models that mix diverse scales and types of European funding schemes.
While the USA, China or Russia deploy huge public and private resources to develop software and infrastructure that massively capture private consumer data, the EU can’t afford this renunciation.
Free and open source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential vectors for foreign interference. It lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and know-how, while allowing an international collaboration.
This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological sovereignty is central, and free software allows to address it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.
In this perspective, we urge you to claim for preserving the NGI programme as part of the 2025 funding programme.